Abstract
Research on staffing organizations traditionally focused on hiring the best performing applicants. This paradigm is restricted to serving the employer's interests, and its utility may be limited by skill shortage. It is therefore proposed to complement traditional recruitment and selection based on a paradigm labeled Assessment and Selection in the Service of the Applicant (PASSA). PASSA is meant to support applicants taking on the agentic role in mutual interactions, such that they become recipients of the information gathered, whereas employers become targets of assessment. This idea is elaborated on along the typical stages of the staffing process, from defining goals and decision criteria, to job analysis, to recruitment, to assessment and selection, to validation. At each stage, implications and challenges for implementing PASSA in research and practice are discussed. Finally, theoretical arguments as to why and under which conditions both employers and applicants may benefit from this implementation are offered.
Plain Language Summary
The task of staffing organizations has engaged industrial/organizational psychologists for long-but almost exclusively with a focus on helping employers to find the right employees. However, staffing can only succeed if both employers and job seekers attract and select each other. Moreover, in tight job markets characterized by skill shortage, job seekers rather than employers may be in the position to select between alternative options.
The present paper therefore offers a proposal to complement the psychology of recruiting and assessing applicants by an analogous psychology designed to help applicants recruiting and assessing potential employers. Towards that end, it is discussed how tools psychologists created in the service of employers may be adapted or extended to support applicants. The paper is organized along the typical employer-oriented process consisting of the stages of recruitment, job analysis, screening, selection, and evaluation. At each of these stages, it is discussed how existing tools and approaches may look like with roles being reversed between applicants and employers. Furthermore, it is outlined theoretically why both and applicants may benefit from complementing traditional recruitment and selection with applicant-focused procedures. Challenges and potential obstacles along this road are discussed as well.
From the discipline's earliest days, staffing organizations has been considered the “supreme problem” of applied psychology (Hall, 1917, as cited in Ployhart et al., 2017). The problem of staffing can be described by the complementary, yet substantively different, tasks of attracting (recruiting) and selecting employees. An enormous body of evidence has been accumulated by industrial-organizational psychologists in the development and evaluation of procedures for employee recruitment (e.g., (e.g., Dineen et al., 2023; Li & Song, 2018), and especially selection (e.g., Sackett et al., 2023; Schmidt & Hunter, 1998; Van Iddekinge et al., 2023). In this paper, I will refer to these procedures collectively as Personnel Assessment and Selection in the Service of the Employer (PASSE).
As employment requires mutual agreement, job seekers need to attract and select employers in the same way as employers have to attract and select applicants. Although several theorists pointed to this symmetry between applicants’ and employers’ tasks (e.g., Bangerter et al., 2012; Marcus, 2009; Schneider, 1987), there is a huge difference in the degree of attention our discipline paid to solving those tasks. Sophistication of supporting applicants lags far behind the standard of supporting employers. The present paper set out to establish the need, and to propose some initial steps, for beginning to fill this gap. In contrast to the employer-centered PASSE paradigm, I will refer to those procedures collectively as Personnel Assessment and Selection in the Service of the Applicant (PASSA). A premise underlying PASSA is that attraction and (psychometrically based) selection are structurally equivalent for employers and job seekers. Therefore, an appropriate starting point for developing procedures aimed at solving these tasks for job seekers as clients is the knowledge accumulated to serve employers. This, of course, does not imply that PASSE instruments can always be successfully adapted. Furthermore, PASSA is meant to complement the PASSE paradigm, not to replace it.
One may rightly point out that our discipline has already considered the applicant perspective extensively. Moreover, whereas mere logic points to the symmetry of attraction and selection tasks between applicants and employers, the distribution of power between these parties may well be asymmetrical. In the following section, I will therefore first offer some arguments for the conceptual distinction between PASSA and extant applicant reaction research under the PASSE paradigm, and for the potential practicality and ethical justification of the PASSA approach. The main section then presents some initial proposals for developing PASSA procedures. Building on the symmetry principle outlined above, this section is structured along the typical sequence of steps for staffing organizations developed under the PASSE paradigm: from setting goals, to job analysis, to recruitment, to the development and application of assessment tools, to evaluation or validation of these tools. The final sections are reserved for discussing implications of implementing PASSA in research and practice.
