Beginning in the early 1980s and continuing through the middle 1990s, the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences (ARI) sponsored a comprehensive research and development program to evaluate and enhance the Army's personnel selection and classification procedures. This was a set of interrelated efforts, collectively known as Project A. Project A had a number of basic and applied research objectives pertaining to selection and classification decision making. It focused on the entire selection and classification system for Army enlisted personnel and addressed research questions that can be generalized to other personnel systems. It involved the development and evaluation of a comprehensive array of predictor and criterion measures using samples of tens of thousands of individuals in a broad range of jobs. The research included a longitudinal sample--from which data were collected at organizational entry--following training, after 1-2 years on the job and after 3-4 years on the job. This book provides a concise and readable description of the entire Project A research program. The editors share the problems, strategies, experiences, findings, lessons learned, and some of the excitement that resulted from conducting the type of project that comes along once in a lifetime for an industrial/organizational psychologist. This book is of interest to industrial/organizational psychologists, including experienced researchers, consultants, graduate students, and anyone interested in personnel selection and classification research.

Employee selection has long stood at the practical forefront of industrial/organizational psychology. Today's social, business, and economic climates require ongoing adaptations by those who select organizations' personnel, and research on the topic helps gauge the impact of these adaptations and their implications for human performance and potential. The Oxford Handbook of Personnel Assessment and Selection codifies the wealth of new research surrounding employee selection (web-based assessments, social networking, globalization of organizations), situating them alongside more traditional practices to establish the best and most relevant research for both professionals and academics. Comprising chapters from authors in both the private sector and academia, this volume is organized into seven parts: (1) historical and social context of the field of assessment and selection; (2) research strategies; (3) individual difference constructs that underlie effective performance; (4) measures of predictor constructs; (5) employee performance and outcome assessment; (6) societal and organizational constraints on selection practice; and (7) implementation and sustainability of selection systems. While providing a comprehensive review of current research and practice, the purpose of this handbook is to provide an up-to-date profile of each of the areas addressed and highlight current questions that deserve additional attention from researchers and practitioners. This compendium is essential reading for industrial/organizational psychologists and human resource managers.

Although ability testing has been an American preoccupation since the 1920s, comparatively little systematic attention has been paid to understanding and measuring the kinds of human performance that tests are commonly used to predictâ€"such as success at school or work. Now, a sustained, large-scale effort has been made to develop measures that are very close to actual performance on the job. The four military services have carried out an ambitious study, called the Joint-Service Job Performance Measurement/Enlistment Standards (JPM) Project, that brings new sophistication to the measurement of performance in work settings. Volume 1 analyzes the JPM experience in the context of human resource management policy in the military. Beginning with a historical overview of the criterion problem, it looks closely at substantive and methodological issues in criterion research suggested by the project: the development of performance measures; sampling, logistical, and standardization problems; evaluating the reliability and content representativeness of performance measures; and the relationship between predictor scores and performance measuresâ€"valuable information that can also be useful in the civilian workplace.