Managing People Essay

IntroductionHiring employees is a crucial task for any company, since every employee has a significant role within the firm. It is for this reason that the recruiter(s) must make the respectable choice while selecting the candidates and make sure that the future employee fits the best the job offer. In aim to achieve this essential task, most companies use the choice audience which is a method that allows the recruiter or manager and the candidate to meet each variant in order for the recruiter to evaluate the different candidates aspects.The selection interview method is the most frequently and extensively used approach for employment selection. However, despite its universality, it has raised numerous issues regarding its reliability especially the perceptual errors mingled in the evaluation process.Throughout this document, the general selection interviews benefits and issues will be mentioned in order to justify its popularity in comparison to other selection methods and identify its main pitfalls. The succeeding(prenominal) part will aim to underline the relation between the selection interview and the until nowtual perceptual errors en sexual urgeed during the recruitment. Finally, the sanctioned implication of the selection interview will be discussed with regard to government policy and legislation.The selection interviewTorrington and Hall (1995) describes the selection interview as a controlled conversation between one or many interviewers (managers) and one or many candidates with a purpose of* Gathering information in order to foretell how well the candidates would perform in the job offered, by measuring their abilities according to predetermined criteria established by the interviewers.* Facilitating the candidates determination-making by providing them with full details of the job dowery they have applied for and information about the organisation.* Giving each candidate an equal opportunity or a fair hearing.BenefitsIn an interview , both move meet each other. This allows a certain opinion to be made that can not be established in any other bearing (Torrington and Hall, 1995) such as the compatibility of two parts and their ability to work together, or the aptitude of someone to perform efficiently within a team without alter the whole group performance.Moreover the selection interview gives the candidates the ability to ask the interviewers any questions, such as information about the working hours, contract negotiation and so forth, in other words, it creates a public relation between both parts. In a second hand, it allows the recruiter to answer the candidates questions, and often to increase the comprehend attractiveness of the job (Barclay, 1999) such as high salary etc In addition, the selection interview costs much less than the other methods such as testing and consultants use.Problems with utilize selection interviewThe major issues concerning the selection interview are related to its unreli ability, invalidity and subjectivity (Torrington and Hall, 1995), although Webster (1964) conducted research that allowed identifying the following problems* If the interviewers make their decision very early in the interviews progress, they will deceive their final decision to the candidate.* Interviewers tend to find out the evidence that the candidate is unfavorable rather than favourable which can be called as overweighting negative information.* Most interviewers make their choice within the first three or four transactions of the interview, and then spent the rest of the time looking for evidence to confirm their first impression.* Primacy and Recency which is the tendency to recall the first few candidates and the last few. wherefore those in the middle of the queue become forgotten by the interviewers.* All the perceptual errors made in the interview selection, which include, stereotyping, Halo effect, discrimination and so forth. The next part will entirely be focused on those major issues with significant examples regarding the selection interviews situation.The perceptual errors in the selection interviewAccording to (Rollinson, 2002110) who defines the perception asA mental process involving the selection, organisation, structuring and interpretation of information in order to make inferences and give meaning to the information acquaintance plays a significant role in organisations, since it is used by individuals to make judgements, inferences and interpretations. Moreover it reflects how the people respond to what we do and what we say. However the differences in perception matter for people seeing different things and inferring different meaning to same stimuli. The manner that people perceive things differs from one individual to another, therefore perception becomes a mortals reality and this can lead to misunderstandings (Mullins, 2001). The selection interview has raised several concerns regarding to its validity and reliability, those issues has been directly associated with the perceptual errors that may occur in a selection interview. The main areas where problems are encountered are* Stereotyping This is where people are regrouped in a same category according to various criteria such as their age, gender and race (Racial stereotyping). Stereotyping is also attributing a person with qualities supposed to be general of members of a particular group (Rollinson, 2002). In our selection interview context, a egg-producing(prenominal) candidate who applies for a building site engineer job would not get the offer because the interviewer might thing that all females are weak and fragile, even thought the candidate has got better knowledge and education than any male candidate. Another example could be a small computing business ran by young managers supported by young computer engineers.If an older candidate applies for an engineer job, the interviewers might discriminate he or she because of his or her age, in the r evere that he/she would not fit into a young working team and that might affect the entire groups overall effectiveness. A deed of studies concluded that interviewers are more(prenominal) likely to give higher ratings on some traits to candidates who are more similar to themselves. For example a study show that females were generally given lower ratings than that of males by male interviewers(http//www.shlusa.com/litigation/BestPractice/bpg_selectioninterviewing.pdf).