Personnel Assessment and Selection in the Service of the Applicant (PASSA): Shifting the Applicant Perspective on Selection from Reaction to Action

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

Personnel Assessment and Selection in the Service of the Applicant (PASSA): How We Can Help Job Seekers Finding the Right Organization, and Why We Should Do That

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.