Why PASSA May Be Needed and Useful
Beginning in the 1990ies, a fair amount of research has been accumulated on what is often referred as the applicant perspective (e.g., Chapman et al., 2005; Gilliland, 1993; Hausknecht et al., 2004; McCarthy et al., 2017). This label covers various lines of inquiry, including applicant attitudes and reactions to selection instruments and procedures, issues of adverse impact and diversity in employer's selection decisions, or effects of employers’ activities throughout the process on applicant attraction and acceptance of job offers. A common element across these lines of research is that they are concerned with the impact of employer's acts on applicant rights and perceptions. Traditional applicant reaction research is an important extension of the PASSE perspective in that it informs employers about how they may design selection systems in ways respectful of applicants’ rights and dignity. Importantly, though, this is not what PASSA is concerned with. As the label implies, applicant reaction research is about how applicants re-act to employer's acts of attraction and selection, whereas PASSA is meant to focus on applicants as agents who initiate attraction and selection. Moreover, extant applicant perspective literature primarily focused on applicants’ attitudes and behaviors during or immediately after the selection process, whereas PASSA is focused on the prediction of outcomes during possible employment, analogous to the focus of PASSE-based principles on the job-relatedness of instruments for applicant selection (e.g., Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology [SIOP], 2018). This is why these principles, rather than the applicant reaction literature, guided the structure of the present article. An appropriate PASSA analogy to applicant reaction research would be employer reactions to PASSA tools, which is of some practical relevance but not at the core of PASSA.
An area of research structurally more closely related to PASSA is vocational counseling. Vocational counseling shares with PASSA the objective to help job seekers making the right career decisions. Yet, whereas vocational counseling typically focusses on a very early stage of the career when choices are made irrespective of a particular job or employer, these latter choices are at the very core of PASSA. PASSA therefore bridges the gap between choosing a vocation and choosing a job offer.
The feasibility of PASSA tools will, of course, depend on job seekers’ relative negotiation power, which partly depends on job market conditions. Despite the notorious volatility of these conditions across times, regions, occupations, etc., in recent years a stable majority of companies across the globe and across a broad spectrum of industries reported to have trouble finding the employees they need (ManpowerGroup, 2025). Current and projected skill shortage covers not just highly skilled jobs (e.g., in information technology) but also semi-skilled occupational groups in healthcare, construction, hospitality, or transportation industries, to name a few (e.g., Bundesagentur für Arbeit, 2025; U.S. Bureau of Labor, 2024). Under such conditions, employers have every reason to consider applicants’ interests during selection, and there is evidence that they already do (e.g., König et al., 2010). As discussed in a later section, PASSA may in fact serve a recruitment function for employers.
Regardless of the distribution of power between any stakeholders, psychologists are generally held to “… strive to benefit those with whom they work …” (American Psychological Association, 2017, p. 3), which in case of personnel selection includes both applicants and employers. From that principle, one may derive an aspiration to move beyond the mere avoidance of harming applicants at the core of most applicant perspective research and to consider applicants as focal clients of psychological consulting.
How PASSA May Work: Attracting and Selecting Employers
As noted, this section is structured along the typical stages of the PASSE process, from setting its goals (i.e., definition of objectives and criteria for evaluating decisions), to job analysis, to recruitment, to the development and application of assessment tools, to evaluation or validation of these tools. At each stage, I will first briefly introduce key concepts developed under the PASSE paradigm, then outline respective PASSA analogies, and finally discuss implications and challenges for implementing PASSA in research and practice. Building on existing PASSE technologies shall also help identifying the limits of mere adaptation and areas in need of more novel approaches. Major steps along this process and respective tasks from PASSE and PASSA perspectives are summarized in Table 1. As a general qualification of the assumed symmetry between employers’ and applicants’ tasks, I shall note that the relative weight given to those tasks typically varies across those stages. Stages requiring little or no interaction (i.e., goal setting, job analysis, evaluation) are relatively independent of the social tasks of attraction and selection. The term ‘recruitment’ refers the employer's attraction task, at which stage job seekers are free to choose available options, bringing them in a more powerful position. This imbalance tends to be reversed at later stages when the employers’ focus shifts to selection. I will try consider these differences in the following sub-sections.
