Category: I/O Psychology

Like lots of people with gifts for noticing the blatantly obvious, I knew a long time ago that the Internet would transform recruiting and selection practices. Nowadays there are millions of job seekers online and they can easily spam the heck out of you if you post a job opening. But for better or worse, job banks, online application systems, and e-mail have dramatically expanded the practice of recruiting. Duh.

With that expansion, though, new questions arise, like “What is an applicant?” Sounds easy at first, yeah? But there are a lot of laws that prevent employers from discriminating in recruitment/selection and dictate what kinds of standards they have to meet in order to stay legit. And since these standards involve applicants and their associated demographics, questions like “Who applied for this job?” are very important.

Problem is, they’ve been hard to answer when you start factoring in online applications. Consider the following:

• A man e-mails a resume into Company X’s HR department, asking to be considered for anything they think is a match
• A woman submits her credentials to Monster.com, which whom Company X has a subscription allowing them to view her online resume (along with millions of others).
• A man creates a profile in the “Career Opportunities” section of Company X’s website and says he’s interested in anything in the Marketing department.
• A job opening content aggregator like Flipdog sends an automated job posting to a woman based on her keyword searches.

Are any of these people job applicants? Should Company X worry about including data from these people the next time they look at applicant flow data or adverse impact for those jobs?

Until recently those weren’t easy questions. The other day, though, I got an e-mail newsletter from EASIConsult. Unlike most company newsletters, this one actually contained a link to an interesting article (written by one of my graduate school professors, whoo!) about this whole question of defining applicants when it comes to users of Internet technology. Turns out that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) recently released some recommendations on how to answer that question.

I turned the quote monkey loose on their provisions. It returned with a fist full of hair and this:

In order for an individual to be an applicant in the context of the
Internet and related electronic data processing technologies, the
following must have occurred:

1. The employer has acted to fill a particular position;
2. The individual has followed the employer’s standard procedures
   for submitting applications; and

3. The individual has indicated an interest in the particular
   position.

That helps, at least for me. So some nimrod that generically spams every recruiter e-mail address he can get ahold of can safely be ignored, while someone who e-mails one recruiter applying for a specific job must be counted. And thank God we don’t have to worry about those millions of resumes on Monster.com unless they’re following our procedures and applying for specific jobs.

The “following the employer’s standard procedures for submitting applications” bit is interesting, though. Given this guideline, I suspect that a lot of employers will ask applicants to jump through specific hoops before considering their applications complete. So even if your Uncle Bob is the V.P. of Marketing, the Human Resources department may make you fill out a thousand pages of information on their website before giving you the job.

Finally, a story that combines my intimate knowledge of Southern Baptist religious hangups and employment law. It’s about Benjamin Endres, a Indiana State Police officer who refused to take an assignment enforcing gambling laws because working in a casino violates his religious (Baptist, to be specific) convictions. His boss told him to shut his prayer hole and get to work. He sued. He lost.

To quote:

Endres sued the State Police under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act makes it unlawful for covered employers to discharge any individual “because of such individual’s religion.” He won in the District Court, but last summer the 7th U.S. Circuit reversed and entered final judgment for the State Police. Three judges dissented.

…[Said the judge:] “Baptists oppose liquor as well as gambling, Roman Catholics oppose abortion, Jews and Muslims oppose the consumption of pork. … If Endres is right, all of these faiths, and more, must be accommodated by assigning believers to duties compatible with their principles. Does the act require the State Police to assign Unitarians to guard the abortion clinic, Catholics to prevent thefts from liquor stores, and Baptists to investigate claims that supermarkets mis-weigh bacon and shellfish? Must prostitutes be left exposed to slavery or murder at the hands of pimps because protecting them from crime would encourage them to ply their trade and thus offend almost every religious faith?”

I’m with Judge Whitey on this one. Nobody was asking the cop to actually gamble. In fact, his job would have been to make sure that the casinos were not ripping people off. …Well, not more so than they’re allowed to by law. Endres shouldn’t be any more concerned about working in a casino than he would be about working in other unwholesome, sinful environments like the red light district investigating homocides or the corporate boardroom investigating white collar crime.

What’s even more interesting to me, though, is that he sued under the supposition that he was entitled to a “reasonable accomodation” under Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I didn’t know that Title VII provided such protection, but after doing some research I see that it does. It’s very similar to how the Americans with Disabilities Act works, in fact.

