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In other words, the intellectual community
behind assessment believes that the only way that assessment can be valid is
within the confines of a specific organizational structure. Fortunately, they
are well prepared to field a team of interviewers and questioners who can gather
the appropriate data required to make assessment work in your organization. This
approach, which precedes the web, is based on a model of the universe that
assumes that you build an hypothesis and then test it for validity. According to most I/O Psychologists, this is the
only way that one can achieve scientific validity. In reality, it is just the
cost structure of the companies that offer this sort of assessment. It was a
good approach before the web rendered it obsolete. The problem is that the I-O
community has not recognized that things have moved on. Science has always recognized inductive
(generalizing from specific data) and deductive
(forecasting specifics from general principles) reasoning. Typical 1990s
scientific method used deductive logic to suggest hypotheses which were then
validated or invalidates through testing. This is how norms are built in the
traditional I-O methodology. Unfortunately, this leaves assessment companies
busy defending huge upfront costs in their work while more nimble competitors
take more pragmatic approaches. The web, because it generates huge volumes of
behavioral data, opens the distinct possibility that assessment can be induced
from specific patterns in the behavioral data from a workforce. It is normal for
an I-O psychologist to turn their nose at the suggestion that a tool like the Myers-Briggs
can be effective (and we wonder what all that jabber actually means). But, and
it's a big but, lots of hiring managers use the tool and the web provides a
solid mechanism for supporting its usage through data. The traditional I-O type would claim that a test
without local norms has low validity. A pragmatic practitioner, on the other
hand, would love the idea of a ready to use instrument that could be later
validated. The swirl of contradictory opinion and opportunity leaves the
traditional I-O practitioner in an indefensible position that must be played
defensively rather than offensively. Because the convention holds that data must
precede utility, the I-O folks have to defend eternally high upfront costs while
the competition can move those expenses downstream. It sad to see institutional
belief systems that are nearly intentionally designed to produce failure. Solving the impending labor crisis depends, in
part, on the development of tools that transcend organizational boundaries. As
counter-intuitive as it seems today, making job changing easier, while painful
as an attrition problem, makes labor more readily available in the aggregate.
The time spent looking for work can readily be converted into productive labor
if the barriers to job changing are reduced. I-O Psychologists could be at the
cutting edge of this trend if their misplaced belief in outmoded methods were
reconciled.
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