Coming soon · Book Profile
Personnel Selection Adding Value Through People, Fifth Edition (Mark Cook
A comprehensive, evidence-based review of how organizations can add value by scientifically finding, assessing and keeping the right employees through valid, fair and cost-effective selection methods.
A profile of this book is on the way.
What it’s about
Personnel Selection: Adding Value Through People distills a century of research on how employers pick staff, showing that employees vary enormously in value and that good selection therefore pays for itself many times over. Mark Cook systematically evaluates every major selection method — interviews, mental ability tests, personality questionnaires, biodata, assessment centres, references, work samples, emotional intelligence and more — against six criteria: reliability, validity, fairness, acceptability, cost and practicality. Drawing on meta-analysis and validity generalization, the book cuts through folklore (graphology, unstructured interviews, faith in plausible salespeople) to reveal what genuinely predicts performance and why, while candidly addressing the legal minefield of adverse impact and the diversity-validity dilemma. For HR professionals, psychologists and managers, it is both a rigorous scientific reference and a practical guide to building selection systems that are accurate, defensible and value-adding.
The through-line
- Who it’s for
- An HR professional, manager or work psychologist who wants to find, assess and keep genuinely effective employees.
- The problem
- They must choose among many selection methods and justify their choices, yet folklore, legal risk and conflicting claims make it hard to know what actually predicts good work performance. They feel uncertain and exposed — worried they are relying on plausible-but-invalid methods, wasting money, or unwittingly discriminating.
- The plan
- Start with job analysis to define the attributes the job truly requires.
- Evaluate candidate methods against reliability, validity, fairness, acceptability, cost and practicality.
- Favour high-validity methods (GMA tests, structured interviews, work samples, biodata, assessment centres) appropriate to the job.
- Check for and design out adverse impact, keeping selection job-related and legally defensible.
- Combine methods for incremental validity and validate the system, ideally predictively.
- The payoff
- The organization consistently hires higher-performing, more productive and more committed employees. · Selection decisions are defensible against fairness challenges and free of unnecessary adverse impact. · Money spent on selection yields a demonstrable return in added value.
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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.