History and Development
Selection into organizations has as ancient a history as organizations themselves. Chinese civil servant exams, which were established in AD 605, may be the first documented modern selection tests. As a scientific and scholarly field, personnel selection owes much to psychometric theory and the art of integrating selection systems falls to human resource professionals.
Much of the US research on selection is conducted by members of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP). Primary research topics include:
- The practicality, reliability, validity, and utility of various forms of selection measures
- Methods for demonstrating return on investment for selection systems
- Assessing fairness and making selection systems as fair as possible
- Legal issues—such as disparate treatment and disparate impact—and overall compliance with laws
- The generalizability of validity across different work contexts
- Alternative methods of demonstrating validity, such as synthetic validity
- The predictive validity of non-traditional measures, such as personality
Read more about this topic: Personnel Selection
Famous quotes containing the words history and/or development:
“The principal office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.”
—Tacitus (c. 55–c. 120)
“Every new development for the last three centuries has brought men closer to a state of affairs in which absolutely nothing would be recognized in the whole world as possessing a claim to obedience except the authority of the State. The majority of people in Europe obey nothing else.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)