Criteria Used to Evaluate Different Candidates

Abstract

Underlying almost all the technical advances in the development of employee selection since World War II is the strong background presence of bureaucratic rationality (Jacoby, 1985). The apparatus of objective science, with its emphasis on reliable, valid, quantitative description, has been used to develop rational decision processes for the accomplishment of two primary purposes: first, to select the persons best suited to specific, objectively defined jobs; second, to develop legally defensible procedures, and outcomes resulting from use of those procedures, that result in the hiring or advancement of some persons rather than others (Schneider & Schmitt, 1986). By its very nature, selection implies some form of discrimination among persons regarded as being different from one another. Because work and employment, and equal opportunity to share in these necessities of contemporary life, lie at the heart of a democratic society, methods and outcomes of employee selection are of major political and social importance.