Psychology

Introduction
Two decades ago, Roper Organization poll underpinned the issue of selecting right personnel as a crucial factor in small business sector besides the issue of motivating them to perform well, since it found incompetence and lack of motivation are the major negative drivers in small business enterprises (The Wall street, 1980). However, another survey showed that the personnel selection practices in this sector contribute to the difficulty in developing effective personnel selection programs, where owners or managers screen and hire the employees on their own, instead of employing a personnel specialist to do the job (Little, 1986). Thus unimaginative recruitment and selection strategies are to blame for the debacle in small business sector, opine the researchers after observing that interview and  HYPERLINK httpwww.allbusiness.comhuman-resourcesworkforce-management-hiring-job-listing102960-1.html t undefined application blank accounted for 90 percent of the most frequently used selection techniques (McEvoy, 1984). Such state of affairs is really uncalled for in a sector where organizations cannot afford to do without dedicated, skilled and quality performers, since each employee here represents a large percentage of the work force (Solomon, 1984, p.22).

And now amid the post-downturn business environment, when the market is asking to provide more at less cost, the significance of personnel selection has reached a new high in small business sector, as it is almost a perform-or-perish situation for them. Such state of affairs clearly shows that all what the small business enterprises need is a systematic process of personnel selection that would help them to find the right employee for any position. This study thus explores the nuances of a three-step selection strategy that is based on the principle of incorporating behavioral consistency into selection instruments used to make decisions among job applicants.

Background
Basically any company would like to recruit persons who possess a desired level of cognitive, emotional, leadership, and management ability coupled with matching skills and cultural competency. But it is not easier to underpin the levels of such elements in individuals and to weigh them against the organizational benchmark. Further, a selection decision has far-fetched implication on the organization in terms of money, time, effort and organizational environment. For example, an inaccurate selection decision can bring unproductive expenditure under the heads like recruitment process, training, and compensation. Worse still, it could be repetitive until an employee of desired caliber is found (Solomon, 1984, p.23).

Thus the most significant point lies in the fact that personnel selection involves performance prediction of the prospective candidates and for that matter it needs to apply the measurement of individual differences to the hiring of people in to jobs where they are likely to succeed (Bobrow, 2003, p. 14).

To cater to the above need, Industrial and Organizational Psychology came into being during the early 20th century, by virtue of the confluence of ideas of the psychologists like Musterberg and management philosophers like Taylor, which culminated into a process of using information about the job and the candidates to help the organizations to find fitting candidate for a particular job. This area of research gained momentum during World War II, with the advent of large-scale aptitude batteries (Army General Classification Test) and leadership assessment technique (Office of Strategic Services assessment centers), which popularized the adoption of structured techniques in personnel selection, where IO psychology shifted from clinical judgment to prediction-based, reliable, and valid selection techniques  (Bobrow, 2003).

Over the period, IO psychology too has gone through several refinement processes with the help of the thinkers and laws of the land. For example, Griggs vs. Duke Power (401 U.S. 424, 1971) court case strengthened the issue of fairness in selection procedures by establishing standards for the validation and use of pre-employment tests. In the process, The Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures were adopted in 1978, with its case law and guideline instruments eventually making their way to codification under the Civil Rights Act of 1991 (Equal, 1978).

Thus, the endeavor to find a systematic, fair, and reliable personnel selection process finally provided a general framework for the development and use of psychological tests for employee selection, comprising of sections like job analysis, selection system development, validation of the assessment, ensuring fairness and applying ethics code.  Small business enterprises with a handful of employees are usually free to surpass legal directions on personnel selection. However, responding to such temptation backfires more often than not, as observed by the researchers. Still, small business sector too needs a customized process of personnel selection, as it differs in nature and operation from big, commercial houses.

Identifying Major Concerns of the Small Business Organization
Correct calling of the future outcome of personnel selection can be counted as the most important factor in this sector, as organizations under this sector cannot afford to go through trial-and-error process for finding the fitting employee.

To fulfill the above precondition, therefore, small business organizations need to measure all available information accurately, which is not an easy job in this sector, since several constraints emanating from both the employer and the candidates limit the amount of information. Still this remains the most important job for these organizations, and thus they should aim to develop their own selection instrument that would collect all information that might have bearing on the desired outcome of the selection (Gatewood, 1987). 

