Development of predictive selection and placement tests for personnel evaluation

There are a number of similar approaches for developing useful occupational selection and placement tests. The primary concern is that the tests be predictive of occupational requirements. This paper discusses an approach that emphasises the predictive criterion and uses a case study involving the development of occupational physical selection standards to illustrate the salient points. The following steps are discussed: (1) identification of the occupational requirements; (2) identification of the candidate tests; (3) establishment of predictive relationships between tasks representing the occupational requirements and the candidate tests; (4) determination of useful performance standards on a selected test; and (5) validation of the proposed performance standards. For this case study, it is concluded that performance standards on a lifting test could be developed for predicting the performance of two lifting tasks, using this approach.