Stages of the Process of Assessment for Selection in the Service of the Employer (PASSE) and the Applicant (PASSA).
Criteria for Making and Evaluating Selection Decisions: Performance vs. Well-Being
In practice, there is reason to believe that selection processes and decisions do not always follow these ideals. First, the pre-condition for top-down selection (premise #2) of multiple qualified applicants in the initial pool may not be met in tight job markets, in which case assessing whether any applicant meets some standard of minimum or satisfactory qualification becomes more pertinent than accurate rank ordering. Second, organizations may not always look for the most qualified applicants (premise #1) but prefer to hire persons who “fit” best to the environment (P-E fit) in terms of the job (P-J fit) and organization (P-O fit). Whereas predicted performance may be operationalized in an additive overall score of predictors, fit rather refers to the degree of similarity between configurations of characteristics on the employer and applicant side. Moreover, the configuration desired in applicants may be defined by similarity either with an existing (supplementary fit) or currently lacking (complementary fit) profile on the employer side (e.g., Kristof, 1996). Whereas complementary fit conceptually corresponds to the idea of measuring knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) needed to successfully perform in a specific job, attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) theory (Schneider, 1987) suggests that selection decisions by both employers and applicants are often based on perceptions of supplementary fit, which may foster employee retention and well-being but also impair diversity and the breadth of KSAOs available. Empirical evidence largely supports these notions and shows that various kinds of assessments of P-E fit tend to be positively, but only moderately, related to measures of job performance (Barrick & Parks-Leduc, 2019; Kristof, 1996; Kristof-Brown et al., 2023).
To summarize, employers likely prioritize employee performance as the criterion to be improved by selection systems but may consider P-E fit as an additional or even alternative criterion. The most efficient decision strategy for improving performance is top-down selection, which corresponds to the predominant validation approach. Applying a strategy based on complementary (needs-supply) fit shall lead to similar performance improvements, whereas supplementary fit directly fosters the homogeneity of the workforce, which in turn may lead to somewhat ambivalent outcomes.
An applicant-centered analogy to the above cited definition of job relatedness would thus state that the job relatedness of PASSA tools is to be inferred primarily from the accuracy of predictions of employer behaviors affecting employee well-being. Analogous to outcome measures of job performance, subjective or objective indicators of employee well-being may serve as additional criteria.
A PASSA analogy to employer's top-down selection based on predicted performance would be top-down selection based on predicted well-being. However, rank-ordering employers makes sense for applicants only if they have multiple job offers at the same time. I am unaware of empirical evidence on the prevalence of this situation, but it seems plausible that it is the exception rather than the rule. As employers organize the selection process, they have the timing under control, which typically allows them to consider multiple candidates in a row, whereas applicants depend on coincidence in order to have multiple options. Unlike top-down selection, assessing person-environment fit is based on internal standards and thus not requires multiple options. As supplementary fit relates more clearly to well-being, whereas complementary fit matters more for performance (Kristof, 1996), and as top-down selection seems rarely possible for applicants, it might be concluded that from a PASSA perspective, the order of relevant decision criteria is reversed, with supplementary fit being most significant, followed by complementary fit, followed by top-down selection.
If applicants only have a single offer, then some cut-off for satisfactory fit would be useful to facilitate their decision. Although setting cut-offs always involves arbitrariness, there are literatures on optimizing cut-offs from various disciplines (e.g., Hajian-Tilaki, 2018). Even if applicants have the chance to employ top-down selection of prospective employers, they still would still need to compare them, which would call for measures standardized across employers. As discussed in the section on selection, this may be most realistic at the screening stage of the selection process.
Identifying Requirements for Performance vs. Well-Being
By contrast, job requirements refer to the specific needs of an individual employer. A proper PASSA analogy would thus require identifying specific needs of the individual applicant the employer is expected to fulfill in order to improve the well-being of that particular applicant. As far as tangible features of the job (e.g., compensation and benefits, worksite, schedule, etc.) are concerned, this may simply be subject to implicit self-assessment. Those objective features primarily affect enablers of well-being beyond work, such as financial income or leisure time. Less obvious to applicants may be their needs with regard to well-being at work.