Since there is almost no margin for error in this sector, correct measurement of an applicants characteristics is extremely important, and for that matter Small companies should be careful while scoring applicants according to the number and degree of desirable job performance characteristics they possess to avoid both false positive and false negative errors, where in the first case wrong choice takes place and in the second case correct choice ignored.

For example, if a small company creates nuts and bolts and in its personnel selection process inducts someone who is knowledgeable in general and appeared smart and presentable in place of a candidate who appears shy and shabby but holds experience in the making of nuts and bolts, then the company becomes victim of false positive and the second candidate becomes the victim of the false negative (Antariksa, 2010). This shows that measuring candidates primarily on the job-related characteristics makes it easier to compare numbers than general impressions.

Developing a Selection Process
IO psychologists suggest aligning the selection methods with the required job performance for a specific job by utilizing common sense and the weight of the evidence, which are very much correlated with the quality of the selection decisions (Guion, 1976). According to Gatewood (1987), the basic steps of personnel selection for this sector should be
Job analysis

Worker-characteristics identification
Developing and exploiting selection devices that would measure those characteristics.
The process of validation in stricter terms involve statistical calculation, which most of the companies under small business sector might find difficult to adopt due to time constraint and lack of expertise, and therefore they need to meet this need by carefully attending the above three steps, which would enable them to effective conduct content validation, which is an important instrument to evaluate the fairness and adequacy of the selection program, besides being a shield against any allegation against hiring process. 

Job Analysis
Job Analysis is a process to determine the Knowledge, Skills, Abilities and Personal characteristics, (together known as KSAPs) required for a particular job. Accordingly this process involves survey, interview, and test of the applicants. Bobrow (2003) suggests that the central idea of the selection system should be to integrate all its instruments of selection process. If there happens to be a high degree of variance across jobs, meta-analysis can be performed on different selection instruments across different jobs to filter the valuable information. Schmidt and Hunter (1998) provide an example of meta-analytic correlation between tools and job performance

Selection Tool  and Validity (Schmidt and Hunter, 1998)Cognitive Ability  .51Job Tryout Procedures  .44Experience (years)  .18Work Sample Tests  .54Interviews (unstructured)  .38Education (years)  .10Interviews (structured)  .51Biographical Data .35Interests  .10Peer Ratings  .49Conscientiousness Tests .31Handwriting  .02Job Knowledge Tests  .48Reference Checks  .26Age  .01

The above process shows that cognitive ability and work sample tests prove to be better predictors of job performance than measures of personality. The emergence of the Five Factor Model (FFM or Big five factor model) (Barrick and Mount, 1991) and non-clinical personality instruments have greatly contributed to the process personality measurement, though there is room for improvement, considering the fact that such instruments are yet to comprehensively establish the impact of emotional intelligence on job performance (Davies, Stankow, and Roberts, 1998). A brief version of FFM might look like below

Extraversion Costa and McCrae (1992) identify six facets that correspond to each trait or domain. For example, individuals exhibiting extraversion are considered as gregarious, assertive, warm, positive, and active, as well as seek excitement.

Neuroticism According to Costa and McCrae(1992), people belonging to this category exhibit anxiety, depression, and hostility they feel self conscious, act impulsively, and somewhat vulnerable before aversive events.

Agreeableness People belonging to this category trust in others and maintain straight and honest communication. They are altruistic and cooperative in nature, and prefer compliance, modesty and humility. They also carry tender and sympathetic attitudes (Costa and McCrae, 1992).

Conscientiousness People belonging to this category are competent and methodical they prefer order and structure, and are dutiful and motivated to achieve goals. They are disciplined, and deliberate or considered (Costa and McCrae, 1992).

Openness to experience People belonging to this category are open to fantasies, aesthetics, feelings, as well as novel actions, ideas, and values (Costa and McCrae, 1992). These people prefer novel, intense, diverse, and complex experiences (McCrae, 1996).

