Job Analysis: Recruitment and Selection - HRM Module Report

This report provides a detailed analysis of job analysis, recruitment, and selection processes within human resource management. It begins with an introduction to the importance of effective recruitment in a globalized business environment. The report then explores personality assessments, defining personality and personality assessment, and reviewing recent research that challenges traditional models like the Big Five and Myers-Briggs. It discusses the Whole Trait Model and the impact of applicant faking on selection measures. The report also covers ability tests and their role in the recruitment process. Furthermore, it addresses ethical considerations related to personality assessment, particularly the issue of applicant faking and the influence of situational factors on personality traits. The report concludes with recommendations based on the reviewed literature, emphasizing the need for updated assessment methods. The report offers valuable insights into the challenges and best practices in recruitment and selection.

JOB ANALYSIS RECRUITMENT AND
SELECTION

Table of Contents
Introduction.......................................................................................................................3
Personality assessment......................................................................................................3
What are personality and personality assessment......................................................................3
Recent research on personality assessment................................................................................4
Ability tests........................................................................................................................7
Recommendations/Conclusion.........................................................................................10
References.......................................................................................................................12

Introduction
The spread of globalisation has greatly affected the competition between business
organisations. Processes and operations can now be easily replicated using reverse
engineering and it has become very difficult for business organisations to attain market
competencies. In such a scenario, business organisations are highly relying upon their human
resources to help them achieve an advantage over their competitors.
A talented pool of human resources, which is committed to their jobs and their organisations,
can prove to be a great plus and the need to recruit the right people for the right type of job
has also increased. Thus, business organisations are using all the strategies that they can to
strengthen their recruitment process and hire the best candidates available in the market. To
achieve this, business organisations design recruitment processes that can include a number
of tests, such as personality test, aptitude test, psychometric test, ability tests, psychological
tests, etc. All these tests are aimed at assessing the ability of a candidate to adjust in the
workplace environment that the company has to offer and also to predict his or her
performance is he or she is recruited to work at a particular job position.
Most of the business organisations follow traditional models of personality and ability
assessment, such as the big five personality traits, Myer-Brigg’s type indicator, Personality
inventory model, etc. but some research in the field have concluded that these tests have
become obsolete and there are that the business organisations should modify these tests to a
certain degree to solve a greater purpose. In this report, a detailed account of the past research
has been reviewed to understand the importance that personality assessments and ability tests
can have on the hiring process and their credibility in predicting the performance of a
candidate. Further, relying upon the literature reviews, certain ethical issues related to
personality assessment and ability testing have also been discussed.
Personality assessment
What are personality and personality assessment
A personality of a person is defined a set of characteristics, though process, thinking pattern,
etc. that governs his or her behaviour in a social setup. The personality traits of an individual
can be greatly helpful in predicting his or behaviour in the future and how he or she might

perform in a particular job role under a given set of conditions (Huang, et al., 2014). As a
result, the personality traits of an individual can be really helpful to recruiters in different
industries in making the right selection choice so that they can hire the right candidate for the
right job and can avoid situations of high employee turnover. Therefore, recruiters and
selectors in the business world have been relying upon personality traits as a great predictor
of performance of an individual. According to Philip E. Vernon, the process of assessing the
personality traits of an individual, in order to predict his or her suitability for a job, is known
as personality assessment (Vernon, 2014).
Recent research on personality assessment
Personality assessment tests have been used as one of the most important tests during
recruitment and selection processes to predict the performance and suitability of a candidate
in a particular job role. There have been a number of personality assessment tests that have
been used in the past, such as the big five personality traits, Myer-Brigg’s type indicator,
personality inventory, etc. and all of them have their own unique method of judging the
personality traits of an individual. Due to the rapidly changing environment, there are new
researches being conducted every day and new ideas have been evolving regarding the use of
personality assessment as a key performance indicator.
In a recent research carried out by William Fleeson and Eranda Jayawickreme, it was
concluded that the people, who carry out research in the field of personality or are using
personality assessments in the hiring process, should modify the existing models and should
include a mechanism of differential reactions to situations in the all the models that they use.
They also stressed upon the Whole Trait Model and its effectiveness in helping recruiters in
assessing the personality trait of an induvial even more accurately (Fleeson & Jayawickreme,
2015). The crux of their work was divided into five main points i.e. 1) the descriptive side of
the traits should be conceptualised as density distributions of states 2) whenever using the big
five traits for personality assessment, an explanatory account should be provided for it 3) the
whole traits can then be prepared by joining the two parts formed out of the big five traits –
the descriptive part and the explanatory part 4) the whole trait theory ultimately proposes that
the explanatory part of the traits identified in the big five are comprised of social cognitive
mechanisms and 5) the social cognitive mechanism that are the attributes of the big five

