Personnel Selection - History and Development

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