Staffing Skill Builder

STAFFING SKILL BUILDER

You are a recent addition to the HR Department of Dynamic Manufacturing Co., Inc. The Director of the HR Department has taken you at your word that you want challenging assignments. Your first assignment is to deal with some of the Company's more serious selection problems. The Director has provided you with some information; the rest you have found on your own.

Your basic goal is to develop an acceptable selection system that will result in improved performance by the Company's equipment repair people. Over the next 1 ½ years the Company expects to hire at least 150 additional equipment repair and maintenance people. Historically, 50-60% of all applicants for this job have been rejected. Very few turn down a job offer. The HR Director indicated that she has had difficulty finding enough applicants through her traditional sources (i.e. radio ads, word-of-mouth) and wants you to give some thought to ways of enlarging and diversifying the applicant pool.

The purpose of your selection system is to predict which candidates will be most successful on the job, and the measure that is currently being used for job performance is a score on the yearly performance appraisal instrument. The instrument was invented by industrial psychologists in another company and "borrowed" by the former HR Director because he thought it looked reasonably good. You have noticed, however, that how well a person is rated on performance seems to depend on who he or she works for. The HR Director wants to know why.

In your preliminary investigation, you found that the present selection system is a series of successive hurdles to be traversed by job applicants. The process involves four steps: pre-screening, a brief interview with an employee specialist, administration of a specially designed test of reasoning ability, and a patterned interview by the supervisor for whom the applicant would initially work.

The pre-screening is ordinarily done by a receptionist in the HR department. She has been told that she is to weed out those applicants obviously unsuited for employment. This includes applicants who are intoxicated, unruly, physically impaired, or of unusual appearance. No statistics are available, but the receptionist estimates that less than 10% of all applicants are turned away at this stage.

Applicants who pass the pre-screening are given an application blank to fill out and then are escorted to an employment specialist who conducts a short interview with them. When questioned, the interviewer indicated to you that he looks for a variety of things at this step including:

1) The way the application form is filled out; he feels that a neat form indicates that the individual has good work habits.

2) Consistency between information on the application blank and data provided in the interview.

3) Stability of work history.

4) Past earnings of applicants; earnings above what the Company pays is taken to be a sign of potential trouble.

5) Availability of transportation to and from work.

6) Number of children; he feels that too many children can mean financial problems which will be troublesome to the individual and Company later on and, perhaps also means that the applicant is irresponsible.

7) Extracurricular activities; he believes that an active life off the job is indicative of a high level of initiative.

All of these factors are subjectively weighed by the employment specialist in making his decision to pass applicants on to the next step. Too many negatives eliminate an applicant at this point. The number to whom this happens appears to vary with the difficulty of attracting good applicants, ranging from 10 to 15% of all interviewees.

The third step in the selection process is the administration of a 60 item test of reasoning ability. The test was designed for the Company by a consultant a number of years ago. Everyone agrees that it was validated at the time, but the results of this research are nowhere to be found.

Scores on the test can range from 0 to 60. Applicants scoring below 30 or over 50 are automatically rejected as being, respectively, too low in reasoning ability to be able to perform the work or too mentally active to be happy at such work. Under normal circumstances, about 20% of the retained applicants are eliminated by scoring too low or too high on the reasoning test.

The final step in the selection process is a structured interview conducted by the prospective supervisor. This interview is designed to once again provide information concerning the applicant's work history, family situation, education, career expectations and health. It is interpreted in motivational terms by the supervisor; that is, he uses the material to judge applicants' potential stability, accident proneness, aspiration levels, and so forth. The information gathered by the supervisor is combined judgmentally. His final decision appears to depend heavily on the sense of urgency he feels concerning the vacancies he has and, therefore, rejection rates at this step vary widely from time to time. The supervisors typically try to paint a "rosy picture" of the job in the hopes that better people will want them. In reality, the typical equipment repair and maintenance job is hard and dirty, but pays fairly well.

Your individual assignment is to write a report to the HR Director evaluating the current selection system and proposing a new system. Remember, you need to be able to prove that any predictors you use are job related. You can not do this unless you have a good measure of job performance.

Make sure you address the following issues;

1) Recruitment sources

2) Performance appraisal instrument (in relation to the selection process)

3) Pre-screening

4) Selection interview

5) Selection test

6) Job application

7) Evaluation

Extra Instruction

March 1, 2012 3:45 PM

The staffing skill builder is still due next week. We covered most of the material you need to complete it, except the interview. The book information is quite clear. make sure each of your interview questions is tied to specific