An Analytic Procedure to Estimate the Benefits of a Particular Type of Personnel Classification Decision

Abstract

The article presents an analytic procedure to estimate the expected benefits of personnel classification decisions for which it is assumed that the available criterion estimates are both equi-correlated and equally valid, that equal quotas have to be filled for the jobs, and that all jobs are equally important. The method outperforms some already existing procedures in that an exact benefit estimate is obtained even when the criterion estimates correlate substantially. To perform the estimation, an efficient numerical procedure is developed and subsequently applied to study the effect of the number of assignment categories, the applicant rejection rate, the validity of the criterion estimates, and the intercorrelation among the estimates. Among other things, the results indicate that the expected benefits of a classification decision are considerably higher than those obtained for the corresponding selection decision, even when the criterion estimates correlate substantially.

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