Attracting and Selecting: What Psychological Research Tells Us

an organization’s varied needs when it comes to recruiting and staffing. One often hears that the proposed solution to a “people problem” is to do a better job in the recruiting process of attracting better people, do a better job in the hiring process of identifying future stars and “weeding out” the problems, and do a better job of attracting and selecting a more diverse workforce. Moreover, organizational demands require that HR professionals accomplish these goals quickly and in a cost-effective manner. HR professionals are continually called upon to come up with new strategies for attraction, new tools for selection, and new ways to enhance workforce diversity, while incorporating the sometimes competing needs and views of varied stakeholders—the hiring managers, the applicants, the legal department, recruiters, labor unions, other external groups, and so on. While recruitment and staffing strategies and tools are sometimes prone to fads, there is a substantial body of research to guide HR professionals in meeting these challenges. In this article, we will discuss four areas where this research can provide some clarity regarding what works and what does not, yet where the research often gets overlooked. These four areas are (1) what selection tools work, (2) what recruitment strategies work, (3) how selection-tool use relates to workforce diversity, and (4) what staffing and recruiting processes lead to positive applicant perceptions. Our focus and ATTRACTING AND SELECTING: WHAT PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH TELLS US