An informal poll

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Hello everybody. Before I pose the poll question, I’d like to introduce myself. I’ve been lurking here for months, finally registering in April, but have posted only sparingly. Out of my whopping 14 posts, the only one I’m glad I put in was the one in Coldfire’s thread about May, 1945 (outstanding OP, by the way). Borrowing from the questions Coldfire asked of Zut in his introductory post, I have the following answers:

  1. My favorite color (or colour, if you prefer) is blue. Isn’t everybody’s?
  2. I hate to be boring, but I really have no opinion about Satan’s ass. It didn’t show up very well in his picture in the SDMB Men thread.
  3. Thread titles? We newbies don’t even know what that means.
  4. You have to have windows before you can have a view from them.
  5. The poster I’d most like to flirt with? That would have to be SwimmingRiddles. Hey, baby, you wanna see my conundrum?
  6. As often as necessary (how’s that for vagueness?).
  7. Are you referring to HooHa?

That said, I’d like to take an informal poll here regarding the practice of employment testing. I work in the field of Industrial/Organizational Psychology, which, rather than having anything to do with counseling, is mainly developing, administering, and scoring employment tests. In other words, I put together the tests a job applicant has to pass before being extended an offer. Although most people in this line of work are in private industry, I work in the Civil Service Dept. of a city government, and therefore work mainly with the hiring of cops and firefighters.

I’ve noticed that there are a wide range of opinions on this line of work. Some are neutral, like they are for most jobs, some are favorable, and some suggest that we employment testers are just a step above lawyers (no offense to any lawyers in the crowd, but you know what your reputation is). The detractors say that we prevent some people from getting a job they always wanted, shattering them in the process, and sometimes making an expensive education worthless. There are also many doubters of our ability to discern those who will perform well in a given job from those who won’t. And, yet others say that we are only a tool of the gigantic corporate money making machine designed to enable them make even more money at the expense of the working man. Advocates say that we do society a favor by keeping those unqualified for a particular job from getting it in the first place. Rather, we insure that the most qualified are hired, which benefits both the company and those hired (for obvious reasons), as well as the individuals turned away (if they truly are unqualified, they would be better off in another line of work; we’ll be more than happy to help them find it).

In my daily activities, I frequently find myself explaining the value of employment testing to those who doubt it. I’m interested in taking this poll because it might better prepare me for answering their questions.

So, here’s the poll question: What is your opinion of the practice of employment testing? A few (but by no means exclusive) categories:

 a) favorable
 b) favorable, but it can on occasion lead to some clear injustices
 c) unfavorable, but the practice is necessary
 d) unfavorable, and the practice is unnecessary
 e) those testers are scumbags

BTW, the reason I’m interested in asking this question of all of you is that I want a more representative sample of people than I usually get. As it is now, the only people I hear from are those who have a stake in the process (i.e., either the applicants or the hiring agency), and therefore don’t really have an unbiased opinion.

Thanks in advance for any replied received.

2

I’m not sure I know what “employment testing” is. I suppose a job interview is an example of an employment test.

What sorts of tests do you do?

In general, I’m in favor of qualified people taking on relevant employment and unqualified people being pushed in to other areas where they are more qualified, so I give you an #a (favorable).

3

I’m in favour of them if they are directly related to a position. Most of what I have seen have almost nothing that connects to the position but are more along the common sense lines.

My ex used to be an employment counsellor and brought a lot of the testing materials home. Taking a test that tells you that you should be a mail man when you hate walking makes no sense.

Are these the kinds of tests you are referring to?

BTW… for the record, I have no opinion on Satan’s ass either :wink:

4

Yes, a job interview is an example of an employment test. In fact, the Supreme Court explicitly acknowledged it as such in one of the many lawsuits filed over the practice (sorry, I don’t have a cite of the actual court case handy, but it is stated in the Uniform Guidelines on Employment Testing published by the federal government).

Most employment testers actually have a somewhat ambivelant (sp?) opinion of interviews. The classic unstructured interview, in which the interviewer can ask anything he/she wants, has been shown to be a very poor indicator of future job performance (cites available upon request). However, a structured interview, in which every applicant is asked the same questions and the answers are graded according to a predetermined key, work reasonably well.

They do not, however, work as well as more directly job related tests, such as job simulations. To illustrate what a simulation is like, take the example of police officers aspiring to be police sergeants. Sergeants, at least in Louisville, KY, are basically first line supervisors overseeing the rank and file beneath them. As such, they are where the buck stops on routine matters, encompassing everything from the handling of problematic/unusual police calls to personnel problems (e.g., squabbling among coworkers). So, in putting together a job simulation, we will (as an example, and among other things) put together a hypothetical job situation in which two or more officers are interfering with each other’s job performance due to personal animosity. This exercise is intendted to measure a person’s supervisory skills, which is essential for any first line supervisor. When the officer-applying-to-be-sergeant is presented with this situation in a testing environment, he/she is asked to describe how he/she would handle the situation. The answers are then graded not by us, but by other cops of the the rank of sergeant or above who have good performance ratings from their superiors. Their expertise insures that the grading of applicant’s responses is both fair and that they’re not being arbitrally judged. Also, it’s hard to argue that such a test is not directly job related. After all, they deal with this sort of thing day in and day out.