One practical challenge at this point is how cost-effective, yet valid, self-assessments may be implemented at this early stage of the selection process. Stable needs and motives may well be assessed independent of a specific job seeking process. Once developed, respective tools may thus be implemented in online job portals at little or no costs for potential applicants. Matching then only requires that job portals offer their customers (i.e., employers) additional tools for assessing the E-side of person-environment fit. As well, vocational counseling or the O*Net may be augmented by assessing individual differences linked to specifics of organizations in addition to the predominant assessment of broad vocational interests (e.g., Nauta, 2010). This may permit to assess the P-side of person-environment fit in addition to the present focus on person-vocation fit. Finally, efforts of implementing the assessment of applicant needs independent of specific selection processes would lead to research questions about the generalizability and long-term stability of such assessments.
Attracting Applicants vs. Attracting Employers
Limits of the analogy between recruitment/attractiveness and marketing/consumer research lie in differences between the nature of the organization's relations to its employees and customers. Jobs are typically more limited than goods, they require specific KSAOs rather than just solvency, and employee turnover tends to be much more costly than loss of a single customer. This implies that organizations may take care to avoid false positive personnel decisions not only at the selection stage but already during recruitment by implementing instruments like realistic job previews (RJPs, Wanous, 1973) to foster applicant self-selection. Still, the preponderance of recruitment research and practice is concerned with attracting applicants by means of creating a positive image as employer and favorable impressions in applicants (Dineen et al., 2023; Yu, 2019).
Assessing and Selecting Applicants vs. Assessing and Selecting Employers
With strict top-down selection, the step from assessment to decision making would follow a simple rule for employers: rank candidates according to their assessment scores and offer employment (or invitation to the next selection stage) in the order of ranks. In practice, this logic based on utility maximization is often stretched to rationalize more emotionally flavored decisions akin to supplementary fit (Rivera, 2020). Yet, following principles of evidence-based HRM implies to first establish job relatedness of assessments by means of validation and then to base decisions on observed scores on these assessments (SIOP, 2018).
However, even under the PASSE paradigm employers need to be aware that job seekers and applicants may also decline their offers. Meta-analytic evidence suggests that perceptions of supplementary fit and of features of the application process are decisive factors for job seekers’ decisions to apply and to maintain their application, whereas tangible job characteristics (e.g., compensation) become more important for final job choices (Chapman et al., 2005; Uggerslev et al., 2012). Thus, understanding applicant reactions serves employers’ attraction task by informing them how to avoid deterring applicants they wish to attract, which illustrates that current applicant perspective research is well rooted within the PASSE paradigm.
When employers screen applicants, they may ask for the specific materials (e.g., resumes, references, application forms, online assessments) they consider relevant for that purpose. By contrast, applicants rarely have the chance to solicit specific information from potential employers prior to application. Rather, applicants may use information material employers create to advertise the job and to present themselves as employers (e.g., employer branding campaigns, presences on the internet or at recruitment fairs). Differences between the specific information employers ask applicants to deliver and the information they deliver to applicants include: (1) Employers decide what they want to know from applicants, whereas applicants are left with what the employer decides to reveal. (2) As a consequence, the information employers ask for and deliver both are tailored to the specific employer's rather than the specific applicant's needs. (3) Whereas both employers and applicants are free to choose the way they present themselves, only employers have the chance to implement controls for impression management (e.g., verification of claimed skills) in their screening tools. A PASSA approach to employer screening thus needs to be aimed at correcting these imbalances by developing cost-effective tools that applicants could administer to employers before they decide to apply.
At the final stage, the PASSA paradigm calls for developing psychometric tools to support applicants’ decision-making in a similar vein as the tools developed and validated for applicant selection under the PASSE paradigm. Although some of these instruments, especially situational interviews and job sample tests, provide applicants with useful information on prospective jobs (Anderson & Ostroff, 1997), this happens as a side effect rather than being systematically guided by psychometric principles underlying the assessment of applicant KSAOs. Analogous to PASSE research on applicant reactions, in their role as assessors applicants also need to understand how the employer's reactions to their assessments may affect their own chances of obtaining a job offer. Finally, analogous to PASSE faking research, a PASSA approach calls for answering the question of how applicants may deal with the employer's impression management.
