Welcome to the Polaris publication section of our web site. Our intent here is to provide you with a variety of topics, trends and technical insights into the selection of front-line employees. Future contributions will include a broad range of authors which should provide for an interesting “Community” of ideas. We encourage you to suggest articles by sending the citations to info@polaristest.com.

Hiring Selection Methods: It’s Important to Do It Right
– by John D. Arnold & Barbara VanZanten
Effective pre-employment screening can have a major impact on the “bottom line” as well as protect your organization from legal exposure. This article hits the high points of how to make sure your selection methods are effective and avoid legal pitfalls.
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Using Tests to Enhance the Interview Process
– by John D. Arnold
For years organizations have thought of the screening stages as independent sets of activities. Two trends, however, have combined to begin to break down this “silo” concept of the screening stages.
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Five Steps to Effective Employee Selection
– by John D. Arnold & Todd Sperl
Read how Polaris’s work at St John Health (Warren, Michigan) reduces turnover among new hires by over 50% … and the significant cost savings that can result.
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Organizational Staffing
– by Ployhart, R. E., Schneider, B., & Schmitt, N.
This is the third edition of a textbook describing various selection procedures, when and how they are used optimally, and with what results.
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Handbook of Assessment and Selection
– by Schmitt, N. (Ed.)
This book contains 41 chapters that describe methods and procedures used by IO psychologists to analyze the requirements of jobs and turn that information into valid selection procedures.
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Handbook of Psychology: Industrial and Organizational Psychology
– by Schmitt, N. & Highhouse, S. (Eds.)
This is the second edition of a successful handbook that describes the entire field of IO Psychology including several chapters on topics related to selection, evaluation, and retention of employees.
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Estimating Trait and Situational Variance In a Situational Judgment Test
– by Friede Westring, A.J., Oswald, F. L., Schmitt, N., Drzakowski, S., Imus, A., Kim, B., & Shivpuri, S.
This article uses confirmatory factor analyses to estimate the degree to which responses to situational judgment items reflect individual characteristics or traits versus aspects of the situation addressed in the items.
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Differential Item Functioning In Biodata: Opportunity Access As an Explanation of Gender- and Race-Related DIF
– by Imus, A., Schmitt, N., Kim, B., Oswald, F. L., Merritt, S., & Friede, A.
The degree to which DIF (differential item functioning) in biographical data items referencing academically relevant background, experiences, and interests was related to differences in judgments about access to these experiences by members of different gender and race subgroups was examined.
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Criterion-Focused Approach to Reducing Adverse Impact In College Admissions
– by Sinha, R., Oswald, F. L., Imus, A., & Schmitt, N.
The current study examines how using a multidimensional battery of predictors, and weighting the predictors based on the different values institutions place on various student performance dimensions, can increase the proportion of some ethnic subgroups often disadvantaged by the use of only traditional measures such as the SAT/ACT.
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Prediction of Four-Year College Student Performance Using Cognitive and Noncognitive Predictors and the Impact on Demographic Status of Admitted Students
– by Schmitt, N., Keeney, J., Oswald, F. L., Pleskac, T., Billington, A. Q., Sinha, R., & Zorzie, M.
This study was conducted to determine the validity of noncognitive and cognitive predictors of the performance of college students at the end of their fourth year in college.
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A Signal Detection Theory Approach to Modeling the Decision to Withdraw From College
– by Pleskac, T. J., Fandre, J., Merritt, S., Schmitt, N., & Oswald, F. L.
This article integrates theories of voluntary employee turnover from organizational psychology and signal detection theory from the cognitive sciences to account for students’ decision to withdraw from college and transfer to another university.
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Measurement Invariance and Construct Correlations, Mean Differences, and Relationships With External Correlates
– by Schmitt, N., Golubovich, J., & Leong, F. T. L.
The impact of measurement invariance and the provision for partial invariance in confirmatory factor analytic models on factor intercorrelations, latent mean differences, and estimates of relationships with external variables is investigated for measures of two sets of widely assessed constructs: Big Five personality and the six Holland (1985) interests (RIASEC).
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The Validity of Current Selection Methods
– by Schmitt, N. & Fandre, J.
This chapter addresses two major issues: (a) how psychologists conceptualize the validity of the procedures they develop and use to select employees and (b) what are reasonable estimates of the validity of those procedures.
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Validation Strategies for Primary Studies
– by Schmitt, N., Arnold, J. D., & Nieminen, L.
This chapter reviews the various approaches to validation of selection procedures and the current validity data bases.
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Reducing Adverse Impact In Employment and Education Selection
– by Schmitt, N., & Quinn, A.
This chapter reviews the literature on subgroup differences in various personnel selection measures and individual characteristics as well as the efficacy of various methods used to minimize these differences.
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Validation Strategies For Personnel Selection Systems
– by Schmitt, N., & Sinha, R.
Various means of supporting the use of selection procedures are briefly summarized.
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Construction of a Situational Judgment Inventory Generalizable Across First-Level Managerial Positions
– by Schmitt, N., Dimotakis, N., & Billington, A.Q.
This paper describes an effort to develop a measure of managerial potential using a method of measurement, the situational judgment inventory (SJI), that has become increasingly popular over the last two decades.
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Theoretical and Practical Issues: Needed Research
– by Schmitt, N., & Ott-Holland, C.
The authors summarize the major research issues uncovered by the 40 chapter authors in this book and point to those that they believe merit the most attention by future researchers in personnel selection.
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Biographical Information
– by Schmitt, N., & Golubovich, J.
The authors describe the nature and history of the use of scored biographical data (biodata) in personnel selection.
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