Coming soon · Book Profile
Managing Staff Selection and Assessment (Managing Work and Organizations Series)
A critical, multi-paradigm examination of how organizations select and assess staff, arguing that assessment is best understood through four competing lenses—strategic management, psychometric, social process, and critical discourse—rather than the dominant psychometric model alone.
A profile of this book is on the way.
What it’s about
Most textbooks treat staff selection as a technical problem of measuring the right traits accurately; Paul Iles' book breaks decisively from that view by presenting selection and assessment as a strategically vital, socially constructed, and politically charged activity. Weaving together four disciplinary paradigms—American strategic management, differential psychology's psychometrics, European social psychology's social process model, and Foucauldian critical discourse theory—Iles shows how assessment can drive organizational and cultural change, how it is shaped by national and cultural context, how it profoundly affects candidates' self-perceptions and careers, and how it operates as a technology of organizational power. Grounded in real case studies (building societies, IT firms, banks, a Finnish paper multinational) and international comparative research, the book culminates in a rich analysis of managerial competence, revealing both the promise and the limits of competency frameworks. It is essential for anyone who wants to manage assessment thoughtfully rather than merely administer tests.
The through-line
- Who it’s for
- A manager, HR practitioner, or student who must recruit, select, assess, and develop staff and wants to do so effectively, fairly, and strategically.
- The problem
- They must choose and design assessment and selection methods that accurately identify the right people and support organizational change amid restructuring, flexibility, and global competition. They feel uncertain and conflicted—torn between technical 'best practice', political realities, legal risks, and the messy, subjective way selection actually happens.
- The plan
- Understand the classical model and its four alternative perspectives on assessment.
- Locate assessment strategically—link it to corporate strategy, structure, culture, and life-cycle stage.
- Use future-oriented job analysis to derive person specifications and choose valid, fair, useful assessment methods.
- Attend to the social process—candidate reactions, negotiation, diversity, and equal opportunity at every stage.
- Critically examine competency frameworks and the power/knowledge embedded in assessment before deploying them.
- The payoff
- Assessment processes are integrated with strategy and support organizational and cultural change. · The organization uses valid, fair methods that improve person-organization fit, productivity, and retention while advancing equality. · Candidates experience the process as fair and developmental, strengthening commitment and self-understanding.
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Additional reading
- Design, Implementation and Evaluation of Assessment and Development Centres; Best practice guidelines · British Psychological Society (BPS)
Cited by the author as an authoritative source for best practice, covering key issues like fairness, design, and evaluation that are central to the book's guidance.
- Assessment Centres (3rd edn) · C Woodruffe
Recommended for readers seeking a broader overview and history of the assessment centre method.
- The big five personality dimensions and job-performance; a meta-analysis · Barrick, M R and Mount, K M
Provides the empirical support for the book's caution against over-relying on personality tests in selection, a key topic in Chapter 5.
- A theory of the validity of predictors in selection · M Smith
Offers a theoretical framework for understanding why different selection tools have varying levels of effectiveness, underpinning the book's core argument.
- Competence at Work · Spencer, L M and Spencer, S M
A foundational text on the concept of competence, relevant to Chapter 2 on developing a competence framework.
- Development and Assessment Centres · Charles Woodruffe
Cited as a key text for readers wanting a more recent and in-depth exposition of assessment centre work, a core topic of the book.
- Performance Management: The new realities · Michael Armstrong and Angela Baron
The book uses Armstrong and Baron's definition of performance management as its foundation, making their work a primary source for understanding this core concept.
- The Competent Manager: A model for effective performance · R. F. Boyatzis
The author attributes the current usage and definition of 'competency' to Boyatzis, making this a foundational text for a central theme of the book.
- Appraisal and Feedback: Making performance review work · Clive Fletcher
Fletcher is cited as an authority on appraisals, a key one-to-one interaction within performance management, providing deeper insight into this specific practice.
- The Easy Guide to Repertory Grids · D. Jankowicz
The book presents the repertory grid as a powerful technique for developing interview models; this book is recommended as a highly accessible introduction to the method.