Drawing on Wernimont and Campbell's (1968) classic distinction, development of PASSA assessments for final selection may aim either at signs or at samples of employer behavior predictive of employee well-being. A sign-based approach would operationalize and measure employer characteristics predictive of employee well-being, analogous to applicant KSAOs related to job performance under the PASSE paradigm. Building on the tripartite concept of attitudinal, relational, and health-related, well-being introduced earlier, there is ample evidence on variables under control of the employer that predict these various components (e.g., Llorente-Alonso et al., 2024; Meyer et al., 2002; Nielsen et al., 2017; Pindek & Spector, 2016; Podsakoff et al., 2007; Van De Voorde et al., 2012). We already possess numerous well validated measures of antecedents of well-being (e.g., leadership, organizational constraints, organizational climate, organizational justice, etc.), which only need to be adapted for use by applicants.
Similar to many selection instruments in the PASSE domain, a sample-like approach to PASSA assessment may build on the critical incident technique (CIT) to identify behaviors in concrete situations that affect the well-being of employees. These behaviors may then be translated into PASSA versions of situational or biographical interviews, or of situational judgment tests. Materials collected from OERs could be employed to train large language models for that purpose (cf. Harwood et al., 2024).
While the approaches described may sound straightforward, implementation may be challenging in practice for a number of reasons. Unlike screening instruments implemented on OER platforms, PASSA assessments at the final stage require the employer's participation and willingness to reveal information that may not always be unequivocally favorable. The presence of RJPs in current recruitment practice shows that this is not without precedent, though. Secondly, variables of interest to applicants may pertain either to the particular job offered, or to the organization level (the time-frame of which may cover careers). The organization level is often referred to in general antecedents of well-being, whereas the job level may be more pertinent in CIT-based measures. Finally, instruments need to be administered to employer representatives authorized and able to answer the applicant's questions. Job interviews may offer a particularly appropriate context for that purpose. Interviews are almost ubiquitously employed (Jackson et al., 2018), and employers and applicants both already use them in pursuit of their respective attraction task (e.g., Bourdage et al., 2018; Wilhelmy et al., 2021). In order to serve the applicant's selection task reliably, interviewers may additionally need to be trained to respond to applicant's questions in line with PASSA's mission.
Instead of predicting employee well-being from employer's characteristics, it may be tempting to assess applicant characteristics for that same purpose. For example, empirical evidence on links between personality and well-being (e.g., DeNeve & Cooper, 1998) may be, and sometimes already is (e.g., Ones & Viswesvaran, 2001), used to select applicants for their predicted well-being as employees. However, these kinds of approaches are in fundamental conflict with the PASSA paradigm, because they shift responsibility for well-being away from the employer. Instead of designing workplaces to serve employees’ legitimate interests, employees are selected for their ability to cope with adverse work conditions. The idea of PASSA is to help job seekers finding an employment that fits their needs, whereas the latter approach corresponds to the PASSE paradigm.
Turning to social aspects of selection, we already possess some evidence on the content and effects of organizational impression management tactics (e.g., Yu, 2019), yet a PASSA analogy to the massive literature on controls of applicant impression management (see, e.g., Burns & Christiansen, 2011, for an overview) is virtually lacking. For most of these methods, there is hardly any evidence on positive effects on validity, and some may be too psychometrically complex to be adapted for practical uses by applicants. However, specific methods like verification (Dunlop et al., 2020), or elaboration (Levashina et al., 2012) techniques, hold promise for developing tools that could help applicants improving the trustworthiness of employer self-presentation.
Finally, a PASSA analogy to PASSE applicant reaction research would inform applicants about how employers react to the tools applicants use to assess the employer, in order to avoid jeopardizing one's application success. As this logically requires development of such assessments in the first place, relevant evidence on this matter is currently lacking altogether.
