Biographical Data In Personnel Selection Assessment And Validity Study

BioData is the general name about individual historical information, which contains individual's behaviors and their results in the past. It has lots of advantages, such as historical, objective and verifiable. There are amounts of researches reveal that individual's behaviors are steady in a certain period of time. The. most frequent use of background date questionnaire is resume in China, then the human resource decisions are made through qualitative analysis of it and experts'judgment. However, lots of errors may occur, such as subjective error. In order to make the best use of BioData to promote the accuracy of human resource assessment and selection decision, this essay standardize the scoring process of BioData according to BARs (Behaviorally Anchored Rating scales), and studies the validity change of multiple human resource measuring tools.One provincial communication company supplied 178 jobs in the Campus Recruitment 2007, and more than 6000 students applied for them. 1500 of them enrolled the examination and interview. The examination collected the scales of GMA (General Mental Ability), FFM (Five Factor Model) and the semi-structured resume. This examination took 2 hours and the semi-structured interview took 20 minutes per applicant.This study systemically analyzed the effect of the assessment tools after the recruitment and formed this essay. The sample consisted of 250 applicants took part in the recruitment. First, we developed the scaling tool to quantify the 250 resumes. Second, we analyzed the relationship between cognitive ability, personality, BioData and the result of interview by statistical methods. The result shows the incremental validity of BioData over GMA and FFM to the result of interview, and the BioData is an effective tool of personnel assessment. This essay also provides operating solutions for BioData scoring and the joint use with other measuring tools based on empirical research.This study includes three parts as follows.PART I: The development and the verification of BioData scaling tool.In the semi-structured resume, the school work, the social experience, and the specific behavior incidents information of the applicants is the qualitative BioData. The information of the school work and the social experience used to scale by single scored methods. But it is difficult to scale the specific behavior incidents information, this essay developed the scoring tool of this information according to BARs (Behaviorally Anchored Rating scales).First of all, we defines focusing categories in firm's recruitment by job analysis through interview with five human resource administrators, then 87 critical incidents are abstracted through strict process. Critical incidents are distributed into categories from by two rounds of rating containing 13 SMEs (Subject Matter Experts, people who have some basic familiarity with appraising work) to insure consistency. 59 critical incidents are filtered by rating to develop the elementary scaling tool.Second, we verify and modify the elementary scaling tool. Specific behavior incidents scoring scale of BioData is developed from another round of rating by 6 SMEs. We analyze the critical incidents scale by Scorer Reliability Analysis(Kendall's Concordance Coefficient, Kendall's W), and the result shows two kinds of categories pass the test while the other three fail. Disputing critical incidents are eliminated through Standard Deviation Analysis which makes the fail categories acceptable. Finial, we refine the rating of the critical incidents and establish the BARs scaling tool.PART II: Research of relationship between BioData and other assessment tools3 trained raters scale the 250 semi-structured resumes, including information be scoring by single scored methods, such as the school work and the social experience, and the specific behavior incidents information was scored by BARs scaling tool. Thus, we collect the quantitative data of BioData.The relationship between BioData and other assessment tools is tested according to Nomological Network. After the logarithmic transform of the scaling data and the reliability analysis, interactive validity is made between specific behavior incidents scored BioData and GMA, FFM and single scored BioData. The result reveals the relationship is accordant with others researches. Therefore, it is feasible to apply the BioData measure in assessment.PART III: Analysis of incremental validity of BioData for selection result over GMA and FFMBased on the data which collected though scoring the 250 resumes by 3 raters and the logarithmic transform, we determine the BioData would account for incremental variance in the criteria, the selection result, over the variance contributed by GMA or FFM personality.Single scored BioData-GMA incremental validity, Specific behavior incidents scored BioData-GMA, Single scored BioData-FFM incremental validity, and Specific behavior incidents scored BioData-FFM incremental validity are verified separately. The result shows the incremental variance(ΔR~2) is about 0.20 despite scoring method. As a conclusion, BioData account for favorable incremental variance in the selection result over other assessment tools, and it is necessary to apply BioData measure in assessment.In summary, the scaling tool developed and the methods used in this research can supply significant validity in assessment, these instruments cost less and easy to use. At the same time, this essay analyzes the concept of Nomological Network and incremental validity based on empirical research in the background of China, which offer both theoretical and practical contributions.