 Liam
Healy & Associates
chartered occupational psychologists
Selection System Audit
A selection system audit involves answering the
question - Does this system accurately
and fairly predict those who will be successful at
their job? The majority of selection
systems do not undergo any systematic or detailed
analysis and evaluation of their predictive power
until a problem arises. Best practise involves
completing an audit on a regular basis.
Why Audit?
The need for an effective audit often only comes about
when an organisation runs into a problem - increasing
staff turnover and attrition, poor individual
performance at work, declining worker morale due to role
ambiguity and conflict, increasing sickness levels,
selection decisions being brought before an Industrial
Tribunal, or other legal action being taken by
candidates.
The ability to be able to prove, to both the
internal organisation and any external third parties,
such as insurers or external audit bodies, that your
selection system is effective, ethical and operating
within the law can lower staff turnover, reduce the risk
of running into legal problems and increase organisational
effectiveness.
What is Involved?
This is a necessarily detailed process. The rationale
underlying an audit report is based on widely published
work regarding selection system evaluation. The audit
deals with the elicitation of desirable
personal characteristics in employees and how those
characteristics are assessed. The guiding principle
behind this audit is that a selection system should be
objective and specified – where the system is criticised
it does not mean the system is ‘bad’, but that it fails
to adhere to these criteria, or that the information
presented for evaluation suggests it does not.
The audit is divided into three sections.
Section One
- The Specification of Purpose
- The Consideration given to the needs of
End-Users: Applicants; Selectors and Consumers.
- The Information about Competencies/Ability
Obtained
- The Selection Tools: the instruments and
procedures which will be used to elicit information
about KSAOs from candidates.
- The Selectors: those people involved in
evaluating and assessing information and
reaching a select/no select decision.
- The Environment in which selection takes place.
Section Two
- Describing the competency domain: the scope of
what is assessed and any technical or structural
weaknesses in the job analysis method used to derive
it, and the behavioural outcomes produced.
- Specifying the utility of the approach:
reliability and validity. This is
a crucial section and one where we look for a
defence against claims of
direct or indirect
discrimination. It involves analysis
of any descriptive/inferential statistics used, as
well as any regression based quantitative analysis.
- Specifying the usability of the approach:
ACCEPTABILITY and PRACTICALITY
Section Three provides a means of summarising and
integrating the evaluations made in the previous two
sections and of providing an overall assessment in terms
of:
- Strengths and weaknesses.
- Ratings of the efficiency and cost-effectiveness
of the selection procedure.
- A final overall effectiveness rating.
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