How good are you at test accommodation?

How good is your organization at accommodating individuals with disabilities when test-time rolls around?

A recent article in Diversity Executive magazine highlights the work of Certiport, a software certification outfit, and the different test accommodations they offer, including:

- Voice recognition software

- Test assistants/surrogates

- Separate, larger rooms

- Extended test times

The article also points out some disturbing facts, like the 70% unemployment rate of individuals with disabilities and the fact that 2 out of 3 of these unemployed individuals would like to work.

Makes me wonder (for the millionth time) about the true nature of the looming "talent shortage"...

New blogs to watch

Here are a couple of new blogs to head over and check out:

HR Recruiting Alert; here are a few recent articles:

• Recruitment strategies for older workers
• EEOC warns of bias in 2 common hiring practices
• Who won this case: Objective interviewing or biased process?
  

Interested? Feed is here.

The other to check out is HR-Worldview; here are some recent articles:

• What's wrong with the formal interview?
• Connectivity and productivity

Like it? Here's the feed.

Now if I could just add 5 hours to my day to read all this great stuff!

B = f (P,E)

One of the most famous axioms in social psychology is what's sometimes called "Lewin's equation" (after the famous psychologist Kurt Lewin): behavior is a function of both the person and the environment. This equation is good to keep in mind when looking at all kinds of human behavior, including recruitment and assessment.

Research presented in the May 2008 issue of Journal of Applied Social Psychology addresses this equation. Let's take a look at it and see if helps us answer an age-old question: What's more important--the observer or what's being observed?

Tell me if this situation sounds familiar. A hiring manager insists on hiring someone based on something they saw in the person's resume (e.g., the candidate graduated from a particular college), even though the person did not do well on a structured, validated assessment. The first study shows that HR is not immune to this phenomenon. In it, HR managers were presented with two types of information about a candidate: preliminary information (like a resume) and performance on an assessment center. The managers were then asked to rate the candidate. Results? Managers were unable to exclude the preliminary information, even though they had better information (the assessment center results) in front of them.

The second article looks at the legitimacy perceptions of promotion decisions and how they relate to information on deservedness (candidate performance) and entitlement (affirmative action). Participants felt that both deservedness and entitlement were related to legitimacy, but there was a gender effect--female participants felt increased resentment when the male candidate was promoted.

The third article is a fascinating take on how people how people perceive discrimination. Specifically, the authors looked at ambiguous situations and the impact of how "prototypical" the person doing the discriminating is. What they found was that the amount of control the perceiver felt they had over discrimination in their lives moderated the influence of the prototype effect. In other words, whether a white male (the prototype) was acting in a discriminatory fashion depended a great deal on the perceiver. Like research on stress, control was found here to have a significant effect on perceptions.

So given these three articles, what's more important--the observer or what's being observed? The research above gives us a clear answer, and one that validates the wisdom of Kurt Lewin: both.

Friday humor: SME meetings

I swear I've had a SME meeting like this one before. Happy Friday!

Adverse impact of assessment centers (May Applied Psych)

The May '08 issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology is out with lots of great content. Unfortunately only one is directly related to recruitment and assessment, so let's check that one out then I'll give you links to some others that look interesting.

The study is Ethnic and gender subgroup differences in assessment center ratings: A meta-analysis by Dean, Roth, and Bobko. The authors found overall d-values of .52 for Black-White differences, .28 for Hispanic-White differences, and -.19 for male-female differences. (the second group in these comparisons performs better)

The results suggest that the Black-White difference is larger than previously thought but may be a more "diversity friendly" option for Hispanics and females.

There are some other great articles in here for fans of organizational behavior, including:

Subjective cognitive effort: A model of states, traits, and time. (which, by the way, suggests another reason why conscientiousness may predict job performance)

Early predictors of job burnout and engagement.

Event justice perceptions and employees' reactions: Perceptions of social entity justice as a moderator.

Harmful help: The costs of backing-up behavior in teams.

Trust that binds: The impact of collective felt trust on organizational performance.

Stirring the hearts of followers: Charismatic leadership as the transferal of affect.

The influence of psychological flexibility on work redesign: Mediated moderation of a work reorganization intervention.

...and several more!

New SIOP networking groups

The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), bless its heart, is getting into the 21st century.

In their April newsletter they mention that two SIOP members, John Golden and Daniel Russell, have formed a LinkedIn group called I-O Practitioners Network. To join, click here. (If you don't have a LinkedIn account, and shame on you, you'll have a chance to create one)

But wait, that's not all, John Golden has also created a Ning site for I-O practitioners, which comes with joining the LinkedIn group. ("What the heck is Ning?" you say? Think Wikipedia meets MySpace)

So bravo, John! And SIOP, welcome to the party! (now will someone please tell them about RSS feeds?)

In search of highly skilled workers

The U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) has a new study out called In Search of Highly Skilled Workers. Like all MSPB studies, it's focused on the federal government. But it has a lot of good info regardless of what sector you're in.

For example:

- MSPB recommended that departments should not rely exclusively on USAJOBS since this was not the primary way people found out about jobs--word of mouth was, through friends/relatives or their supervisor/co-workers

- More and more hires are being made from the veterans program, and this results in the most white males compared to other mechanisms; this has resulted in upper level hires trending toward white males. Interestingly, the most diverse hires were made through "direct hire", which does not require rating & ranking candidates.

- Use of the competitive exam process (e.g., need to rate & rank) is less and less frequent.

- Job security was by far the top reason new hires applied for federal jobs; other highly ranked factors included mission of organization, opportunity to serve the public/do good, benefits, and opportunity to use talents/have a better job.

- OPM's television campaign is seeing some success, with increased traffic.

- Candidates are pretty lazy and/or strapped for time. About 1/3 of hires did not apply for other jobs because they would have had to re-write their narrative description of their KSAs while about 1/4 did not because they would have to have rewritten their resume (!).

- More than ½ of upper-level hires were not aware of their application status until they called for an interview/job offer (sadly, probably not that rare).

- Many new hires indicated they would have accepted their job even with a reduction in pay because of workplace flexibilities and benefits.

- Coordination of hiring managers and HR was key: 98% of managers involved with the development of assessment tools said they got the talent they needed; only 82% of managers not involved felt that way.

- Upper level hires were willing to wait about 2 months between job application and job offer--most felt anything after that was unreasonable.

- Things the feds don't do well? According to new hires, they don't deal effectively with poor performers, their leave benefits could be better, and (not surprisingly) they weren't thrilled with the pay.

- Something else federal departments can improve on: providing clear minimum qualifications that truly are the "lowest bar", and verifying that applicants have them.

Good lessons here for employers everywhere.