Personnel Selection | A Visual and Practical Guide: What a Century of Evidence Reveals About Evaluating and Selecting the Best Candidates

EVERYONE WANTS TALENT

It doesn’t matter where you look—books, magazines, guides, or research. It doesn’t matter who you ask—CEOs, managers, or HR professionals. And it doesn’t matter what field you’re in—technology, business, real estate, or finance. Wherever you go, one thing is always true: everyone is looking for talent.

Why? Productivity.

A talented worker, by definition, is more productive. What does that mean? Simple: they’ll get the job done faster and, more importantly, they’ll do it better. Whether it’s designing a website, preparing financial statements overnight, developing a complex marketing strategy, or simply organizing documents and washing dishes, a talented worker will do it significantly faster and better.

The problem is, finding that kind of talent isn’t easy. In fact, it’s one of the biggest challenges for managers, executives, psychologists, and HR professionals. Sometimes recruiters don’t screen candidates carefully, psychologists rely on weak assessments, managers ask random questions, colleagues struggle to connect with candidates, or leaders just don’t know how to make sense of all the information they’ve gathered.

This book tackles the challenge of personnel selection and how to solve it using truly effective methods. Based on over 100 years of accumulated knowledge in industrial/organizational psychology, management, and economics, it synthesizes findings from more than 525 meta-analyses on the effectiveness of over 20 selection methods.

Some of the methods you'll find here include:

• Knowledge tests / Projective tests / Work sample tests
• Intelligence tests / Personality tests / Emotional intelligence tests
• Job interviews / Assessment centers / Reference Check

By the end of this book, you’ll discover:

• How well over 20 different methods work when it comes to identifying talent.
• Why these methods are effective, backed by solid evidence—not just intuition.
• What affects their success and how you can make the most of each one.
• Simple, practical tips for putting every method into action.
• Smart strategies to help you choose the best candidate once you have all the information.
• Common myths, interesting insights, and misconceptions you’ll want to leave behind.

In short, you’ll know what over 100 years of accumulated knowledge in the science of selection has to say about how to choose the best talent.