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Personnel Selection Test Development & Validation

Hiring the Best and Limiting Litigation Threats

Determining which applicants to hire is one of the most impactful decisions an organization can make. In selecting a new employee, an organization is inviting that person into their family. Good decisions can enhance workplace productivity, culture, adaptability and diversity in a myriad of ways. When new hires possess the knowledge, skills, abilities and other personal characteristics to be successful, amazing things can happen. However, nearly every hiring manager can attest to the negative impacts that result from poor hiring decisions.

Biddle Consulting Group has developed and validated high quality personnel selection instruments for nearly every sector of the United States Economy for over 40 years. We apply the latest scientific tools and strategies when crafting custom-built selection instruments that have never failed in court challenges. We understand that every organization is unique and every job has specific requirements that a new hire must meet to provide the greatest benefit.

Our goal is to help organizations identify and hire the most talented, innovative and productive employees available. Our highly experienced doctoral-level consultants are here to provide you with a free consultation to determine how we can help you. Below are some of the services we provide.

A job analysis can be used for a wide variety of important human resource functions including identifying training needs, establishing job classification schemes, and even making salary decisions. It is also the foundation for all valid assessment and selection decisions. This is because, in order to develop valid and legally-defensible selection instruments, the first step is to understand the nature of the job including the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) necessary to perform that job.

Biddle Consulting Group’s proprietary Guidelines Oriented Job Analysis (GOJA) process is an industry standard, and we use this technique to help our clients get the most out of their job analysis. In addition to providing the basis for developing valid pre-employment assessment procedures, we are also able to help your organization’s goals of complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by determining which job tasks are fundamental or assignable along with other physical ability requirements.

If your organization is seeking to validate its current selection procedures, develop new ones, or simply to better understand job requirements to support other organizational decisions, Biddle Consulting Group can help. Contact us for a free initial consultation.

Employment interviews represent the most common method of assessing job applicants. When employers use interviews as part of their selection process, Biddle Consulting Group strongly recommends using structured interviews. This is because structured interviews are specifically designed to address the shortcomings found in unstructured interviews and thereby reduce the opportunity for bias to be introduced into the selection process. Structured interviews provide a framework for selection that has both higher validity and is much more supportable in the face of a legal challenge.

A structured interview is a formal, systematic, and standardized interview process in which all candidates are asked the same pre-established job-related questions in the same order. The goal is to ensure that every candidate has the same experience and opportunity for success.

Interviewers evaluate each candidate’s responses using a pre-defined scoring guide which consists of benchmark answers and anchored rating scales. This approach has been consistently upheld by the courts, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and the Office of Federal Contractor Compliance Programs (OFCCP).

Biddle Consulting Group has developed a wide variety of structured interviews for our clients. Contact us today for a free initial consultation on how we can help your organization hire the best new employees through high quality structured interviews.

Contact Biddle Consulting Group for a free, no obligation consultation about how we can help you improve your selection process through the development of structured interviews.

The written test is perhaps the most powerful of all the available tools and techniques for assessing job applicants. This is because written tests have a variety of desirable advantages that most other assessment methods do not. For example:

  • They can be administered to large numbers of applicants quickly and efficiently in either a single location or online.
  • They are objectively scored which takes the subjective judgement out of the equation making them less susceptible to rater bias.
  • A greater number of questions can be asked meaning that a written test can cover a wider array of knowledge skills and abilities that are required for success on the job.
  • It is much easier to evaluate the statistical properties of the test including reliability, item effectiveness, fairness across gender and ethnic groups, and overall validity. This makes written tests easier to defend in the face of litigation.
  • Once developed, they are efficient to administer requiring very little staff time and cost relative to other methods such as interviews when assessing large numbers of applicants.

Written tests can be designed for a wide variety of purposes. For example, written tests can be designed to:

  • Measure specific knowledge, skills, and abilities (such as, but not limited to, job knowledge, reading comprehension, analytical reasoning, mechanical ability, math, and electrical principles)
  • Assess a candidate’s personality to ensure a good fit with the job
  • Collect biographical data inventories (biodata) which looks at historical information about a candidate’s experience and predicts future job performance.
  • Determine a candidate’s ability to correctly judge situations and make appropriate decisions.

Biddle Consulting Group has many years of experience designing, validating and helping our clients take full advantage of the power of written tests in identifying the best applicants for hire. We can also review your current testing process and/or help your organization to create its own written tests to be used for the selection/promotion of candidates and/or the evaluation of current employees.

Finally, we are able to even help you administer your tests online through our proprietary online testing platform, TestGenius.

If you would like more information about how we can help you with your written test needs, please contact us for a free initial consultation.

Research into human performance makes clear that the best predictor of future performance is past performance. Rather than asking a candidate how they "would" do the job, you can find how they have done the job in the past, or, better yet, have them demonstrate the ability to perform the job using a simulation.

Work sample tests are a type of job simulation that requires applicants to perform tasks or work activities that mirror or sample the tasks employees perform on the job, such as a typing test for administrative assistants or coding challenges for software programmers.

Another type of work sample test is known as a Physical Ability Test (PAT). PATs are tests that measure an applicant's ability to perform the physical parts of the job such as lifting boxes for warehouse workers, performing the physical activities of firefighters or police officers, as well as other physical labor-intensive jobs.

Biddle Consulting Group has a great deal of experience helping clients develop valid and defensible work sample tests. We can help your organization develop work-sample and/or physical-ability tests in a way that is designed to address the requirements of the federal Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures, which are the guidelines the courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission follow when reviewing the validity of work-sample and physical ability tests used by employers.

Biddle also offers a software tool called PAVE that dynamically creates a physical ability test event and simultaneously creates a validation report. We can certify your employees so they can develop PATs for your organization.

We are here to help you. Contact us for a free initial consultation.

Basic Qualifications are typically those minimum criteria that an applicant must possess in order to be considered eligible to move forward during the earliest phases of an employment selection/promotion process. Preferred, or desirable, qualifications are those criteria that might be helpful for a job applicant to possess (i.e., “nice to have”), but which are not necessarily required at the time of entry.

Biddle Consulting Group can help your organization develop Basic and/or Preferred Qualifications in a way that is designed to address the requirements of the federal Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures, which are the guidelines the courts and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission follow when reviewing the validity of basic and preferred qualifications used by employers.

Contact us for a free consultation.

The Process:

Job Analysis Test Development Test Validation

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What Sets Biddle Consulting Group Apart From The Rest?

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The Proof: Court Cases

As evidence of the legal defensibility of our services, Biddle Consulting Group's work products (job analysis, validation and statistical adverse impact analyses) have been supported in over 200+ court cases, some of the most in the industry.

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Some Of The Industries For Which We Have Experience Creating Tests:



Software

Electrical

Mechanical

Longshore

Airlines

Oil & Gas

Manufacturing

Healthcare

Finance

Administrative
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