Rather strict California licensing requirements prevent me from actually calling myself a psychologist, but if they didn’t, I would. One of the things that led me into Industrial/Organizational Psychology was an interest in finding out why people behave as they do when put into organizations or even loosely structured situations. How do people learn what’s appropriate? How does what’s appropriate become what’s appropriate? Through what mechanisms is information disseminated to people in an organization or other group? What causes people to leave organizations or other social groups?

Thanks to 7 years of overeducation and mountains of crippling debt, I had an idea of how to answer those questions this week when I observed the behavior of people in St. Francis Hospital’s Intensive Care Waiting Room. This was the room where family and friends of patients in the ICU were able to pass the time between visiting hours (the only kind of hours I know of that only lasted 30 minutes each). At only a few hundred square feet, the room was small and its perimeter was lined with nearly soft couches, which were colored with nearly calming hues of lavender and seafoam green. A small television perched near the ceiling in one corner, but all I remember about it was that it seemed perpetually tuned to History Channel movies about WWII submarine crews. Behind the reception desk hung a white board divided into a sloppy grid, each square of which contained the phone number and status (“here” or “home”, etc.) of each patient’s family.

But it wasn’t the things in the waiting room that really interested me. The people did. When a new visitor, such as myself, first arrived, we quickly learned the system of rules and mores that had, at some point, developed. I learned, for example, that if the volunteer staffing the reception desk is out, the next nearest person should answer a ringing phone with “ICU waiting room,” find out what family the caller is trying to reach, and announce that family’s name in a LOUD, clear voice and wait for someone to answer. If no one answers, reply to the caller with “Sorry, nobody is answering,” and end the call. If someone does answer, you transferred the call to one of the other stations scattered throughout the room and told the family where to pick it up. It was amazing to see people pick all of this up and jump into the role after watching someone else do it a couple of times.

I also learned that one’s place on a particular couch could be held by almost any item, such as a pillow, a book, or a coat. I saw a few people encroach on others’ territory a few times, and they were quickly but silently put straight when the spot’s prior owner returned from the restroom or a visit to the ICU unit. It’s amazing how strong a message you can send by simply sitting right next to someone, even though there are other seats available.

Besides roles and turf wars, through, the people in the ICU Waiting Room were interested in each other. It was considered rude to ask about someone’s misfortune directly, but you could gather intelligence through intermediaries and share it with anyone else who asked. I learned which family had an 18-year old badly hurt in a car crash, which one had a father with clogged heart valves, and which fiance had been living in the waiting room for twelve weeks and surviving on nothing but Hershey’s chocolate bars and cheese puffs. And I suppose that a few people circuitously learned about my dad’s condition as well.

The really, really cool thing, though, was how this little waiting room society reacted when someone abandoned it. We were happy and we cheered. A couple of times when I happened to be there people got phone calls saying that their loved one had improved to the point that the ministrations of the ICU staff were no longer necessary and they could “move up” to a normal hospital room. That was good news that everyone was glad to overhear. We even clapped a few times.

You know, people are all right. Even the ones who glare at you for sitting too close to the newspaper that marks the edge of their seafoam green and lavender territory.

