Applicant Screening and Performance-Related Outcomes

A central question in economics is how to ensure that employees do not shirk their workplace responsibilities. Most of the research on this question focuses on economic governance schemes that provide incentives to induce employees to act in the interests of their employers (Canice Prendergast 1999). Some studies examine arrangements to induce self-selection by potential employees having heterogeneous unobserved human capital. An alternative to self-selection, much less studied by economists (for an exception, see Casey Ichniowski, Kathryn Shaw, and Giovanna Prennushi 1997), is applicant screening, where the employer attempts to identify which applicants have the desirable attributes. An advantage of the screening approach versus self-selection is that it does not require the applicant to even be aware of possessing relevant attributes. Virtually all employers use some level of applicant screening. It is a fundamental part of the human resources function in most firms. Although different kinds of jobs may require different attributes, arguably the most fundamental attribute and the one that cuts across virtually all jobs can be described as work ethic, what we might think of as the ability to work hard independent of monitoring by employers or of rewards. The field of personnel psychology has spent a great deal of time examining attributes of individuals associated with work ethic, and one of the most important is the personality construct known as “conscientiousness,” which has been found to be a reliable and consistent dimension of personality that relates strongly to job performance across types of jobs (Frank Schmidt and John Hunter 1998). In this paper, we study the screening of job candidates to find workers with a stronger work ethic Applicant Screening and Performance-Related Outcomes