The above five traits are very much associated with job performance and thus companies under small business sector cannot afford to evaluate the trait of the candidate. FFM covers the nearly the entire gamut of human characteristics, ranging from cognitive state to social compatibility, besides providing ample hints on the employees possible activities in workplace, such as absenteeism, self-control, social competency teaming ability and so on. 

It may not always be possible for the small business enterprises to adopt such a detailed data for evaluation, where mostly the information is gathered through job analysis interviews with the individuals who know the nature and requirement of the job. Yet the individuals taking charge of personnel selection should keep in mind that job analysis commands a systematic way of identifying the most important aspects of a job  such as the activities performed, tools and equipment used, and the physical working conditions, suggests Gatewood (1987), and therefore they should develop task statements by including all tasks that are critical to critical to successful performance on that job.

Task Statement
Task statements should contain the following items
Specific action verbs denoting what the candidate does
Comprehensive description of the purpose behind candidates work actions
Comprehensive description of the outcomes of such action and
Comprehensive description of materials, tools, procedures, or equipment used in that action.
Such arrangement facilitates the identification of the elements critical to job performance besides rating the tasks on two dimensions like time spent on the task and the importance of the task for the successful completion of the job (Gatewood, 1987). For time dimension, one may use the commonly used scale that specifies hours spent per week as well as the percentage of total work time spent on the job. For task importance there is a common five-point scale.

Identifying Worker Characteristics
This is the most difficult step in the personnel selection process, since it involves imaginative vision to associate the clues with the help of deep experience about the job for which the selection is being conducted. The high qualification and glittering track record of previous work performance may not always guarantee the future performance of the candidate. However, the degree of alignment between candidates KSAPs and the job specification serves as a clue to the possible future performance of the candidate.  Therefore, instead of using general information to evaluate applicants it would always be better to identify the specific characteristics of candidate, and for that matter, the task statements should clearly describe the type of knowledge and skill required, mentioning the required degree or level of them for successful performance. (Bobrow, 2003 Gatewood, 1987).

Developing and Exploiting Selection Devices
After underpinning the required knowledge and skills for desired job performance, the small business firms can resort to Wernimont and Campbell s (1968) principle in developing selection devices to maintain behavioral consistency, which suggests maintaining a direct correspondence between the information collected by selection instruments and critical job tasks. Generally three types of instruments can be useful in small business sector, such as training and experience forms, interviews, and work sample tests.

Training and Experience Forms
This form should be designed to solve the problem of inadequate data on applicants covering job-specific information, such as listing of critical job tasks, and specific training and experience, which should form the basis for scoring applicants potential regarding training and experience.

Work Sample Tests
McEvoy (1984) observed that personnel selection decisions are more often than not made after interview in small businesses sector, thereby leaving the chance of false positive and false negative errors. Such possibilities can thus be avoided by administering a work sample test after the interview, which should be a replication of critical job tasks. However, there must be a uniform rating system to such tests.

Validation, Fairness, and Ethics Code
Validation
IO psychologists stress on the measurement of the validity of an assessment process by using three strategies like Construct, Content, and Criterion, where the latter two strategies are commonplace. Criterion-related studies are done on tests for jobs in case of many incumbents and tests, while content valid tests are used to directly measure skills and abilities related to the job.

Fairness
Though the concept of a fair test appears to be complex, the Uniform Guidelines have operationally defined it as such as the 45ths rule, which provides a guideline as to whether a selection procedure unfairly discriminates against racial minorities, women, or those ages 40 and older. If the passing rate for any of the groups is .80 or greater than the passing rate of the highest scoring group (assumed to be whites, or males or those under age 40), then the procedure applied is considered as fair (Bobrow, 2003).

Ethics Code
There is a standard 2.01, Boundaries of Competence (American Psychological Association, 2002) that requires non-IO psychologists to either seek supervision or refer clients when asked to assess candidates for hiring andor promotion (Bobrow, 2003). 

Conclusion
The review amply highlights the significance of applying a systematic process in personnel selection in small businesses sector, where it should begin with a job analysis, before defining important job activities and worker characteristics. Alongside, the procedure also needs to be validated and framed by ethics. Such a strategy is easy to design and also costs little, especially considering the future implications of personnel selection. Therefore, amid the financial crunch of post-downturn business environment, a systematic personnel selection could be the savior of the small business organizations.