1. That the auto checkin kiosks at the airport hate me with a personal intensity.
2. Enjoying the 4-hour plane ride because it gave me a chance to read for 4 hours straight.
3. The shuttle service at the airport being run by the most incompetent, scatterbrained, and socially retarded unprofessionals I’ve ever seen.
4. $32 for chicken picata? Are you kidding me?
5. Briefly considering walking to the AMC movie theater across from the hotel, just for a chance for this new parent to see a movie on the big screen.
6. Realizing that I had forgotten to pack my toothbrush, that the gift shop was already closed, and that I’d have to just smear toothpaste across my teeth with my finger until the morning.
7. Seeing Navy Pier from my hotel window and remembering that I still have the beer glasses from the time SO long ago that I got drunk there with college friends.
8. Being gently mocked by some Indian guy for not including effect sizes in our practitioner forum presentation.
9. Being deathly afraid that I was going to drop the overhead slides for said presentation, sending them to the four corners of the room and, in the process, spontaneously creating spelling errors on every other slide.
10. $14.50 for two beers? Are you kidding me?
11. That I don’t remember anything about Item Response Theory.
12. But at the same time, being able to completely follow a pretty sophisticated factor analysis research report.
13. Being wined and dined –literally– Friday night by one of our vendors, complete with a stretch limo, awesome Italian food at a trendy joint, and lots of wine.
14. That the moderately attractive woman sitting next to me at that dinner became totally hot when she said “creme brule” in a thick Australian accent.
15. Realizing, with some indignation, that not everyone wanted to see pictures of my new baby.
16. $5 for a diet coke? Are you kidding me?
17. Realizing that there are a lot of people who are smarter than me and who have done a lot more with their lives.
18. And realizing that there are a lot of people who aren’t and who haven’t.
19. Some guy standing up in a crowd and telling the editors of the most prestigious scientific journals in I/O Psychology that they had a worse grasp on research methods than his undergraduate students.
20. This quote: “When it comes to modesty, Americans are NUMBER ONE. Always have been, always will be.”
21. Getting a call from my sister during a symposium and learning that my dad had to be taken to the hospital (he’s doing fine, by the way).
22. Geralyn’s putting the phone up to Sam’s butt so i could hear my daughter fart from half a continent away.
23. Noting that venerable, distinguished I/O psychologists who are being honored for a lifetime of achievement get boogers, too.
24. No longer having to explain that “No, I don’t make video games.”
25. Being introduced to one UMSL grad student by another as “Someone who actually finished the program.”
26. A distinguished, elderly I/O psychologists mocking the Emotional Intelligence fad: “They describe Emotional Intelligence as the intelligent use of emotions at work. Where has this guy been for 35 years? What has he been learning? Where has he been taught? I don’t know…”
27. Seeing my brother-in-law’s new book for sale in the exhibitor hall and quipping “Finally, someone else in the family has written a book.”
28. Buying two new books (this one and this one), despite still not having read the two I bought at last year’s conference.
29. Sitting through a presentation and thinking with moderate annoyance that my rejected paper was better than this.
30. $18 just to park our rental car? Are you kidding me?
31. Eating tapas and drinking sangria at a Spanish restaurant with the Sempra folks and a couple of Penn-Staters
32. How the lady in front of me on the plane ride home leaned her chair all the way back so I could barely open my laptop to write this.
33. How glad I was to see Samantha and Geralyn when I got home.

I’m headed for Chicago SIOP, where I’ll stay until Sunday. I fully expect to not only enjoy myself, but also learn a thing or two. That’s the general idea. However, my ‘net access will be nil, so no updates until then, though I should have fun writing about it when I get back. I may even be late posting Samantha’s update this weekend since I’m traveling Sunday.

As I mentioned before, this is the first year that I’m actually involved with presenting research I conducted. If you’re curious, I’ve put the PowerPoint presentation online for you to read (use Internet Explorer for best results).

This kind of thing just makes me shake my tiny fists in anger until I realize that the world is not yet sufficiently messed up for it to fly. Essentially, a company called Test Central Inc. has claimed that they own the patent to online testing (viewable online here), and that universities that decide to offer tests online (e.g., for classes or for online distance learning) have to pay them for the privilege.

Scribbled the quote monkey:

When Regis University put some of its courses online in the 1990s,
officials there figured that it was a no-brainer to administer tests
online as well. And so they did.

Last fall, however, they received a threatening letter from Test
Central Inc., which holds a patent on various types of online
testing. The company claims that Regis and other colleges may be
infringing on that patent and, if so, must pay thousands of dollars
to continue offering tests online.

…”There are many organizations out there who have made a ton of money
off of the technology that we’ve got a patent on,” says James J.
Posch, chief executive officer of Test Central and of its parent
company, Test.com. “Our concern is that other people are profiting at
our expense.”

That last quote from the guy at Test Central really gets me. Profiting at their expense? What expense is that? Their not paying you to do the testing for them is not an expense. I’m not claiming to be an expert on patents or associated laws, but that doesn’t make any sense.

It gets worse. If you read the patent, it sounds like this could also apply to any online testing, including for employment testing, which is growing very quickly as well. Here’s the patent’s abstract:

A method of making a tests, assessments, surveys and lesson plans with images and sound files and posting them on-line for potential users. Questions are input by a test-maker and then the questions are compiled into a test by a host system and posted on-line for potential test-takers. The compiled test may be placed in a directory for access by the test-takers, the directory preferably having a plurality of categories corresponding to different types of tests and the compiled test is placed in the appropriate category. For ease in administration, a just-made test is placed into a temporary category so that it may be later reviewed (by the proprietor of the host system) and placed in the most appropriate category.

