Performance Assessment for the Workplace Volume I (1991) / Chapter Skim
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9. The Management of Human Resources
9. The Management of Human Resources
Pages 184-206
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From page 184... ...
based on the information now available about the job performance that can be anticipated for given ASVAB scores.) Some might think that the validity correlations of tests with performance reported in Chapter 8 show that the link between entrance standards and job performance has been established, and so the work is done.
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From page 185... ...
In the military context, some interesting models for setting enlistment standards were developed in the 1970s and 1980s. These models were designed to locate the most cost-effective cutoff score; they do not help answer the question of how much performance is sufficient in some absolute sense, but rather set enlistment standards in order to minimize personnel costs per unit of productivity.
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From page 186... ...
The last major section of this chapter addresses the problems associated with setting standards for several jobs at the same time in the discussion, we examine the competition among jobs for the available talent and review several approaches for comparing the utility of performance across jobs. PERSONNEL ACCESSION AND JOB ALLOCATION Although the numbers will decline substantially in this period of military downsizing, during the 1980s the Services selected approximately 300,000 persons annually from over 1 million applicants across the country.
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From page 187... ...
or when a desired position a "training school seat" becomes available. JOB ALLOCATION AND MULTIPLE STANDARDS Before considering methods for setting entrance standards, it is important to consider the practical context for such standards.
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From page 188... ...
Methods for measuring job performance are now well developed, and standard methods for relating entrance test scores to performance criteria are well known. But setting entrance standards, allocating applicants to jobs, and budgeting recruiting resources make up a complex and interdependent set of policy functions that could be clarified with the aid of computer-based models.
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From page 189... ...
The idea is familiar to the general public, and to teachers, who often have more trouble appreciating the strictly comparative scale of aptitude tests. But a performance scale with an external, fixed referent rather than a comparative norm is not usually encountered in personnel work, and thus it needs explication.
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From page 190... ...
Raising the minimum cutoff will raise the mean and reduce the variance of the distribution of competence, but a considerable spread will remain. Setting entrance standards must ultimately depend on a judgment about the acceptability of the resultant distribution of competence.
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2 Performance Distribution of the Number of Cases Above Each Cutoff FIGURE 9-1 Schematic scatte~plot of predictor and performance scores. 191 required on the job, some kind of inference is warranted from the test to the job domain.
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From page 192... ...
SETTING MINIMUM STANDARDS FOR A SINGLE JOB The next step in the development of methods for managing accessions is to find a rationale for setting a minimum entrance standard for a single job. Such methods are of limited practical use, since jobs usually do not exist in isolation.
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From page 193... ...
Second, it leaves policy makers with less evidence than they would like as to the competence of the force they have recruited. With objective measures of job performance in hand, there is now a realistic possibility of developing better-informed methods for setting entrance standards, based on econometric models that pit costs against performance.
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From page 194... ...
Since test scores are imperfectly related to job performance, the potential utility of a prospective employee is given by his or her predicted performance, which is derived from a linear regression function relating job performance to scores on the predictors. The model states that the marginal productivity gain due to using the selection procedure is the difference between the cost of that testing and the mean marginal gain in performance realized by selecting applicants with a valid predictor test.
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Several aspects of the utility difference analysis are worth noting. First, better test scores mean higher predicted performance and therefore better yield.
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From page 196... ...
and was defined as a "month of post-training duty time contributed by a person who can pass the SQT at a minimum standard" (Armor et al., 1982:141. To contribute a QMM, a soldier had to pass basic training, pass advanced training, stay in the service long enough to take the SQT, pass the SQT by obtaining a score of at least 60, and stay in the service one month.
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From page 197... ...
Fixed costs, such as maintaining recruiting stations and training centers and paying a base number of recruiters and trainers, are not included, because they would not vary with different entrance standards. The various temporal stages were separated because they apply to different numbers of soldiers.
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than nongraduates in AFQT Categories I-IIIA, because low-ability graduates are less likely to pass basic training, advanced training, or the SQT. Recall that the cost
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Evaluating the Models The Rand model and the utility difference model provide important early steps toward rationalizing the standard-setting process. Each model leaves out some factors, as any model must if it is to be sufficiently understandable to be useful.
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Although neither model expects this, neither model prevents it. The utility difference model assumes a normal distribution of applicants and assumes that all who are offered employment will accept, in which case the distribution above the minimum would be realized.
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To study the interactions, models for standard setting must be extended. Revisiting the Rand and Utility Difference Models The Rand model was extended modestly by Fernandez and Garfinkle (1985)
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With its linear evaluation of utility, the utility difference model meshes well with linear programming models of the classification problem (Charnel et al., 1953) , the name given to the personnel allocation problem in the operations research literature.
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From page 203... ...
This effect is more apparent in the utility difference model, in which utility is assumed to increase linearly with predicted performance, but it is also present in the Rand model, as pointed out by Armor et al. Comparing Jobs Comparing jobs is a critical part of deciding how to allocate personnel across multiple jobs most effectively.
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From page 204... ...
A scale of learning difficulty implies that the more time and effort needed to learn a job, the higher the abilities needed in the assigned recruits. All military jobs require intense specialized training, so a comparison of learning difficulty can be quite objective.
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There is reason to expect that important advances can be made in developing objective, empirically based methods of demonstrating the levels of quality needed in the recruit population to ensure adequate staffing of a range of first-term military jobs and to seed the next generation of leaders. Some of the work reported in this chapter also encourages optimism that cost-performance trade-off models for setting enlistment standards can be designed to handle more sophisticated performance information and a larger number of jobs.
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From page 206... ...
of the way in which minimum entrance standards would interact in an assignment model with the mechanisms (e.g., quality goals) used to maintain an acceptable distribution of recruit quality in all Army jobs.
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