personality traits should then be identified to maximise the efficiency of personality
assessments.
Even though a number of organisations have been relying upon the personality assessment
tests from the past, such as the Myer-Brigg and the big five personality traits, the changing
business environment and the new trends in the field of human resource management have
been making them outdates and ineffective. According to Barbara Ehrenreich (2006), a
number of tests, even the Myer-Briggs test, have no scientific credibility or predictive value.
Further, Anny Murphy (2005) wrote in her book that using Myer-Briggs test to assess the
personality of an individual at different point of time can render different results altogether.
Brent W. Roberts (2009) in his paper, performed an efficient research on the personality
assessment and personality development concepts. He used a number of resources from the
past to find out whether personality tests can actually have an impact on the performance
levels of an individual or if they can actually be used to predict the performance levels of an
individual. In his paper, Brent W. Roberts talks about the work done by Mischel (1968) in
personality and assessment and how the personality traits were criticised. Mischel (1968)
basically used four key points to develop a negative view point towards the usage of
personality traits as a mean to determine the performance of an individual in a particular job
role. These four points are listed below:
1) Due to the failure of the personality traits in mustering a correlation, or the infamous
personality coefficient, they had a limited utility in predicting the behaviour of an
individual.
2) The personality traits assessed by an individual can also be influenced by his or her
own thought and perception. It was also included that the traits are in the eye of the
beholder.
3) If there is a stability in the personality traits assessed, it can be attributed to the
similarity of the situation and not to the behaviour of a person.
4) Behaviour is not cross-situationally consistent i.e. the behaviour of a person can differ
from one situation to another.
A number of future researches proved that the first three arguments made in personality and
assessment (1968) were not valid while the credibility of the fourth argument paved the way

for future researches in the field of personality and assessment. In conclusion, Brent W.
Roberts took a different way to define personality assessment or personality traits. He said
that personality assessment should be used to identify personality traits, which are the
relatively enduring patterns of though, feeling and behaviour that reflect the tendency of an
individual to respond in a certain way under a given circumstance. Thus, the research clearly
indicates that the personality assessment models being used in the past were never able to lay
a stress on the effect of a situation on the personality traits shown by an individual.
Further, another research was conducted by John J. Donovan, Stephen A. Dwight and Dan
Schneider (2013) to study the impact of applicants faking on selection measures on the hiring
decisions and employee performance predictions (Donovan, et al., 2014). To conduct the
study, the researchers took a sample of 162 candidates who had applied for a sales position in
a pharmaceutical company. A self-report measure was obtained from each of the candidate
before and after they had appeared for the selection process. Further, training performance
data was also collected at the completion of their training program while the sales data was
collected five months later. With such credible data at hand and in use, the researchers were
able to find that applicant faking was a common occurrence and almost half of the candidates
that had appeared in the selection process had faked on at least one of the dimension
contained in the self-report measure. In the conclusion, it was also identified that applicant
faking had a negative impact on the psychometric properties of the selection measure and on
the hiring decisions. Further, it was also concluded that fakers exhibited lower levels of
performance at the end as compared to the performance levels demonstrated by the applicants
that did not fake.
From the information collected above, it can be believed to a certain extent that the pioneers
of the subject and their theories have been helpful for the business organisations only up to a
certain extent. The researches carried out in the past few years have been successful in
redefining the process of personality assessment and the meaning of personality traits. It can
be seen from the above information that the behaviour demonstrated by an individual, when
going through a personality assessment test, can be influenced by the situation that he or she
is put through. As a result, individuals are likely to demonstrate different personality traits
and behavioural patterns when they are subjected to different situations. The researches being
carried out in the past few years also raise an ethical issue in the field of personality
assessment. As seen above, out of 162 candidates, more than half of the candidates have been

