With humanity’s overall progress, the job types and requirements change accordingly. Compared to previous centuries, offered jobs become less manual and monotonous and require utterly different, sometimes even creative approaches. People move at the forefront of organizational performance, productivity, and general success, becoming an organization’s essential resource and capital. This tendency urges companies to shift their focus and preferences from employee output to employee satisfaction. They understand that finding people who properly fit job positions becomes harder. In this regard, the selection process also undertook various changes. Modern human resources management puts a great emphasis on candidates’ assessments to make the right decisions in employment. The psychological and technological advances made in this field of knowledge can prove the selection process’ importance.
The selection process presents the complex chain of actions that companies have to make in order to hire people. It involves advertising, initial screening, candidate listing, interviewing, checking the competence, and finally offering a job to a selected employee (Janetius et al., 2019). At every point, several specific job position features, organizational requirements, and other factors, such as potential candidates’ loyalty and dedication, have to be considered and checked. Despite the high emphasis on identifying the right person for the right job, there is still room for many mistakes and disappointments in the recruitment field (Janetius et al., 2019). Consequently, companies make investments in the research of more reliable searching, screening, and selection process; psychological testing represents one of the researched fields.
Psychologists’ job is centered around understanding people and uncovering their abilities and potential. They often use specialized tools that help in the assessment, such as psychological tests – validated and standardized tests meant to sample the behavior and measure the candidates’ behavior dynamics (Janetius et al., 2019). Although standard psychological tests, for example, personality or skills tests, do provide some insight into the people’s personalities, they can be faked by the candidates, thus losing their reliability. Consequently, projective tests were developed to address the foolproof issue. These tests focus on unconscious processes and personality characteristics – hidden feelings, habits, perceptions, and cognitions. In the hands of skilled psychologists, they provide a substantial advantage for companies in the selection process. Moreover, psychologists are able to ensure the best interview experiences for candidates since it is their job to be thoughtful and attentive toward applicants.
Another practice that reasonably considers the interests of possible employees is the use of technologies to perform the job search from their point of view as well as from the companies’ one. The study conducted by Yabanci (2019) explores the topic of incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) in the selection process. The AI can process amounts of information that far exceed any human limits. The programs referred to as candidate assistants help professionals and general job seekers to find the job according to their skills, personality traits, interests, and preferences (Yabanci, 2019). In the meantime, it helps organizations with their requests, analyzing various internal and external data on the subject of applicants with needed competencies and social sentiments. Although AI cannot aid much during the late stages of the selection process, it substantially simplifies the initial searching stages.
The development of new psychological candidate assessments and the inclusion of AI in the initial selection process indicates the importance of a process as a whole. It consists of numerous steps that companies have to organize and control to secure talent acquisition. To make more correct choices in whom to hire, they invest in psychological studies and testing, allowing for better screening and interview experiences. In the meantime, to simplify the search process for both organizations and candidates, the selection process uses technological advances such as AI, which is proficient in extensive datasets analysis.
References
Janetius, S. T., Varma, P., & Shilpa, S. (2019). Projective tests in human resource management and hiring process: A challenge and a boon. The International Journal of Indian Psychology, 7(4), 258-265.
Yabanci, O. (2019). From human resource management to intelligent human resource management: A conceptual perspective. Human-Intelligent Systems Integration, 1(2), 101-109.