That’s so broad I don’t see how it could possibly hold up. In fact, it sounds a lot like the guy who tried to pull something similar by patenting the hyperlink, which also eventually flopped. But it costs next to nothing to send out threatening letters, and it sounds like the universities aren’t going to take this seriously. And how could they?

Is it too late for me to patent multiple choice tests? Or heck, testing in general? I could make millions off the work of others. Millions!

The Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology (SIOP) is the main professional organization for I/O psychologists. I’m a card-carrying member. Actually, I lost the card, but they’ve got my info in their computer thingie. Call and ask for Betty. She knows me. And it’s a good thing, because I’m going to SIOP’s annual conference this April. It’s a conference full of firsts for me.

The first first is that I’m not having to take my own vacation time and spend my own money to attend. GameSpy wasn’t too keen on my going, which is understandable given that it had nothing to do with my job and I was covertly job hunting for 2 of the 3 times I went while working there. And that’s another first: I love my current job and won’t be looking for another this year. I can go to the evening receptions to eat cheese cubes and drink $4 Diet Cokes without pondering the least awkward way to beg everyone I meet for an interview.

The third first is that I’m presenting research this year! Some of us from my group here at work are on a practitioner forum, presenting some findings related to survey research. Basically we’re asking if you get different results depending on if you survey people at one point in time (like at the end of the year) or several points in time (such as after each service call). Oh here, just read this from the program:

This practitioner forum will address important real-world issues relevant to survey practitioners and their clients. Through the use of actual survey studies, the papers will answer common survey questions and offer practical recommendations to assist the survey specialist in delivering higher quality results.

…Lastly, in the fourth paper, Morris, Madigan, and Ashworth answer a very important methodological question: Do results differ between a survey that is administered annually and one that is administered on a more frequent basis? The authors serve as internal consultants for an Energy Service Company and manage several internal customer satisfaction programs. They were advised that customer surveys should be administered on a more frequent basis (via a web-seminar by Better Management), the rationale being that more frequent feedback allows for quicker response time to address and fix what is not going well and to acknowledge and reward what is going well. However, from a psychometric perspective, the authors were interested in how the measurement frequency would impact results.

To investigate their question, they compared item results between an annual survey and a point-of-service survey. The point-of-service survey was much shorter, but contained identical items pulled from the larger annual survey. Differences in mean ratings and response patterns were found. After finding differences quantitatively, they also investigated qualitative differences on the open-ended responses.

If you know me and plan on going to SIOP this year, let’s meet up! At least come by and see us in the Mayfair Room at 3:30 on Friday April 2nd. If you see her, tell Betty I said “hi”.

File this under “Odd”: The California Supreme Court ruled that Catholic charities in California must provide their employees with medical coverage for birth control. Somebody queue up the song from that Monty Python skit.

To quote the New York Times Online article (free registration required):

Catholic Charities of Sacramento, which brought the case in 2000, argued that it should be exempt from the state law because it is a unit of the Roman Catholic Church, and the law does allow an exemption for “religious employers” like churches.

But the State Supreme Court ruled that the organization did not meet any of the criteria defining a religious employer under the law, which was passed in 1999. Under that definition, an employer must be primarily engaged in spreading religious values, employ mostly people who hold the religious beliefs of the organization, serve largely people with the same religious beliefs, and be a nonprofit religious organization as defined under the federal tax code.

The article goes on to explain that there’s a loophole to the law that would allow the charities to not offer such a benefit if they did not offer a prescription drug plan. I sincerely hope they don’t decide that no coverage is the lesser of two evils.

The solution to this seems pretty simple regardless of your views on birth control. The charities give their employees paychecks, yet don’t place restrictions on them as to how to spend the money. They preach and create a culture (I presume) that says employees shouldn’t blow their pay on booze and hookers, but should instead use it to tithe, provide for their families, and do other wholesome, prosocial things. But they don’t force them to.

Why can’t this part of their compensation package be the same way? Provide the access to birth control and let employees decide whether or not to use it.

You know what sucks? Spending weeks stitching together a complicated data set for a validation study, including mismatched, incomplete, and longitudinal data from half a dozen sources, then get results like this (variable names omitted for confidentiality, correlation on top with p value below it):

So I got nothin’. But all may be lost. I’m investigating ways to …massage the data to see if there are relationships there that aren’t being picked up by my clumsy, ham-fisted analyses. It sounds like a fairy tale, but it’s true!

