HRM textbook

206 PART 2 RECRUITMENT, PLACEMENT, AND TALENT MANAGEMENT
EXPERIENTIAL EXERCISE
A Test for a Reservation Clerk
Purpose: The purpose of this exercise is to give you
practice in developing a test to measure one specific ability
for the job of airline reservation clerk for a major airline. If
time permits, you ll be able to combine your tests into a test
battery.
Required Understanding: Your airline has decided to outsource
its reservation jobs to Asia. You should be fully
acquainted with the procedure for developing a personnel
test and should read the following description of an airline
reservation clerk s duties:
Customers contact our airline reservation clerks to
obtain flight schedules, prices, and itineraries. The reservation
clerks look up the requested information on our
airline s online flight schedule systems, which are updated
continuously. The reservation clerk must speak clearly,
deal courteously and expeditiously with the customer, and
be able to find quickly alternative flight arrangements in
order to provide the customer with the itinerary that fits
his or her needs. Alternative flights and prices must be
found quickly, so that the customer is not kept waiting,
and so that our reservations operations group maintains
its efficiency standards. It is often necessary to look
under various routings, since there may be a dozen or
more alternative routes between the customer s starting
point and destination.
You may assume that we will hire about one-third of the
applicants as airline reservation clerks. Therefore, your
objective is to create a test that is useful in selecting a third of
those available.
How to Set Up the Exercise/Instructions: Divide the class
into teams of five or six students. The ideal candidate will
need to have a number of skills and abilities to perform this
job well. Your job is to select a single ability and to develop a
test to measure that ability. Use only the materials available in
the room, please. The test should permit quantitative scoring
and may be an individual or a group test.
Please go to your assigned groups. As per our discussion
of test development in this chapter, each group should make
a list of the abilities relevant to success in the airline reservation
clerk s job. Each group should then rate the importance
of these abilities on a 5-point scale. Then, develop a test to
measure what you believe to be the top-ranked ability. If
time permits, the groups should combine the various tests
from each group into a test battery. If possible, leave time for
a group of students to take the test battery.
APPLICATION CASE
THE INSIDER
In 2011, a federal jury convicted a stock trader who worked
for a well-known investment firm, along with two alleged
accomplices, of insider trading. According to the indictment,
the trader got inside information about pending
mergers from lawyers. The lawyers allegedly browsed
around their law firm picking up information about corporate
deals others in the firm were working on. The lawyers
would then allegedly pass their information on to a friend,
who in turn passed it on to the trader. Such inside information
reportedly helped the trader (and his investment
firm) earn millions of dollars. The trader would then
allegedly thank the lawyers, for instance, with envelopes
filled with cash.
Of course, things like that are not supposed to happen.
Federal and state laws prohibit it. And investment firms
have their own compliance procedures to identify and head
off, for instance, shady trades. The problem is that controlling
such behavior once the firm has someone working for it
who may be prone to engage in inside trading isn t easy.
Better to avoid hiring such people in the first place, said
one pundit.
At lunch at the Four Seasons restaurant off Park
Avenue in Manhattan, the heads of several investment
firms were discussing the conviction, and what they could
do to make sure something like that didn t occur in their
firms. It s not just compliance, said one, we ve got to
keep the bad apples from ever getting in the door. They ask
you for your advice.
Questions
1. We want you to design an employee selection program
for hiring stock traders. We already know what to look
for as far as technical skills are concerned accounting
courses, economics, and so on. What we want is a program
for screening out potential bad apples. To that end,
please let us know the following: What screening test(s)
would you suggest, and why? What questions should we
add to our application form? Specifically, how should
we check candidates backgrounds, and what questions
should we ask previous employers and references?
2. What else (if anything) would you suggest?