found to demonstrate a fake behaviour that could make their selection easier and their act of
faking their behaviour also had an impact on the decisions taken by the selectors. Therefore,
an ethical question that rises after going through all these research models is, that under such
circumstances and after such fruitful researches, is is ethical for the employers to continue
with the personality assessment tests as they were designed by the pioneers of the subject,
such as the Myer-Brigg type indicator, the big five personality traits, etc. If some candidates
are able to demonstrate certain personality traits that they are not otherwise capable of, just in
order to grab a job opportunity, while the other candidates are not able to pass the personality
assessment tests due to a difference in the situations, no matter how capable they are, then it
is unethical for the recruiters to use the personality assessment tests as an indicator of an
induvial performance in the long run. Thus, the concept of applicant faking their behaviour
and the impact of a situation on the personality traits demonstrated by an individual should
definitely be taken into consideration in the future researches and better models to assess the
personality of the candidates should be devices.
Ability tests
According to psychology and in a human resource management context, ability of a person is
defined as the talents or skills that he possessed, which are necessary to perform a task or a
duty (Nugent, 2013). A lot of times, skills, abilities and aptitudes are used interchangeably
but all the three terms are distinct. Skills are used to define the things that a person has
learned in the past. Abilities are used to defined the things that a person can do in the present
while aptitude defines the things that a person is capable of doing in the future.
The need to recruit the right candidate for the right job and at the right point of time is
haunting the recruiters throughout the world. Employers from all industries are eyeing upon
the perfect talent suited for the vacant jobs as a right selection can help them in increasing
employee retention rates and in increasing the overall performance of their companies. To
increase the efficiency of the recruitment process, employers are using a number of ability
test in the selection process to check the abilities of an individual in performing a certain kind
of job. Some common types of tests covered in ability test are problem solving tests, mental
ability, reasoning ability, general intelligence and so on.

According to Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic (2015), more than 76% of the business
organisation, that have a workforce in excess of 100 employees, rely upon aptitude and
personality tests for external hiring. The figure is expected to climb up to 88% in the coming
few years. The tests are not just used to assess the personality traits of the candidates
belonging to the lower part of the hierarchy. The senior the role, more is the likelihood of the
employers to use ability assessments to identify the skills possessed by a candidate. It has
also been found that aptitude tests are used for 72% of the mid-managerial positions and 80%
for the senior level positions whereas such tests are used for only 59% of the entry level
position. According to Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic (2015), there are three main reasons for
attributes and business organisations use ability tests to assess these attributes. These three
attributes are emotional intelligence, competence and work ethics.
Another area of assessment, related with ability testing, is the cognitive ability test.
According to David W. Arnold, cognitive ability tests are designed to measure attributes like
induvial reason, problem solving capability, learning ability, abstract thinking, etc. in a
candidate. According to him, employers throughout the world have used cognitive ability
testing as a tool to predict the performance of a candidate in a particular job and these tests
have been the best predictors of job performance. Using cognitive ability testing as an
assessment tool has certain evidences from the past that have concluded its effectiveness in
predicting the job performance of a candidate during recruitment. According to an article
published in the Psychological Bulletin (1998), a research conducted by taking 19 different
types of employee selection techniques, such as reference check, experience, cognitive ability
testing, interviews, etc. into account, concluded that tests like the Wonderlic Classic
Cognitive Ability Test, also known as WPT, have the highest validity and credibility when it
comes to predicting the job performance of a candidate, as compared to another method
(Arnold, n.d.).
Another research carried out by Peter A. Hausdorf, Manon Mireille LeBlanc and Anuradha
Chawla (2003) points at an important issue that arises as a result of ability testing. The
research says that an important issue that rises due to the impact of cognitive ability testing
on the hiring process is that the minority loses a lot of jobs, while the majority is able to score
more jobs. It has been found that there is a huge variation in the score of majority and
minority groups when they take a cognitive ability test. For example, General Aptitude Test
Battery, also known as GATB, is one of the most widely used ability test that helps in the

measurement of a candidate’s cognitive ability. Even though the test has a high credibility in
predicting the job performance of a candidate, it has found to have a differential prediction
and adverse impact on the job performance of African Americans in the United States
(Hausdorf, et al., 2003). As a result, to overcome the biasness that is related with the
cognitive ability tests, researches have suggested the use of culture-fair tests for the minority
groups which can strengthen the hiring process even more. The basic idea behind the usage of
culture fair test is to remove the impact of differences in languages, literacy level and the
value that is attached with the rapid performance between cultural groups by minimising the
the emphasis on verbal tests, reading tests or language tests.
John E Hunter (1986) prepared another paper in which he studied hundreds of studies that
had been conducted in the past that were aimed at studying the effect of a candidate’s ability
on his job performance. In his study, he concluded that the abilities of a person can actually
have an impact on his or her job performance. He also suggested that importance played by
the abilities of a person in his or her day to day job activities (Hunter, 1986). After
researching so many papers from the past, John E Hunter (1986) came to a conclusion that it
is the general cognitive ability of a person that can predict his or her performance levels while
working at a particular job position and not his or her specific cognitive aptitudes.
Cristina Bertua, Neil Anderson, Jesús F. Salgado (2005) conducted another research by
taking a sample of 283. The primary objective of the study was to predict the validity of
ability testing in predicting the job performance and training success of a candidate. The
results found that general mental ability and specific abilities of a candidate are actually valid
predictors of his or her performance on a job and training success. Thus, it would not be
wrong to say that testing the abilities of a candidate during the hiring process can actually
help recruiters in predicting his or her job performance in a particular job profile and the
training success.
The ability assessment tests that are widely used by the recruiters in the contemporary
business world also have certain ethical and legal issues associated with them. As studied
above, the ability tests have been found to have different results for different sections of the
society. In general, the minority groups have been found to have a lower score in ability
testing as compared to the majority groups. Under the legal system, it is prohibited for any
business organisation to show an act of biasness in the recruitment process. In certain ability

