PSYC108- INDUSTRIAL/ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY
Y 2023 - 2024
LESSON 3: RECRUITMENT AND SELECTION
PROFESSOR: MRS. GENEIL AMBAYEC
Employee Selection
RECRUITMENT
Attracting people with the right qualifications (as
determined in the job analysis) to apply for the
job.
Recruitment
 The first decision is whether to promote
someone from within the organization
(internal recruitment) or to hire someone
from outside the organization (external
recruitment). A balance between promoting
current employees and hiring outside
applicants is needed.
WRITING RECRUITMENT ADS
 Ads displaying the company emblem and
using creative illustrations attract the
greatest number of applicants, but ads that
include the salary range and a company
phone number attract the highest-quality
applicants (Kaplan, Aamodt, & Wilk, 1991).
 Ads containing realistic information about
the job, rather than information that is ―too
good to be true‖ increase applicant
attraction to the organization
(Thorsteinson, Palmer, Wulff, & Anderson,
2004).
 Ads containing detailed descriptions of
the job and organization provide
applicants with an idea of how well they
would fit into an organization and result in
positive thoughts about it (Roberson,
Collins, & Oreg, 2005).
 Ads containing information about the
selection process affect the probability
that applicants will apply for a job. (Reeve
& Schultz,2004).
S.
TRANSCRIBED BY: GACILAN, ALTHEA
WAYS ON HOW TO RECRUIT
MEDIA ADVERTISEMENT
1. Newspaper Ads
 In 2002, recruiters rated newspaper
advertising as one of the most effective
avenues of applicant recruitment (Gere,
Scarborough, & Collison, 2002)
 In 2007, recruiters considered print
advertising as one of the least effective
recruitment methods (SHRM, 2007).
Newspaper advertisements typically ask the
applicant to respond in one of four ways:
 Respond by calling
- when an organization wants to
either quickly screen applicants or
hear an applicant’s phone voice (e.g.,
for telemarketing or receptionist
positions).
 Apply-in-person
- when they don’t want their phones
tied up by applicants calling, want
the applicants to fill out a specific
job application, or want to get a
physical look at the applicant.
 Send a résumé directly to the company
(send-résumé ads)
- when the organization expects a
large response and does not have
the resources to speak with
thousands of applicants.
Ex.
A. Send a résumé to a blind box
Organizations use blind boxes for three main
reasons.
1. The organization doesn’t want its name in
public like if the company is well-known.
2. The company might fear that people
wouldn’t apply if they knew the name of the
company like if the company is a funeral
parlor.
3. On rare occasions, a company needs to
terminate an employee but wants first to
find a replacement.
2. Electronic Media
 In generating applicants, the commercials
are an excellent public relations vehicle.
SITUATION WANTED ADS
 Situation-wanted ads are placed by the
applicant rather than by organizations.
POINT OF PURCHASE METHOD
 In this method, job vacancy notices are
posted in places where customers or
current employees are likely to see them:
store windows, bulletin boards restaurant
placemats, and the sides of trucks.
Advantages: it is inexpensive and it is targeted
toward people who frequent the business.
Disadvantage: Only a limited number of people are
exposed to the sign.
CAMPUS RECRUITERS
 Many organizations send recruiters to
college campuses to answer questions
about themselves and interview students
for available positions.
OUTSIDE RECRUITERS
A. Employment Agencies
 Employment agencies operate in one of two
ways. They charge either the company or
the applicant when the applicant takes the
job.
Advantages: Less work
Disadvantage: A company loses some control over
its recruitment process and may end up with
undesirable applicants.
B. Executive firms
 Executive search firms, better known as
“head hunters,” differ from employment
agencies in several ways.
 First, the jobs they represent tend to be
higher-paying, non–entry-level positions
such as executives, engineers, and computer
programmers.
 Second, reputable executive search firms
always charge their fees to organizations
rather than to applicants.
 Third, fees charged by executive search
firms tend to be about 30% of the
applicant’s first-year salary.
C. Public Employment Agencies
 Public employment agencies are designed
primarily to help the unemployed find
work, but they often offer services such as
career advisement and résumé preparation.
 EMPLOYEE REFERRAL
 Current employees recommend family
members and friends for specific job
openings.
 In a survey of 450 HR professionals,
employee referrals were rated as the most
effective recruitment method (SHRM, 2007).
Some organizations are so convinced of the
attractiveness of this method that they
provide financial incentives to employees
who recommend applicants who are hired.
DIRECT EMAIL
 With direct-mail recruitment, an employer
typically obtains a mailing list and sends
help-wanted letters or brochures to people
through the mail.
INTERNET
A. Employer-based websites
 With employer-based websites, an
organization lists available job openings
and provides information about itself and
the minimum requirements needed to apply
to a particular job.
B. Internet recruiting sites
 An Internet recruiter is a private company
whose website lists job openings for
hundreds of organizations and résumés for
thousands of applicants.
JOB FAIRS
 Designed to provide information in a
personal fashion to as many applicants as
possible.
 Job fairs are typically conducted in one of
three ways. In the first, many types of
organizations have booths at the same
location. The second type of job fair has
