Validity of Selection Procedures

This article addresses two major issues: How psychologists conceptualize the validity of the procedures they develop and use to select employees; and what reasonable estimates of the validity of those procedures are. Changes in the way one conceptualizes validity are obvious in the American Psychological Association Guidelines, the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Principles, as well as recent textbook treatments of validity. At the same time that these changes in the ideas about measure validity have occurred, the use of meta-analysis has radically changed the...

This article addresses two major issues: How psychologists conceptualize the validity of the procedures they develop and use to select employees; and what reasonable estimates of the validity of those procedures are. Changes in the way one conceptualizes validity are obvious in the American Psychological Association Guidelines, the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Principles, as well as recent textbook treatments of validity. At the same time that these changes in the ideas about measure validity have occurred, the use of meta-analysis has radically changed the discipline's thinking regarding the magnitude of the validity and utility of selection procedures, as well as their generalizability. Procedures developed to assess the extent of validity generalization have prompted a focus on true validity.