Yesterday a bunch of old people on the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the 1967 Age Discrimination Act does not work in reverse. To quote this Yahoo News story:

Age has its benefits, the Supreme Court said, ruling that younger workers can’t sue their employers when older colleagues get preferential treatment.

In a 6-3 decision that affects tens of millions of workers, the justices said Tuesday that the law that protects older employees from age discrimination doesn’t apply in reverse.

…The Supreme Court ruled in a case brought by about 200 General Dynamics Corp. workers who claimed they suffered a type of reverse discrimination because they were too young to get benefits being offered to colleagues age 50 and over. …The workers claimed they were protected by the 1967 Age Discrimination in Employment Act, which forbids age discrimination of any worker 40 or older. About 70 million U.S. workers are 40 or older, roughly half the nation’s work force.

This has a potentially large impact on those of us who work in the fields of employment testing and Human Resources in general. What’s interesting is that the people bringing the suit are all over 40, which means they were supposedly protected against discrimination on the basis of their age. The Court, however, took the stance that this protection does not apply when the recipients of the preferential treatment are older still.

After mulling this over a bit, I’ve decided this makes sense. In this case, older workers were being given early retirement if they were over 50 (which is ironic, since many discrimination cases come about on the basis of people not getting a job instead of not losing it). The employer may not have been able to offer the same deal to every one age 40 and up, and forcing them to would have resulted in either a) unreasonable hardship on the company, or b) the company’s deciding to not offer the benefit to anyone.

The law was originally designed, in effect, to protect older workers from younger ones –not younger workers from older ones. As Justice David H. Souter said in the decision, “The enemy of 40 is 30, not 50.” Now we begin to wait for someone to come up and say that this means race and sex are as relative as age.

Anyone out there know how to program SAS to compute a simple correlation coefficient (Pearson’s r will do) that corrects for unreliability on the criterion? And while we’re on it, do you have information on when it’s appropriate to do such a correction? I can’t seem to find the topic in any of the stats textbooks I have handy.

If you can help, leave a comment or e-mail me. Thanks!

Ever have one of those “Hey! They stole my idea!” moments? A while back my co-worker and I were discussing how statisticians could apply their powers to the betterment of mankind by helping them select movies, books, or video games based on self-reported ratings and data clustering methodologies.

The idea is pretty simple. First, you rate a bunch of books that you’ve read. Then a team of either trained chimps or graduate students make independent ratings about the books on a number of objective dimensions –things like publication date, genre, author, reading level, etc.

There’s then a number of clustering methodologies that could be used to group books together based on these factors, putting them into “families” that may or may not transcend the traditional genre boundaries. Then, based on your ratings of the books you’ve read and those books’ scores from the chimps/students, the system could assign weights to each factor and recommend new books to you. It could even look at people who gave similar ratings to the same books and use that information to further refine its recommendations. (In fact, this is probably similar to how Amazon.com’s recommendations work.)

You could then really take it to the next level and further improve recommendations by factoring in demographic data (gender, age, education) or psychological measures like intelligence or personality. You could find that people who are high in emotional stability but low in conscientiousness tend to like mystery novels involving cats. Neat, eh?

It’s kind of a one day project, in that we thought we could get to it “one day”. Looks like someone beat me to it, though, because I was poking around the ‘net today and noticed a site called What to Rent.

Their system purports to recommend movies based on your personality. When you sign up for an account you take a short “personality test” that asks you about your movie preferences. It then recommends movies and invites you to come back 24 hours later to tell it how you liked its recommendations by answering more questions. Over time it’s supposed to get smarter and tailor its recommendations more snugly.

They don’t go into any detail about the methods used, saying that “The specific theory behind the computer system that recommends movie rentals has patents pending in many countries and cannot be published at this time due to concerns over uncredited use of the technology involved.” I can tell you, however, that the personality “test” they give you is crap. It’s just a short questionnaire about movie preferences, not a personality inventory based on a scientifically researched model. So that part of it seems like a sham –a glossy coat made to make a simple survey look more complicated than it is. This opinion is cemented by this quote:

To give a more specific idea how a personality is simulated and analyzed, displayed below is a schematic for the fear simulator that assigns virtual component values based upon the film database. While the actual implementation of the simulator uses Integrated Circuit chips, the design was done with analog components.