Evaluating Tools and Procedures for Assessment and Selection
Applicants’ efforts to attract employers are evidently best evaluated in terms of their impact on the success of applications (i.e., receiving invitations to subsequent selection stages and finally job offers). As reviewed earlier, some relevant evidence comes from research on effects of applicant impression management tactics on recruiter perceptions. Of note, a PASSA perspective would place a positive value on observing positive effects on employer impressions, which is at odds with the predominant PASSE view on applicant self-presentation as faking. Whereas this points to a potential conflict of interest, there fortunately is also evidence that more authentic forms of self-presentation such as self-verification striving yield desirable outcomes for both stakeholders (e.g., Moore et al., 2017).
The issue of utility is closely tied to the question of who is going to pay the bills. As the primary beneficiaries of PASSA elements are the applicants, it may be tempting to present the bills to them. However, this would restrict PASSA to applicants willing and able to pay for it. Employing organizations may be willing to pay if they consider the costs being investments the return on which is attractive and predictable. For the same reason, they might be willing to reveal the information needed to fuel the PASSA approach. This issue is discussed in greater detail in the next section. Other players potentially willing to invest in PASSA tools are companies hosting OER and similar platforms. In their case, potential competitive advantage lies in the ability to offer psychometrically sound matching of job seekers and employers to clients from both groups. 1 For these reasons, utility in the sense of cost-effectiveness appears of limited relevance from applicants’ perspective.
Why and When PASSA May or May Not Work
The present paper introduces a call for our discipline to support applicants in similar ways as we had always supported employers in the process of staffing organizations. Beyond this ethical argument, I will briefly discuss some theoretical considerations of expected effects and conditions for implementing PASSA, although development of an elaborated PASSA theory lies beyond the scope of this position paper. There are, of course, multiple theories a PASSA approach may draw on. Some of these theoretical bases (e.g., theories of work motivation, of person-environment fit, or of predictors of job performance) have been mentioned in earlier sections and thus shall not be reiterated. In the present section, I will focus on three additional theoretical perspectives that may be applied in particular to tentatively predict specific consequences of implementing PASSA.
First, socioanalytic theory (e.g., Hogan & Holland, 2003) holds that people try to convey in social interactions an image of themselves driven by the motives of getting along and getting ahead in social groups. Whereas the getting along motive is conceptually akin to the goal of (relationship) well-being and to supplementary fit as a decision criterion, high job performance has a closer link to career (getting ahead) goals. This implies that the motives for applicant self-presentation are not necessarily in conflict with employers’ interests, as is implicitly or explicitly assumed in the bulk of applicant faking research. Similarly, self-presentation theory (Marcus, 2009) suggests that negative effects of applicant impression management on psychometric properties of ‘fakable’ selection tools may be outweighed by improved chances of hiring applicants with better skills and higher motivation to perform in the specific job (for empirical evidence supporting these predictions, see Hogan et al., 2007; Marcus et al., 2020).
Second, signaling theory (Spence, 1973) has also been applied to understand the dynamics of self-presentation during selection (Bangerter et al., 2012; Roulin et al., 2016). According to signaling theory, both applicants and employers send signals to distinguish themselves from competitors, and both seek for signals that reduce the uncertainty in each other's assessments. Depending on perceived costs and benefits of one's signaling strategy and on perceived and expected reactions of the interaction partner, a dynamic process of adaptation and counteradaptation may lead either to a cooperative equilibrium of mutual trust and honesty, or to a maladaptive escalation of mutual deception (Bangerter et al., 2012). Implementing elements of the PASSA approach may affect these processes in several interrelated ways. First, employer's willingness to be assessed sends a direct signal of trustworthiness to the applicant. Second, awareness of being assessed may signal to the employer that offering desirable job conditions is rewarded by gaining competitive advantage on the job market. Third, offering desirable job conditions may facilitate honest self-presentation, and lower incentives for deception on part of the employer, which in turn may foster reciprocal attitudes on part of the applicant. Thus, signaling theory points to ways in which implementing PASSA elements in personnel selection may initialize a dynamic process of mutual adaptation that eventually leads to the exchange of accurate information despite partially conflicting interests. On the other hand, signaling theory also points to possible reasons for failure, especially if either interaction partner expects that transparency may backfire and thus returns to more deceptive communication.
