The most important thing that I learned this term was how to build a structured interview, and why structured interviews are better than unstructured interviews in predictive validity. In general, I thought all the material that covered measuring predictive validity was very interesting. I want to be an HR Manager one day, and knowing how to select the best candidate is going to be essential to the success of my role. I thought it was great that we got to go in depth on how to do a job analysis, determine the KSAOs of a job, build out interview questions based on the KSAOs, and then use a numerical scoring method to select for talent. We learned that structured interviews are up to twice as effective at determining predictive validity than unstructured. Additionally, structured interviews are more defensible to discrimination claims, and in general are a more valid and robust tool for interviewing candidates. The tying in of KSAOs also made a lot of sense to me. The KSAOs are what you should use to build the interview questions, and this will relate back to the job analysis you administer. If you use this method, the interview questions should be very relevant to characteristics you want to select for.
This topic is important to any person interested in entering the Human Resources field. The work I hope to do will likely incorporate many of these class concepts, and I am grateful to have a good understanding of these ahead of time. I also see the value in understanding this information as a candidate on the flipside of the interview process. Overall, this class has been phenomenal and the content has been extremely relevant to Recruitment and Selection. I took the Human Resources class last term, and while there was some overlap, I would still recommend this class to any of my peers interested in going into HR after graduation.
