Once relevant KSA's have been identified, now the I/O psychologist can determine how to measure those KSA's in applicants. Tests can be created (or "off the shelf" tests can be used) to assess applicants on those KSA's. Remember from other discussions throughout the course that tests need to be both reliable and valid. In this case I/O psychologists would look for the following in the tests they select:

Reliability: Tests need to have stable internal characteristics, meaning that the test behaves consistently. One type of reliability evidence would be determining if a person's test scores are reasonably similar if they take the same test on two different days a week apart. If they are, that would be evidence that the test is reliable.

Validity: I/O psychologists would be interested in whether an employment test (a) is actually measuring what it purports to measure, and (b) whether test scores are related to performance in a specific job. For example, if a job analysis determines that cognitive ability and the personality trait conscientiousness were both important for the job, we would want to establish BOTH that our tests measure cognitive ability and conscientiousness, AND that applicants that get higher test scores are better at the job than applicants that get lower scores.

With that introduction, take a look at these pages:

https://www.siop.org/Business-Resources/Employment-Testing/Effective-Testing

Also, browse this document and Section 8 in particular: https://www.uniformguidelines.com/testassess.pdf

Evaluate which types of companies would be most and least liekly to use a selection test.

There is also a great deal of information about the 9 major types of employment tests. Advantages and disadvantages of each type are discussed.

For this Exercise, answer the following:

• What are the most common types of testing that are used? Which are the least common?
• List and discuss 3 of the reasons you think are most the important reasons why organizations should use employment tests.
• List and describe 3 of the reasons discussed on the SIOP page that discuss why organizations DON'T use employment tests.
• Choose 3 of the different types of tests discussed. For each:
  • describe major advantages and disadvantages
  • think about the types of job where it might make sense to use a test of this nature.