The Uniform Guidelines Are a Detriment to the Field of Personnel Selection

The primary federal regulation concerning employment testing has not been revised in over 3 decades. The regulation is substantially inconsistent with scientific knowledge and professional guidelines and practice. We summarize these inconsistencies and outline the problems faced by U.S. employers in complying with the regulations. We describe challenges associated with changing federal regulations and invite commentary as to how such changes can be implemented. We conclude that professional organizations, such as the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), should be much more active in promoting science-based federal regulation of employment practices. For most of the history of the United States, the employment opportunities of ethnic and racial minorities, women, and older adults were substantially restricted. With the enactment of federal civil rights legislation, the U.S. government sought to end such employment discrimination. The Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Civil Service Commission, Department of Labor, & Department of Justice, 1978), hereafter ‘‘Uniform Guidelines,’’ are U.S. federal guidelines, ‘‘which are designed to assist employers [. . .] to comply with requirements of federal law prohibiting employment practices which Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Michael A. McDaniel. E-mail: [email protected] Address: Virginia Commonwealth University, Snead Hall, 301 W. Main St., PO Box 844000, Richmond, VA 23284-4000 This paper has benefited substantially from the feedback of several individuals. Their help has been appreciated. discriminate on grounds of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. They are designed to provide a framework for determining the proper use of tests and other selection procedures’’ (Section 1B). The Uniform Guidelines evolved from federal legislative actions and court decisions related to employment discrimination in the United States. As such, these 33-yearold guidelines have substantial influence on how employers, industrial and organizational (I–O) psychologists, and other practitioners in personnel selection conduct their work. In this article, we present arguments that the Uniform Guidelines are scientifically inaccurate and inconsistent with professional practice as summarized in the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, & National Council on Measurement in Education, 1999), hereafter ‘‘Standards,’’ and the Principles for the Validation and Use of Personnel Selection Procedures