* The Halo Effect This is the assumption that a person has a certain characteristic, therefore he or she will have other characteristics (Rollinson, 2002). If a candidate has good communication skills. This does not mean that he or she will perform in effect as a manger or a group leader. It can happen that the panel member is impressed by one candidates criterion, and then the interviewers will give him/her positive evaluation for all other criteria regardless the performance.* Self-fulfilling prophecy in our selecti on interview perspective, the Self-Fulfilling prophecy can be thought as the interviewers feelings regarding the interviewee. If this first person feels negatively about the candidate, he or she might ask more difficult questions in order to confirm his/her first assumptions. Therefore the candidate will feel uncomfortable when providing. This concern is also valid in the other sense which is the positive interviewers positive feeling and the straightforward questions to candidate in order to confirm it., The interviewers will basically tend to confirm their first impression whether it is positive or negative. This issue has a relevant impact on the validity and reliability of the selection interview in the sense that the interviewers first impression has a considerable effect on both candidates self-confidence and interviewers final result.* Attribution Theory The attribution can be internal or external to a person, i.e. people attribute causes to other peoples behaviour. The inter nal attribution can be the persons abilities intentions etc. whereas the external attribution is the environment, luck etc. To simplify this theory throughout an example, a candidate is sweating during a selection interview, the deduction the interviewer might have is Does this person sweat because the means is hot (External attribution) or because the candidate is nervous and struggle to answer the question (Internal attribution)? In fact there is a significant difference between those two factors that affects the interviewers perception and therefore his/her decision making.Government policy and legislationWhile organisations are totally free about how they choose their employee, legislation has a significant role in the recruitment and selection methods, especially in attempts to prevent different discriminations such as ethnic origin, sex, age and disability and to warrant equal opportunities in recruitment (Beardwell and Holden, 2001).The first act was elaborated in 1974 and concerned the discrimination against people with criminal records (The Rehabilitation of Offenders spell 1974). This stipulates that after a certain time, the offender has the right to not reveal his or her sentence to any organisation, and should have the same recruitment chances that everybody else has. Followed by that, sex discrimination Act 1975 (including marital status) and race discrimination Act 1976 were introduced in the United Kingdom in order to protect people from direct and indirect discriminations.Since those acts, women and people from different origins have taken important part within organisations however the evolution has been done relatively slowly according to national statistics (EOC Annual Report, 1998 and IDS 1997) which indicate the dispersion of employment on the grounds of gender and race has slightly changed since those acts for instance, people from ethnic minority are two and a half times more likely to be unemployed than white population. More recen tly, the Disability Discrimination Act (1995) was enforced in order to protect people with physical or mental impairment that affect them carrying out normal day-to-day activities and tasks. National statistics (Sly et al. 1999) reveal that the unemployment rate for disabled people is almost twice that the non-disabled people for the working age.ConclusionWe have seen that the reliability of the selection interview is affected by perceptual errors. However it this issue that can be overcome by using a structured interview, which makes the interviewer more involved in the job analysis. It is important to remember that the validity of the interview is improved by building a vigorous relationship between the content of the job and the structure of the selection method. The questions are relevant to the job requirements, and candidates are assessed according to a unique and specific grading procedure in other words the same questions are asked to each candidate and rated according to pre-elaborated rating scales (Barclay, 1999).Moreover, the interviewers should have special trainings and practices in order to allow them know the various pitfalls met in selection interview and overcome their weaknesses regarding the different aspects of the interview. Despite the existence of other recruitment methods such as testing, group selection, assessment centres, and consultant agencies which reveal to be more expensive and less accurate the selection interview approach remains the most popular and flexible method used by organisations.BibliographyBarclay, J. (1999) Employee Selection A question of Structure, Personnel Review, 28 (1/2) 134-151.Barclay, J. (1999) Improving Selection Interview with Structure, Personnel Review, 30 (1) 81-101.Beardwell, I. et al. 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