many organizations in the same field in one
location. The third approach to a job fair is
for an organization to hold its own.
INCENTIVES
 When unemployment rates are low,
organizations have to take extra measures
to recruit employees. One of these
measures is to offer incentives for
employees to accept jobs with an
organization.
NON-TRADITIONAL POPULATIONS
A. Partnerships with local churches
B. Recruiting former PDLs
C. Hiring of people with intellectual
disabilities
D. Hiring of people with physical disabilities
E.
How would you know what recruitment
strategy to utilize?
Evaluating effectiveness of recruitment strategies
1. Applicant yield methods
- Examine the number of applicants
each recruitment source yields
2. Cost per applicant evaluation method
- It is determined by dividing the
number of applicants by the amount
spent for each strategy
3. Number of qualified applicants
4. Cost per qualified applicant.
5. Number of successful employees
- every applicant will not be qualified,
nor will every qualified applicant
become a successful employee
 EMPLOYMENT INTERVIEW
Realistic Job Preview
 RJPs involve giving an applicant an honest
assessment of a job.
 The logic behind RJPs is that even though
telling the truth scares away many
applicants (Saks, Wiesner, & Summers,
1996), especially the most qualified ones
(Bretz & Judge, 1998), the ones who stay
will not be surprised about the job. Because
they know what to expect, informed
applicants will tend to stay on the job
longer than applicants who did not
understand the nature of the job.
 A variation of the RJP is a technique called
an expectation- lowering procedure (ELP).
TYPES OF INTERVIEW
Interview may vary on three major factors:
 Structure
 Style
 Medium
STRUCTURE
Structured Interview
 The source of the questions is a job analysis
(job-related questions)
 All applicants are asked the same questions
 There is a standardized scoring key to
evaluate each answer
STYLE
One-on-one interview
 Involves one interviewer, interviewing one
applicant.
Serial interviews
 Involves a series of single interviews.
Return interviews
 Similar to serial interviews with the
difference being a passing of time between
the first and subsequent interview.
Ex.
Interviewer: Please come back tomorrow at
9:00 in the morning for you interview with
the manager
Panel interview
 Multiple interviewers asking questions and
evaluating answers of the same applicant at
the same time.
Group interview
 Multiple applicants answering questions
during the same interview.
MEDIUM
Face-to-face interviews
 Both the interviewer and the applicant are
in the same room, allowing the participants
to use both visual and vocal cues to
evaluate information.
Telephone interviews
 Often used to screen applicants but do not
allow the use of visual cues.
Videoconference interviews
 Conducted at remote sites where the
applicant and the interviewer can hear and
see each other, but the setting is not as
personal.
Written interviews
 It involves the applicant to answer a series
of written questions and then sending the
answers back through regular mail or
through email.
 ADVANTAGES OF STRUCTURED INTERVIEW
 It is the job relatedness and standardized
scoring that most distinguish the
structured from the unstructured interview.
 Using highly structured interview can also
add predictive power to the use of
cognitive ability tests.
 Structured interviews are based on a job
analysis; It taps job knowledge, job skills,
applied mental skills, and interpersonal
skills.
UNSTRUCTURED INTERVIEW
 Interviewers are not required to have
consistency in what they ask of each
applicant, and may assign numbers of
points at their own discretion.
Why does the unstructured interview seem not to
predict future employee performance?
PROBLEMS WITH UNSTRUCTURED INTERVIEW
Why does the unstructured interview seem not to
predict future employee performance?
REASONS
 Poor intuitive ability
 Lack of job relatedness
 Primacy effects
 Contrast effects
 Negative-information bias
 Interviewer-interviewee similarity
 Interviewee appearance
 Nonverbal cues
POOR INTUITIVE ABILITY
“Spending only 15 minutes interviewing an
applicant we can predict how well she will get along
with the varied members of an organization”
 Interviewers often base their hiring
decisions on ―gut reactions,‖ or intuition.
However, people are not good at using
intuition to predict behaviour: research
indicates that human intuition and
judgment are inaccurate predictors of a
variety of factors ranging from future
employee success to the detection of
deception (Aamodt, 2008).
LACK OF JOB RELATEDNESS
 Research by Bolles (2010) has identified the
most common questions asked by
interviewers. These questions are not
related to any particular job. Furthermore,
the proper answers to these questions have
not been empirically determined.
Can you give examples of commonly asked
questions?
Commonly asked questions:
- Why should I hire you?
What do you see yourself doing five years
from now?
- What do you consider your greatest
strengths and weaknesses?
- How would you describe yourself?
- What college subjects did you like best?
Least?
- What do you know about our company?
- Why did you decide to seek a position with
the company?
- Why did you leave your last job?
- What do you want to earn five years from
now?
- What do you really want to do in life?
 PRIMACY EFFECTS
 Research indicates that information
presented prior to the interview
(Dougherty, Turban, & Callender, 1994) or
early in the interview carries more weight
than does information presented later in
the interview (Farr, 1973).
 Interviewers decide about a candidate
within the first few minutes of an
interview (Dessler, 2002; Otting, 2004)
How can we address that?
 To reduce potential primacy effects,