This circuit is operated with specified values and the generated output is graphed and evaluated at points of interest.

That just makes …no sense. That’s an electrical diagram. I don’t think they’re even trying, and haven’t completely discounted the possibility that the whole site is a scam or a hoax. Still, the vision is right, even if it’s not there yet.

Well, not literally. As funny as it would be, nobody is expecting the Senior Editing staff of Journal of Applied Psychology to march the ball up the field. But I/O psych actually does have practical applications to sports.

We already know that if you have a bunch of job applicants you can use properly constructed and skillfully administered employment tests to pick out the most suited to the job. If you have a Pipeline Operations Tech, for example, you may test for mechanical knowledge, basic mathematical ability, and upper body strength. Add up those three test scores and blammo! You just have to pick the applicant with the best results to maximize your chances of getting a high-performance employee.

And so it is with sports –or can be. Coaches and scouts already use lots of information about athletes to draft new players or trade veteran ones. 100 meter dash, bench press, high jump, height, weight, number of yards gained during high school or college, et cetera. These analysts of talent look at all these things and make a determination about an athlete’s potential performance. It’s not that different than looking at an applicant’s mechanical knowledge, mechanical ability, or upper body strength, is it? (Hint: no, it’s not.)

Thing is, coaches and scouts usually aren’t scientific or methodical about it. Going by gut and experience only lets our puny human brains take into account a few factors at a time, and it leaves us vulnerable to all kinds of human foibles and biases. So coaches and scouts are only taking advantage of a tiny fraction of the data’s true predictive power (or worse, they’re making entirely wrong predictions).

Enter I/O psychologists or others trained in the mysterious ways of data management and statistical analysis. It’s fairly straight-forward to take a bunch of data and see what predicts what by building a multiple regression formula, a path analysis, or a structural equation model. (That’s basically statistical l33t sp34k for saying “to the degree that a player has X, Y, and Z, he/she will do well”.)

As a matter of fact, my friend and fellow U. of Missouri -St. Louis graduate Spencer Stang has a company called SportLab that does this very exact thing with a product called “BASELINE”.

Another interesting example of this sort of thing can be found in a book called “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game”. I haven’t read it yet, but I did hear a fascinating interview with its author on NPR. The book describes how Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A’s, looked at these kind of stats and systematically interpreted them to scoop up the right players (most often those who were not highly sought after by others) to assemble a winning team –all on one of the League’s smallest budgets.

If this catches on, we’ll be worshiped like tiny, number crunching demigods. It’ll be awesome.

This story, sent to me by Frank, is some crazy stuff. File it under “I read it on the Internet” with the appropriate amount of caution, but it discusses the new role that some neuroscientists are playing in determining how advertising affects the human brain.

In it, the author describes a study that found that branding can have just as much affect on how something tastes as …well, as taste does. He describes a version of the familiar “Pepsi Challenge” where subjects are hooked up to brain monitoring equipment, sample unmarked cups of soda, and report which they like better. Usually it’s Pepsi, and researchers can see changes in an area of subjects’ mellon called the ventral putamen. This is a region of the brain known to be associated with feelings of rewards.

However, when researchers told subjects which cups contained which brand of soft drink, almost everyone picked Coke. What’s more, there was increased activity in the brain region controlling higher-level cognitive function.

It could be argued that Coke’s marketing and brand image were affecting how they tasted the soft drink! If not that, then it at least affected which they preferred! That alone isn’t too surprising to people convinced of the power of marketing, but what is huge is that these scientists are measuring it with hard, scientific data. That’s huge!

You should really read the whole article. It goes on to talk about how some scientists are using their expertise to determine the effectiveness of specific marketing and advertising techniques. They can do stuff up to the point of showing you the same product packaged two different ways and measuring which one you prefer, all without your doing anything overt. It’s creepy, in an Orwellian kind of way.

Thinking on this, though, I can see other applications for such technology in the realm of “Industrial/Organizational Neuropsychology”. An important issue in the hiring process is determining person/organization fit between a job applicant and the company. In a nutshell, this deals with the degree to which the applicant and the organization have the same values, preferences, and expectations.

