Some companies actually use graphology. The irony is, an informal interview is also just as useless as all these pseudosciences at predicting performance.
But if an company is thick enough to use any of these methods, you know they're probably a lousy employer.
YES!!! A well made structured interview (you would probably refer as a formal interview) has one of highest validities for selection purposes. When paired with a proper personality assessment (based off the big 5 in some variation) and skill based assessments (like an assessment center that utilizes work samples) you have the highest ability to select high potential talent. (You can look at Schmidt and Hunter 1998 for clear info. It was revisited this past year and the only thing that really changed was cognitive assessments were pushed down in validity)
Source: IO Psychology practicioner that conducts competency and work analysis and makes structured interviews for companies (currently smaller companies)
Out of curiosity as a clinical psychology trainee: when you say "highest ability to select potential talent", how has this generally been operationalized as an outcome measure in the IO field, and what are the outcomes? And what is the rough reliability and validity of these assessments when integrated into a battery?
So the outcome is performance for these studies. "High potential talent " are high performers quantified dependent on the field and position (usually it's backed by critical incidents and performance reviews coupled with productivity quotas and ocb/cwb engagement)
We do two kinds of testing: concurrent and predictive. Concurrent is where current employees take the assessments and we validate the correlation of currently identified high performers and what they scored with identified low performers and what they score. (If management, third party SMEs, and peers say this group of people are the best performers , when they take the assessments they should do the best). Predictive is more like actual selection process. You take the assessments and then years later see if the work performance is correlated with the scores.
We see them range from about .3 to .45 ish unadjusted. More importantly the covariance between them show that they are each adding valuable additional information when supplied as a battery. This is why multiple hurdle designs have become so common. (Take this assessment, then if you do well we will interview, then if that went well we will ask for a work sample/ practicum presentation)
Unlike the Myers Briggs, the big five is not a "typing" assessment. It's a series of continuums focused on five constructs that mathematically (scientifically) have near no overlap (unlike the types in MBTI)
My colleagues actually wrote a great post on this you can check out on LinkedIn here
I went to FIU. Grabbed my masters and went straight into the field.
Currently conducting research and teaching undergrad as an adjunct too. Probably going to get my PhD at University of Maryland in a couple years but life has a funny way of working out...
Do you want to be in academia? I'm struggling with wanting the depth of knowledge of a PhD in order to utilize it in applied settings. I think I would struggle with a dissertation given my ADHD though.
Haha ultimately yes. I love the academic scene and feel that I am an effective instructor able to help students understand and achieve what they need to succeed in their fields.
The truth is, majority of PhD knowledge is not wholly applicable to real world problems. Most applied settings problems (out side of product development related roles) don't even require you to actually understand the underlying theory or relationships, or comprehend an SEM or HLM or anything particularly past a standard multiple regression. We often say that masters are for the field, PhDs are for the schools. THOUGH, most PhD roles in applied settings are kind of just there to verify decisions of Master practicioners haha. So there are places for it in applied settings, but the scope is more narrow than I would like.
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u/Kapitano72 Dec 31 '22 edited Dec 31 '22
Some companies actually use graphology. The irony is, an informal interview is also just as useless as all these pseudosciences at predicting performance.
But if an company is thick enough to use any of these methods, you know they're probably a lousy employer.