Evaluating the Selection System - Paper Example

Introduction

Human resource is among the most critical determinant of organizational success. While other factors of production can be harnessed, human resource is the most sensitive, and it distinguishes one organization from the other resulting in differential competitive advantages. Therefore, human resource management activities including recruitment and selection, setting corporate culture, managing employee relations, training, and development are vital in ensuring the achievement of the organizational mission and vision. In any vacancy, applicants who send applications to fill them have different skills, education, and experiences yet the human resource management must ensure that the process of selection results in an exceptional team that can steer the institution towards its goals. The choice of suitable candidates for any post must involve an evaluation of the selection system to eliminate possible flaws that may either undermine the corporate image or attract lawsuits on grounds such as unfair treatments.

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When the selection criteria have been established, implemented and the best candidate offered the job, the final stage is to ensure that the adopted process of recruiting the candidate works appropriately. There are two primary benchmarks to test the efficiency of a selection system. The first approach is using the legal dimension in which the recruiting team ensures that the process does not breach any fundamental requirements such as equal treatment of applicants and non-discrimination of special interest groups including the physically challenged. In essence, the system should not lead to disparate treatment based on mundane aspects such as sex, religion, age, or gender. Any such biases should be identified and mitigated prima facie as a way of safeguarding the organization from liability resulting from the selection process. Even in cases where equal treatment was employed, it could result in unequal outcomes. For instance, if a particular gender balance was to be attained, but the selection process unintentionally resulted in a different outcome then there is a need to revisit and meet such expectations, especially of the special interest or protected groups. A finding of below 80% obtained after dividing the ratio of a minority group and the majority group would mean that the selection process has inherent adverse impacts which must be corrected.

Apart from using the legal requirements to assess the effectiveness of a selection process, another approach is to determine the decision-making accuracy. This approach derives from the fact that an employee selection process is always intended to predict the applicant whose set of characteristics including skills, education, and experience among others can succeed in the given job specification. The prediction may not necessarily be accurate since the performance of a candidate on the assessment criteria may not expressly reflect their abilities. The evaluation of decision-making accuracy may be applied through classifying the applicants into various groups such as strong and weak applicants. After the recruitment and the employees taking their new roles, they can again be ranked based on their actual performance after a period. The time taken to evaluate the hired employees should be sufficient to provide a real picture of their performance. Ideally, a period of six months to one year is adequate for employees to be classified as either a good hire or poor hire. In essence, the predicted performance before hiring is evaluated against the actual productivity after the recruitment to determine if indeed the decisions made were accurate. A highly precise prediction implies that the selection process was beyond reproach.