interviewers are advised to make repeated
judgments throughout the interview rather
than one overall judgment at the end of the
interview.
CONTRAST EFFECTS
 With the contrast effect, the interview
performance of one applicant may affect
the interview score given to the next
applicant.
NEGATIVE INFORMATION BIAS
 It supports the observation that most job
applicants are afraid of being honest in
interviews for fear that one negative
response will cost them their job
opportunities.
Interviewer-interviewee Similarity
 In general, research suggests that an
interviewee will receive a higher score if
he or she is similar to the interviewer in
terms of personality, attitude, gender or
race.
Interviewee Appearance
 Physically attractive applicants have an
advantage in interviews over less attractive
applicants and applicants who dress
professionally receive higher interview
scores than do more poorly dressed
applicants.
Nonverbal Cues
 Appropriate nonverbal cues include such
things as smiling and making appropriate
eye contact (Levine & Feldman, 2002).
Because unstructured interviews are seen to be
not effective, how can we create structured
interview?
Creating a Structured Interview
 Information about the job is obtained (job
analysis) and questions are created that
are designed to find out the extent to
which applicants’ skills and experiences
match those needed to successfully
perform the job.
Step 1: Determining KSAOs to tap in the
interview
 Determine the best way to measure an
applicant’s ability to perform each of the
tasks identified in the job analysis.
For example, suppose a job description for a
receptionist indicated that the primary tasks
included typing reports, filing correspondence,
answering the phone, and dealing with people
visiting the organization.
Typing ability might best be measured with a
typing test, filing correspondence with a filing
test, answering the phone with a job sample,
and customer service with an interview
question.
 Step 2: Create Interview Questions
Types of Interview questions:
 Clarifiers
 Disqualifiers
 Skill-level determiners
 Past-focused
 Future-focused
 Organizational fit
Clarifiers
 Allows the interviewer to clarify
information in the résumé, cover letter,
and application, fill in gaps, and obtain
other necessary information.
For example:
I noticed a three-year gap between two of
your jobs. Could you tell me about that?
Disqualifiers
 Questions that must be answered a
particular way or the applicant is
disqualified.
For example,
if a job requires that employees work on
weekends, a disqualifier might be,
“Are you available to work on weekends?”
If the answer is no, the applicant will not
get the job.
Skill-level determiners
 Allows the interviewer to tap an
interviewee’s level of expertise.
For example:
Several months after installing a computer
network, the client calls and says that
nothing will print on the printer. What
could be going wrong?
Future-focused
 Allows the interviewer to ask an applicant
what she would do in a particular
situation.
For example:
Imagine that you told a client that you
would be there at 10:00 a.m. It is now 10:30
and there is no way you will be finished
with your current job until 11:30. You are
supposed to meet with another client for
lunch at noon and then be at another job at
1:15 p.m. How would you handle this
situation?
Past-focused
 Allows the interviewer to ask applicants to
provide specific examples of how they
demonstrated job-related skills in previous
jobs
For example:
When you are dealing with customers, it is
inevitable that you are going to get someone
angry. Tell us about a time when a customer
was angry with you. What did you do to fix
the situation?
Organizational fit
 Allows the interviewer to tap the extent to
which an applicant will fit into the culture
of an organization or with the leadership
style of a particular supervisor.
For example:
What type of work pace is best for you?
Describe your experience working with a
culturally diverse group of people.
Step 3: Create a Scoring key for interview answer
Three main methods:
 Right/Wrong Approach
 Typical Answer Approach
 Key Issues Approach
Right / Wrong Approach
 It can be scored simply on the basis of
whether the answer given was correct or
incorrect.
For example, consider the question ―As a
server, can you give a glass of wine to a 16-
year-old if his parents are present and give
permission?‖ If the interviewee answers no,
she would get a point for a correct answer.
If she answers yes, she would not get a
point.
Typical Answer Approach
 The interviewer creates a list of all possible
answers to each question, have subject-
matter experts (SMEs) rate the
favourableness of each answer, and then
use these ratings to serve as benchmarks
for each point on a five-point scale.
Key Issues Approach
 SMEs create a list of key issues they think
should be included in the perfect answer.
Conducting a Structured Interview
Step 1: Build the rapport
Do not begin asking questions until applicants have
had time to ―settle their nerves.‖
Step 2:
Set the agenda for the interview by explaining the
process. Explain the types of questions that will be
asked and point out that each interviewer will be
taking notes and scoring the answers immediately
after the interviewee has responded.
Step 3:
Ask the interview questions
Step 4:
Provide information about the job and the
organization. Such information might include
salary and benefits, the job duties, opportunities
for advancement, a history of the organization, and
so on.
Step 5:
Answer any questions the applicant might have
Step 6:
Pleasant note by complimenting the interviewee
  Second paragraph states that you are
Job Search Skills qualified for the job and provides about
three reasons why.

