Personnel selection: a longstanding story of impact at the individual, firm, and societal level

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses how and why the field of personnel selection has made a long-lasting mark in work and organizational psychology. We start by outlining the importance and relevance of the well-established analytical framework (criterion-related validity, incremental validity, utility) for examining the impact of selection at the individual (job performance) level. We also document the substantive criterion-related validities of most common selection procedures on the basis of cumulative meta-analytic research. Next, we review more recent research that investigated the impact of selection at the more macro organizational (firm performance) level. We show that the positive relationship between selection and performance at the individual-level translates to the organizational-level. Finally, we draw upon a longstanding project on situational judgement tests to exemplify the tradition of implementing interventions for improving the way selection is done in specific settings. We reflect on the reasons for this programme’s impact on the selection process and its decision makers. We end with recommendations to researchers in personnel selection and other fields for increasing the impact of their research projects.

KEYWORDS:

• Personnel Selection
• validity
• job Performance
• firm Performance
• situational Judgement Tests
• impact
• human Capital
• utility

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Philipp Schäpers and Christoph N. Herde for their insightful comments to a prior version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.