Using Person–Organization Fit to Select Employees for High- Turnover Jobs

Using a concurrent validation strategy, we examine the incremental value of a measure of actual person–organization fit (P–O fit) as a selection tool beyond cognitive ability for predicting continued length of service and performance for call center agents, a job with historically high turnover. P–O fit was operationalized as the correlation between managers’ descriptions of the work culture with participants’ work preferences. P–O fit added significant incremental variance in predicting employee retention, but was not related to performance. We discuss the implications of the results and suggest that firms should consider using measures of P–O fit in their selection battery, in particular when turnover is a significant problem.