Skills necessary obtain a job:

 Third paragraph explains why you are
 Successful Interview interested in the particular company to
 Writing cover letter which you are applying.
 Writing résumé
 Final paragraph closes your letter and
provides information on how you can best
be reached.
Successful Interview
 Closing signature
 Receiving interview training and
Above your signature, use words such as
practicing interviewing skills are good
―cordially” or “sincerely.”
ways to reduce interview anxiety.

o In scheduling an interview, do not be late

o Before the interview, learn about the Writing Resume
company
o Dress neatly and professionally  Résumés are summaries of an applicant’s
o Observe firm handshake, eye contact, professional and educational background
smiling, and head-nodding intended to be advertisements for an
o After the interview, write a brief letter applicant
thanking the interviewer for her time
Views of Resume
Writing Cover Letter
Résumés can be viewed in one of two ways:
 Cover letters tell an employer that you are
1. As a history of your life
enclosing your résumé and would like to
apply for a job. Cover letters contain
 Résumés written as a history of one’s life
salutation, four basic paragraphs, and a
tend to be long and to list every job ever
closing signature.
worked, as well as personal information
Salutation such as hobbies, marital status, and
personal health.
If possible, get the name of the person to whom
you want to direct the letter. If you aren’t sure of Characteristics of Effective Resume
the person’s name, call the company and simply
 The résumé must be attractive and easy to
ask for the name of the person to whom you
read.
should send your résumé. If you can’t get the
 The résumé cannot contain typing, spelling,
person’s name, a safe salutation is ―Dear Human
grammatical, or factual mistakes.
Resource Director.‖ or ―To Whom It May Concern‖
 The résumé should make the applicant look
Paragraph as qualified as possible—without lying.

 Opening paragraph should contain the fact

that your résumé is enclosed, the name of
the job you are applying for, and how you
know about the job opening.
Types of Resume

 Chronological

Lists previous jobs in order from the most to the

least recent.

 Functional

Organizes jobs based on the skills required to

perform them rather than the order in which they
were worked.

 Psychological

It contains the strengths of both the chronological

and functional styles and gives an overview of your
work history, volunteer work, skills, and education