PS451 Unit 4 Interviews and Work Samples Paper Example

Six Questions and a Training Tree: A PS451 Unit 4 Interviews and Work Samples Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS451: Selection and Assessment in Organizations

Unit 4 Interviews and Work Samples Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the tree care company, the applicants and every figure are composite and illustrative; the sources cited are real.

The Old Interview

Until this year, a climber applicant at our Chattanooga company met whichever foreman was in the yard. The conversation covered where the applicant had worked, what saws he had run and whether he knew anyone on the crews. The foreman then said yes or no. There were no set questions and no scoring. Foremen liked applicants who sounded confident and knew the right brand names.

The climber who fell last year had described six years of experience and talked fluently about rigging. In the field it became clear that most of his experience was ground work and bucket truck pruning, not climbing. He tied in to a dead limb that a trained climber would have tested, and the limb failed. He survived with a broken pelvis.

What Structure Means

Levashina et al. (2014) took stock of twenty years of work on interview structure. In their framing, an interview gains structure when its questions come out of a job analysis, when every candidate hears the same ones, when replies are scored against concrete examples for each level, and when two or more trained people do the scoring. The review found that structure reduces several forms of bias, that rating scales with clear anchors are a central component, and that both situational questions, which ask what an applicant would do, and past behavior questions, which ask what the applicant has done, are useful, each with somewhat different strengths.

Huffcutt and Arthur (1994) grouped interviews by their level of structure and found that validity for predicting performance in entry-level jobs rose with structure, though the gains leveled off at the highest levels. An unstructured conversation like ours sat near the bottom.

The New Interview

From the job analysis, I identified the six areas where an interview could add information not available from the physical assessment: judging tree hazards, choosing a tie-in point, communicating with the ground, deciding when to refuse a job, learning from mistakes and working in storm conditions. With three senior climbers, I wrote one question for each area.

Three are past behavior questions. One example: "Tell me about a time you decided not to climb a tree you had been sent to climb. What did you see, and what happened next?" Three are situational. One example: "You are tied in at forty feet, and the ground worker below starts feeding brush into the chipper while your next piece is about to drop. What do you do?"

Raters give every reply a score between one and five, guided by written examples. For the refusal question, a one is "Says he has never refused a climb or that refusing is for beginners." A three is "Describes refusing for an obvious reason, such as a split trunk, but gives little detail on how he judged it." A five is "Describes specific signs, such as fungus at the root flare or a hollow sound, explains how he checked, describes how he told the foreman and what alternative he proposed." Two interviewers, a foreman and a senior climber, score independently and then discuss any differences of two points or more.

The refusal question is there because the climber who fell would have answered it with a story about never backing down.

The Work Sample

An interview can tell us what an applicant knows and says; it cannot tell us how he moves on a rope. The physical assessment from Unit 2 already tests ascent, limb movement, cutting control and rescue. For experienced climber applicants, we added a twenty-minute work sample on a training tree in our yard. The applicant inspects the tree and identifies hazards aloud, chooses and tests a tie-in point, ascends, repositions twice and talks the ground worker through lowering one practice limb. Two raters score each step on a checklist built with senior climbers.

Roth et al. (2005) reexamined the research on work sample validity and found that earlier estimates had been too high. After integrating the available data, they found an observed correlation of .26 between work samples and job performance, rising to .33 when corrected for imperfect performance measures, about a third less than older figures suggested. They also found that work samples correlated .32 with cognitive ability tests, so they are not entirely independent of other predictors. Even at the revised level, work samples remain among the more useful predictors, and they have a practical advantage for us: they reveal claimed experience that is not real.

Combining the Pieces

Climber applicants now complete the physical assessment, the structured interview and the work sample. Each produces a score, and the three are combined with weights agreed with senior climbers: forty percent work sample, thirty-five percent physical assessment and twenty-five percent interview. Any score of one on the tie-in step of the work sample or on the refusal question is an automatic stop, regardless of the total, because those are the errors that kill people.

Training the Interviewers

Six foremen and four senior climbers attended a three-hour session. Working from recorded mock interviews, they scored, compared and argued until a three meant the same thing to everyone in the room. Several foremen disliked giving up their freeform style; one said he could "tell a real climber in five minutes." I showed him last year's records: the fallen climber had been his hire. He did not argue after that, and he now co-leads the training sessions.

First Results

Over six months, twenty-one experienced climber applicants went through the new process. Eleven were hired. Three applicants who claimed several years of climbing experience could not choose a safe tie-in point on the training tree, and two of them admitted their experience was mainly in buckets. Interviewer agreement was good: the two raters' scores were within one point on 84 percent of answers. It is too early to judge validity against performance, but the work sample has already done what the old interview could not, which is to catch inflated experience.

Limits and Next Steps

The interview questions may become known among local climbers over time, which could weaken them. I plan to rotate in new questions of equivalent difficulty each year. The combined weights were set by judgment, not data; after a year of hires, I will check which components predict foremen's ratings and near-miss reports and adjust the weights.

Conclusion

The old interview rewarded confidence and missed the gap between claimed and actual climbing experience. Levashina and colleagues show what makes an interview structured, Huffcutt and Arthur show why structure raises validity, and Roth and colleagues give realistic estimates for work samples. Six anchored questions, a scored work sample on a training tree and trained raters give the company a far better chance of hiring climbers who are as skilled as they say.

References

Huffcutt, A. I., & Arthur, W., Jr. (1994). Hunter and Hunter (1984) revisited: Interview validity for entry-level jobs. Journal of Applied Psychology, 79(2), 184-190. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.79.2.184

Levashina, J., Hartwell, C. J., Morgeson, F. P., & Campion, M. A. (2014). The structured employment interview: Narrative and quantitative review of the research literature. Personnel Psychology, 67(1), 241-293. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12052

Roth, P. L., Bobko, P., & McFarland, L. A. (2005). A meta-analysis of work sample test validity: Updating and integrating some classic literature. Personnel Psychology, 58(4), 1009-1037. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2005.00714.x