Topic: Staffing
Publication: International Journal of Selection and Assessment (SEP 2010)
Article: Applicant reactions in selection: Comprehensive meta-analysis into reaction generalization versus situational specificity
Authors: N. Anderson, J.F. Salgado and U.R. Hulsheger
Reviewed By: Benjamin Granger
While organizations should certainly be concerned about the ability of their selection tools to predict future performance on the job, they should also be concerned with job applicants’ perceptions of their experience during the hiring process. For example, for organizations whose job applicants are also potential customers, it’s vital that candidates who do not get hired (which most of them will not) have a positive experience. This is also a particularly important issue for multinational organizations since there has been speculation that applicants in different cultures may react very differently to the same hiring tool.
Anderson et al.’s (2010) meta-analysis on job applicant reactions to selection tools reveals that overall, job applicants tend to react most favorably to work samples (candidates are evaluated on their performance in a job-related activity) and job interviews. Notably, these hiring tools are often viewed as the most job-relevant and “face valid” (they seem to measure what they intend to measure).
Less popular than these tools, but still favorably rated by applicants overall were cognitive tests, personality inventories, biodata (basic information about a candidate), references, and resumes. The least favored selection tools investigated by Anderson et al. were personal contacts, honesty tests and graphology (i.e., hand writing analysis).
Perhaps most importantly, this pattern of results was relatively consistent across different countries.