What if you could jam a few electrodes into a job applicant’s head, then describe or show him situations that are typical (or atypical) of those encountered in your organization. You could measure his brain activity when you show a vignette of a group working as a team, versus that of a bunch of individuals working independently. You could describe a job’s travel requirements and see how averse the applicant’s brain is to that information.

The problem of job applicants’ aversion to having needles stuck in their brains aside, how cool would that be? I’ll make millions!

I’ve spent the last couple of days reviewing resumes for the open position in my department. As usual, this makes me laugh and cry at the same time. Even at this level (we’re asking for a Ph.D. or Master’s degree), you get some really poor resumes, some of which are from total nutjobs. One actually had a “pull quote” on it that said that the applicant “not only thinks outside of the box, but doesn’t know what the box is”. I plan on writing the rejection letter myself: “Dear sir, Thank you for your application, but the ideal candidate for this job is one who can identify boxes by sight. Regards,”

Other resumes use such strong language and hyperbole that they go beyond self-promotion and flirt with absurdity. I kept imagining that they were written by Morbo, the bulb-headed alien overlord and host of the nightly news on Futurama. I think I have a picture here somehere. Ah, here we go:

And that got me to thinking… What if Morbo really were applying to this job? What would the cover letter look like?

Dear Manager of Puny Human Resources,

I am Morbo! My all-seeing eye perceived your job posting on the SIOP JobNet website, and I was intrigued. Morbo wishes to join your pathetic team of mewling People Research Advisors.

Prepare to receive my qualifications!

• Introduced a cost-savings plan for nationwide distributors of component parts, resulting in 13% decrease in costs.
• Obliterated the indigenous inhabitants of Omicron Pices II, preparing the way for intergalactic death squads
• Organized, analyzed, and filed legal documents
• Directed a number of strategical initiatives to enhance organizational performance
• Razed the capitals of all free worlds in the Intergalactic Federation of Peaceful Planets (IFPP), casting their ashes to the solar winds and scouring their souls with my triumphant laughter

These and many other qualifications are Morbo’s to command. Fear me, wretched human insect! Together, we will destroy our enemies and realize synergistic improvements in organizational outcomes. SO SPEAKS MORBO!

References available upon request.

Respectfully,
Morbo

Shoot, I’d interview him. Wouldn’t you?

One of the my current work projects is a validation study for a set of cognitive ability (i.e., intelligence) and personality tests used to hire Meter Readers at San Diego Gas & Electric. As part of the study, I’m looking at adverse impact ratios. In other words, I’m determining whether or not people from different races tend to pass the tests at a higher or lower rate.

SDG&E asks applicants to pick their race from the usual list that you see almost everywhere: Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian, and Other.

While mulling through these data, that list took on a strange quality. It seems deficient to me. Of the 1,800+ people who had taken the test, only seven people claimed to be American Indian. More people chose “Other”, so why have American Indian? And why not have “Arab” or “Indian” (as in from India)? Presumably, Arabs and Indians are supposed to consider themselves White and Asian, but are they? (Hint: No, they aren’t.) Why are we and so many other employers so set on the above list of 5 races and a catch-all “other”?

I did a bit of digging and found out the answer. As usual, it boils down to tradition. One of the documents that Human Resource Professionals treat like the Bible (or Koran; take your pick) is the Uniform Guidelines on Selection Procedures, which dictates a lot of stuff you should and should not do. While thumbing through them, I found this passage:

B. Applicable race, sex, and ethnic groups for record keeping.

The records called for by this section are to be maintained by sex, and the following races and ethnic groups: Blacks (Negroes), American Indians (including Alaskan Natives), Asians (including Pacific Islanders), Hispanic (including persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, or other Spanish origin or culture regardless of race), whites (Caucasians) other than Hispanic, and totals. The race, sex, and ethnic classifications called for by this section are consistent with the Equal Employment Opportunity Standard Form 100, Employer Information Report EEO-1 series of reports.

So there you have it, and with an antiquated term like “Negroes” to boot. Personally, I think that’s dumb reason. Not only should we include more races, I think we should change how we collect these data. Currently employers usually ask you to “choose the option that best describes your race.” But what if Tiger Woods is looking to get a part-time job at Wal-Mart to earn a few extra bucks for the holiday? Is he Asian or Black? If he’s half each, no single option “best” describes his race!