testing techniques, business organisations are questioned whether they have been carrying out
the recruitment process according to the legal guidelines or has there been an act of
unintentional discrimination. Therefore, using ability tests, such as the physical ability tests is
a question on the ethics of an organisation as it can cause unintentional discrimination
between minority and majority groups, which can also be an invitation to legal trouble.
Recommendations/Conclusion
The research and findings discussed above were prepared by different scholars at different
points of time using different samples and data collection techniques. In the first phase, we
realise that personality assessments tests have lost their credibility and validity in predicting
the job performance of an individual or his training success to a certain extent. The fresh
research articles suggest that using the pre-designed personality assessment tests, such as the
Myer-Brigg type indicator or the big five personality model, cannot predict the actual job
performance level of an individual as the results of one model can differ when a same
candidate is subjected to different situations at a different point of time. Further, it has also
been found that some candidates can demonstrate fake personality traits when they are aware
about the traits required for the job that they are being tested for. The act of faking can create
an impact on the recruiters, who can make a hiring decision on the basis of the fake
personality traits demonstrated by the candidates.
On the other hand, we have also been able to find that testing the abilities of an individual can
actually help in predicting the job performance of a candidate and even his or her training
success. Even though some scholars have pointed out the difference in ability test results for
minority and majority groups, there are other scholars that have been able to eliminate the
differences using efficient tools and techniques.
The recruitment and selection process can be designed differently by the employers from one
industry to another. There can be a number of tests that the employers can include in the
selection process but most of the present day employers are largely relying upon personality
assessments as a mean to predict the suitability and job performance of a candidate.
Therefore, it is important for employers and human resource managers to review their
selection processes and include new testing techniques in their process because the business
world has changed to a great extent and it is not possible to achieve success by using models

that were designed decades ago. One of the best ways to strengthen the hiring decision and
accurately predicting the job performance of all the candidates can be to assess their
personality by subjecting them to a unique job related situation and combining the personality
assessment results with certain ability testing techniques.

References
Vernon, P. E., 2014. Personality Assessment (Psychology Revivals): A Critical Survey.
s.l.:Routledge.
Abou-Moghli, A., 2015. Recruitment and Selection and Their Effect in Achieving the
Institutional Excellence. International Business Research , 8(3).
Huang, J., Ryan, A., Zabel, K. & Palmer, A., 2014. Personality and adaptive performance at
work: A meta-analytic investigation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99(1).
Fleeson, W. & Jayawickreme, E., 2015. Whole Trait Theory. Journal of Research in
Personality, June, Volume 56, pp. 82-92.
Roberts, B. W., n.d. Back to the Future: Personality and Assessment and Personality
Development. 43(2), pp. 137-145.
Mischel, W., 1968. Personality and assessment. s.l.:s.n.
Donovan, J. J., Dwight, S. A. & Schneider, D., 2014. The Impact of Applicant Faking on
Selection Measures, Hiring Decisions, and Employee Performance. Journal of Business and
Psychology , September, 29(3), pp. 479-493.
Nugent, P. M., 2013. ABILITY. [Online] Available at:
https://psychologydictionary.org/ability/[Accessed 7 October 2017].
Chamorro-Premuzic, T., 2015. Ace the Assessment. [Online]
Available at: https://hbr.org/2015/07/ace-the-assessment
Arnold, D. W., n.d. Cognitive Ability Testing. [Online] Available at:
https://home.ubalt.edu/tmitch/645/articles/Cognitive%20AbilityTesting%20EF
%20wonderlic.pdf[Accessed 7 October 2017].