New employee selection predictors

The Influences of Recruitment Processes and Selection Predictors on New Employee Safety... 

The following sections examine two processes associated with recmitment activities (i.e., job analysis, and realistic safety preview), and a range of selection predictors (application blank, applicant interview, cogiutive, physical, psychomotor, sensory/perceptual ability testing, personality testing, and attitude measurement) which an organization can use to help predict job applicant (new employee s) safety behavior, and overall their ability to work safely. Where appropriate, recommendations on how recruitment and selection processes can be used to improve new employee safety are discussed. Finally, this chapter examines how employees perceptions of organizational processes can be made more realistic. 

Job description and person specification documents that contain safety information can clearly provide the foimdation for the development of a recruitment and selection program which has at least the possibility of a successful outcome. Further, Thompson and Thompson (1982) provide an excellent review of the steps required to help ensure that courts accept job analysis information as the foundation of selection predictor development and or selection decisions. Furthermore, a job description that includes a section on safety can be used in the expectation setting processes as discussed in Chap. 3, Sect. 3.7.2. In contrast, if there has been no systematic attempt to understand what the requirements are to perform a job in a safe manner, it is unlikely that the recruitment and selection system will be delivering the safety benefits that it potentially could. Furthermore, it is likely that employees trust in these processes to deliver a safe new employee may be somewhat misplaced. 

As a final note on tools which might be used to select new employees, there are number of products on the market which claim to predict safely behaviors and safety-related outcomes. Providers of these assessment tools vary greatly in the claims that are made about their tools ability to predict employee safety behavior, and the degree of research based evidence which they provide to support these claims. Organizations using these products need to examine very carefully the nature of the instrument/measure, and the evidence that it is a valid predictor. As with other selection assessments, employees are likely to assume such measures will operate in a valid and reliable way. 

From a new employee safety perspective, there are two key considerations associated with selection processes. First, what abilities do the measures or predictors used have to provide information on the job applicants work related outcomes (e.g., the individual s ability to perform the job safely, their attitude toward safety, and/or risk taking). Second, what assumptions do employees in the workplace hold about the organization s selection processes, and how can these assumptions influence workplace safety. The next two sections examine these two issues in more detail. 

While the use of inaccurate selection predictors can reduce the abUily of an organization to ensure (predict) new employee safety, assumptions about what selection information means, particularly job applicant s previous work experience, can also be problematic for safety. Chapter 3 provides an extensive discussion of experience and its relationship with new employee safety. Experience is a complex constmct that should not be measured by simply examining a job applicant s cumulative job tenure (how many months or years they have previously worked... 

In summary, selection processes can help to ensure new employee safety if they clearly define the knowledge, skills, and abilities that are required to perform a job, and obtain or develop accurate predictors of these. Put simply if an organization selects an individual for a job that does not have the knowledge, skills, and abilities which are necessary to perform the job in a safe manner, there will be an increased chance that the individual (the new employee) will be involved in an accident. Of course, working safely is also partly dependent on the new employee s attitude toward safety and on their personality (see Chap. 5). Unfortunately, attitudes and personality are not easy to measure in an error-free way. In this regard, an organization should not assume that they have very much ability at all to predict safety-related attitudes or to determine much in the way of safety behavior based on personality profiling. 

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