5

I would qualify your descriptions of job interviews not as “unstructured” and “structured”, but rather “bad” and “good”. Good interviewing always calls for the evaluation of past performances and hypothetical performances on real-world scenarios.

I’m still not sure of your role. Do you work with higher level police officers (as in your example) to come up with interview questions? If so, this doesn’t sound controversial to me; is this one of those reasonable things that folks like the ACLU (or such) are against?

I’d be interested in reading more about high quality interviewing (defined by high corelation to future job performance). Would you mind posting those cites?

Oh, and you’re still an #A in my book.

6

Is this just a Politically Correct way of saying profiling?

7

I’m going to say “A” for that one.

But then again I usually lie on these sorts of tests.

8

Billehunt, the best cite is probably still Harris, M.M., (1989). Reconsidering the Employment Interview: A Review of Recent Literature and Suggestions for Future Research. Personnel Psychology, 42, 691-726. It’s an old cite, but to my knowledge, it’s still the best synopsis of the state of the interview. Personnel Psychology can be found in most university libraries.

The ACLU doesn’t really care what we do as long it doesn’t unfairly discriminate against any minorities. In reality, the issue should be pretty uncontroversial, but there are so many people who get mad (and subsequently irrational) because they’re turned down for a job that we have to constantly be on guard against lawsuits. It’s a situation where anybody who’s been turned down and has enough anger and time on their hands can sue, saying that we don’t know what we’re doing and therefore unfairly turned them away.

“Do you work with higher level police officers (as in your example) to come up with interview questions?” We work with whatever level is one or two above the one for which we’re hiring/promoting. If we’re dealing with sergeant, then we work with current sergeants and lieutenants to iron out the details of the test. If we’re dealing with lieutenant, we deal with other long-time lieutenants and captains. For captain (which, at least in Louisville, is the highest rank you get before getting the politically appointed rank of Major or above), we deal with other captains and Majors.

Elbows, I’m not sure what you mean by “profiling”. If you mean we’re selecting those people who match or exceed a predetermined skill level, then yes, we do that.

9

A. My s.o. is a cop and just went thru a similar process trying to make Lieutenant. Frankly,I think it should be done for anyone going for a supervisory position. I work in the personnel office of the same local government agency he works for, and I see a lot of performance evaluations, disciplinary actions, etc., and the cops do a far better job of dealing with their personnel problems and being forthright and (apparently) fair in their evaluations. For most of the other supervisors, the annual performance review is a pro forma exercise - they don’t deal with problem employees and don’t understand agency policies well enough to explain or counsel their employees.

10

I think I get it, and I’m about to say something potentially hurtful:

In private industry, where the best only survive by worrying constantly about being eaten, we strive very hard to bring the best into our ranks, promote the best, and discard the worst. In the not so competitive worlds, such as government, the internal desire for success just isn’t there, and stuff that’s obvious to those of us that are always watching over our shoulder for the wolf behind us must be carefully investigated by commitees, who (in addition to trying to add success to their organizations) must also worry about creating unrest in their hierarchies, and worry about lawsuits from nuts (such as the ACLU or unions) who feel that competency is irrelavent to a job requirements.

Well, I’m still looking at you as one of the good guys. (#A)

11

Actually, that’s not hurtful at all. You’re pretty much on track. Government agencies are far more regulated than private industry. This has advantages and disadvantages for both. Private industry has the advantage of being able to make decisions and change things very quickly, but it has the disadvantage that these decisions aren’t always made by people who know what they’re doing. There are methods out there intended to help managers make the sorts of decisions you’re implicitly referring to, but not all private companies see them as valuable. This is why some private companies do such a good job in their hiring/promotional process, and some absolutey suck.

The major disadvantage for the high level of beauracracy in government is that it takes forever to change things. The reason for all the committees and reviews is, supposedly, a noble one: It insures that the tax dollars used to pay for it all are going to the right place. However, it also leads to situation where you can’t change things when they should be. All non-political government jobs were created for a legitimate reason, but, just as in the private sector, things happen over time that make the job less valuable or even unnecessary. Private industry deals with it immediately, by changing the job, transferring people, or eliminating the job entirely. Private industry also has the luxury of being able to get rid of the dead weight. Government, on the other hand, has a situation where once you pass your probationary period, you’re in for life, and the only way to get fired is to kick the boss in the shin (I suppose moral impropriety and conviction of a felony would do the trick too). Thus, you really do get people who sit on their asses for 25 years and then retire with a nice pension and full benefits.

Don’t get me wrong, though. There are still lots of people in government jobs who definitely earn every penny they make. The ratio of productive to non-productive people also varies dramatically from agency to agency.

One point on which I disagree: The cops definitely have an internal desire for success. They are every bit as competitive as private industry folks, maybe more so. In fact, we have to watch them like hawks when we give them promotional tests to make sure they don’t cheat. Firefighters are also competitive in their promotional process, but not to quite the same degree. The only major difference is, and the one you pointed out in your last post, is that they don’t have to worry about being replaced in their current job by someone younger, more recently educated, or better integrated into the network.

Thanks for the replies.