As a final example, consequences of implementing PASSA may be derived from the distinction of structural and psychological components in the theoretical literature on employee empowerment (Thomas & Velthouse, 1990). Whereas structural empowerment refers to the management's actual sharing of power and control over resources with employees, psychological empowerment refers to the subjective perception of empowerment by individual employees. As implementing PASSA provides applicants with the sort of psychometric resources traditionally available only to the employer, it may be considered an extension of structural employee empowerment to the pre-hire stage. Structural empowerment translates into psychological empowerment through cognitions of meaning (alignment with one's values and beliefs; i.e., essentially supplementary fit), choice (perception of being the maker of decisions rather than driven by the situation), competence (sense of self-efficacy), and impact (feeling to be able to affect important outcomes) (Thomas & Velthouse, 1990). Implementing PASSA shall affect the expected meaning of advertised jobs through providing applicants with information on supplementary fit. During the selection process, provision of information on non-observable features of the job and organization inherent in PASSA likely enhances both the perception to make a self-determined decision (choice) and the perceived ability to make a good decision (competence). The only element of psychological empowerment not obviously linked to PASSA is impact. Notably, this element missing in PASSA appears to be the only one conceptually covered in the application of procedural justice theory to applicant reaction research (namely, as opportunity to perform; Gilliland, 1993), which illustrates the complementary nature of PASSA and applicant reaction theory.
Signaling and employee empowerment theory both imply that implementing PASSA at the pre-hire stage likely raises the expectation of post-hire empowerment in applicants. Meeting these expectations therefore may be considered pre-condition for the long-term success of PASSA (beyond the immediate condition of being willing and able to reveal information to applicants). Meta-analytic evidence suggests that employee empowerment substantially improves indicators of well-being, and also, though more moderately, dimensions of job performance (Llorente-Alonso et al., 2024). This pattern aligns perfectly with PASSA as a complement to PASSE approaches. Especially structural empowerment implies loss of control on part of the management, which in turn calls for replacement of monitoring with alternative controls to avoid moral hazards. Mills and Ungson (2003) suggested developing trustful relationships and strengthening organizational constitutions towards that end.
Conclusion
The present position paper introduced PASSA as a way of rethinking recruitment and selection from the perspective of applicants as agents (as opposed to objects) of assessment. Understanding PASSA may be facilitated by explicating what PASSA is not supposed to be. First, PASSA is not meant to be a general critique or challenge of the PASSE paradigm. I do not question that employers are legitimate stakeholders of the selection process who have the right to know who they hire. I/O psychologists amassed an enormous body of evidence to inform these decisions under the PASSE paradigm, which in many ways served applicants’ legitimate interests as well (e.g., by preventing unfair selection decisions). In developing PASSA, I had tried to build on this evidence whenever it seemed reasonable. Second, PASSA is also not meant to challenge current accounts of the applicant perspective in the selection literature, which contributed in many ways to employers’ adherence to their ethical and legal responsibilities. PASSA complements these contributions by adding a more agentic perspective on applicants.
That being said, PASSA also builds on the observation that our predominant focus on the PASSE paradigm created significant imbalances between employers and applicants. It is a truism that both employers and applicants need to attract each other to fill a position, and that both employers and applicants may use means for attracting each other that could range from disarming honesty to extreme forms of self-promotion and outright deception. However, we equipped employers with sophisticated tools for successfully attracting applicants, and at same time we developed tools for preventing applicants from attracting employers. It is another truism that both employers and applicants need to select each other in order to fill a position. However, whereas we created an enormous volume of research to improve the employers’ selection decisions, we basically left applicants with not much more than their intuitive sense of how to assess prospective employers.
PASSA essentially is the proposal to begin correcting these imbalances by adapting and extending what we already learned along the PASSE road. This would require complementing current practices with an additional toolkit. In the present paper, I could only try to shed some light on the very first steps on the road to PASSA. Along this road, we would likely face quite a few non-trivial psychometric problems; yet our discipline has shown that it is prepared to solve such problems. The greatest obstacle may lie in required changes of employers’ mindsets, who need to be willing to reveal information and to share power to an extent uncommon in current staffing practice. Yet, beyond ethical arguments, I hope to have shown that adopting the view that employers and applicants shall be treated as equally entitled stakeholders might eventually pay off for both parties involved.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.