Tag Archives: K. G. Melchers

Less Isn’t More: Structure in Employment Interviews

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Topic: Interviewing, Selection, Human Resources
Publication: Personnel Psychology (SPRING 2011)
Article: Is more structure really better? A comparison of frame-of-reference training and descriptively anchored rating scales to improve interviewers’ rating quality.
Authors: K. G. Melchers, N. Lienhardt, M. V. Aarburg, & M. Kleinmann
Reviewed By: Thaddeus Rada

Interviews remain one of the most common methods that organizations use to select new employees. Additionally, one of the most consistent recommendations in I/O psychology is that structuring interviews improves their ability to improve the selection process and make successful hires. Although the strength of structured interviews over unstructured interviews is well-documented, previous research has been inconsistent in identifying how different methods of adding structure to interviews may relate to one another. A new study by Melchers and colleagues begins to address this issue.

Melchers and his colleagues’ study compared the effectiveness of two methods of adding structure to interviews: frame-of-reference (FOR) training and descriptively anchored rating scales (DARS). FOR training is used to provide interviewers with information about the content addressed by each question, as well as a common standard by which the performance of applicants and their answers to the interview questions can be judged. DARS are a bit more specific, giving interviewers examples of what poor, average, and good answers to each interview question might consist of.

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Managing Assessors’ Workloads in Assessment Centers

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Topic: Assessment, Staffing
Publication: International Journal of Selection and Assessment (SEP 2010)
Article: Do assessors have too much on their plates? The effects of simultaneously rating multiple assessment center candidates on rating quality
Authors: K.G. Melchers, M. Kleinmann, and M.A. Prinz
Reviewed By: Benjamin Granger

Assessment centers (ACs) usually consist of several job-related exercises that tap competencies necessary for the job.  ACs are most often used by organizations to select, promote and develop their employees.  Like many employee selection and assessment methods (e.g., interviews), ACs require a scorer or assessor to provide an evaluation of candidates’ performance.  But here’s where it gets tricky.

In two studies, Melchers et al. found that assessor ratings of candidates decrease in accuracy as the number of candidates they assess simultaneously increases.  While this finding may seem like a “no-brainer”, meta-analytic research (Woehr & Authur, 2003) has demonstrated that ACs with higher candidate-to-assessor ratios (i.e., fewer assessors evaluating more candidates) tend to be more valid than ACs with lower candidate-to-assessor ratios.  However, as Melchers et al. point out, the candidate-to-assessor ratio in an AC is not the issue here, its how many candidates an assessor must observe and evaluate simultaneously that apparently decreases rating accuracy.

Unfortunately, Melchers et al. do not provide specific recommendations for the ideal number of candidates assessors should be assigned to assess simultaneously in an AC exercise. 

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