The solution, I think, is to give people a list of races and have them fill in percentages so that they total 100%, like this:

Caucasian
Black
Asian
Hispanic
American Indian
Orc

et cetera. For a White guy like me, it’s easy. 100% Caucasian. For someone with a Hispanic mother and a Caucasian father, it’s 50% 50%. Simple.

Of course, what we gain in richness we pay for in complexity. This kind of data would make doing simple adverse impact analyses really difficult, and employment laws aren’t written to deal with it. Still, that could be changed and I think it would be progress.

My group at Sempra Energy is looking to hire someone to fill a “People Research Advisor” position. This is the same job I’m currently in, and it’s located in sunny San Diego, California. If you’re a I/O Ph.D. (or a Master’s with experience) or know someone who is, check out the posting and contact me if you want more information. If you come to work here, you can even sit next to ME! Just don’t mess with my stuffed llama.

Update: We’ve filled the position.

Like many I/O Psychologists, I often make use of the handy Dictionary of Occupational Titles, as well as its sexier sibling, O*NET. Both of these resources aim to provide a comprehensive description of every job in the world economy. If people do it, they want you to be able to look it up and get a list of tasks accomplished by a person in that job. Nifty.
While looking up a rather mundane job today, I started flipping through just to see what kinds of stuff they have. Turns out the authors of the DOT included some wacky occupations in the name of completeness. Check out the job descriptions for…

• Human Projectile
• Stripper
• Psychic
• Santa Claus Impersonator
• Carnie
• Puppeteer

And of course, I/O Psychologist. Cyberathlete was nowhere to be found.

Got the links pageup. If you’ve been wanting to click on something but you just don’t know what, check it out. It’s got links to friends’ webpages, all my other online sites/projects, and a smattering of some of my favorite articles I did for GameSpy.
Also, today was the deadline for submissions for the 2004 SIOP convention. For the first time ever, I submitted something! Lamely, it was my (finely aged) dissertation. Therese Macan (my advisor from grad school) hacked my 121 page prove-you-know-it-through-volume dissertation down to a 21 page I-don’t-have-time-for-this poster submission.
The title is “Improving Applicant Reactions by Altering Test Administration” and here’s the abstract:

Research on applicant reactions traditionally focused on a limited set of test characteristics. Using an organizational justice framework, we examined six characteristics of test administration and their role on outcomes like company attractiveness and intentions to remain in the selection process. Two hundred eight job applicants in nine different locations provided their reactions before the test and after. Results show that six rules (participation, consistency of administration, uncertainty reduction, interpersonal treatment, transparency, and quality of two-way communication) are all related to overall perceptions of fairness, and that these perceptions are related to the outcomes examined.

In other words, here’s how to reduce the chances that you’re going to piss an applicant off by making him think your selection processes are unfair: let them ask questions, let them make decisions that they think affect the outcome of the situation, don’t be a dick, treat everyone the same, and tell them what to expect.
I’d love to expand this research, and am on the lookout for opportunities to do so. There may be chances here at Sempra Energy for me to do some applicant reactions research using computer-based selection tests. That would be fantastic, but we’ll have to impliment it in a high-volume job. We’ll see.
Therese wants me to submit this to a journal for full publication, which I may do. Regardless of whether it gets published or not, I’d like to at least check that off my “Life’s To-Do List”.
Oh, I’m also involved with a Practitioner Forum submission on survey methodology. Here’s the abstract from that:

This practitioner forum will address important real-world issues relevant to survey practitioners and their clients. Through the use of actual survey studies, the papers will answer common survey questions and offer practical recommendations to assist the survey specialist in delivering higher quality results.

And then here’s the relevant bit from the body of the proposal:

Lastly, in the fourth paper, Morris, Madigan, and Ashworth answer a very important methodological question: Do results differ between a survey that is administered annually and one that is administered on a more frequent basis? The authors serve as internal consultants for an Energy Service Company and manage several internal customer satisfaction programs. They were advised that customer surveys should be administered on a more frequent basis (via a web-seminar by Better Management), the rationale being that more frequent feedback allows for quicker response time to address and fix what is not going well and to acknowledge and reward what is going well. However, from a psychometric perspective, the authors were interested in how the measurement frequency would impact results.
To investigate their question, they compared item results between an annual survey and a point-of-service survey. The point-of-service survey was much shorter, but contained identical items pulled from the larger annual survey. Differences in mean ratings and response patterns were found. After finding differences quantitatively, they also investigated qualitative differences on the open-ended responses.

Wish us luck!