The Use of In-Basket Exercises for the Recruitment of Advanced Social Service Workers

Abstract

A turnover study in California found that 79.5% of the social workers that carried child caseloads left their agency within the first five years of employment. As one means of addressing this problem, Cooperative Personnel Services (CPS) developed an in-basket examination. The long-term goal of this exploratory project is to attract qualified and motivated workers, discourage less qualified workers, and reduce the excessive costs of training new workers who precipitously terminate their employment. Employed social service workers and administrators were used as subject matter experts to take piloted examinations and professional raters were used to evaluate these examinations. Despite some encouraging results, the small sample size and lack of randomness as a generalizability issue limits the findings.