Advantages & Disadvantages of Employee Selection Techniques

Employee selection techniques are as individual as the employers who use them. Few employers use only one specific criterion when choosing employees because this narrowness and rigidity would be unnecessarily limiting, potentially excluding worthy candidates. It is best for an employer to use multiple employee selection techniques, ultimately choosing an applicant who satisfies a range of job criteria.

Evaluating a candidate's work experience is an important employee selection technique. It is usually valuable to choose a job applicant who was worked in your field and is familiar with the type of job you are offering. In addition to the fact that an inexperienced employee will face a steeper learning curve, a candidate's work history will likely reflect his predilections. But using work experience as the sole criteria for employee selection puts you at risk of ruling out a candidate with potential who just happens to have no experience.

Although profiling job candidates on the basis of race, sex or age is illegal, many employers nonetheless approach job applicants with a general idea of the type of employee they want. If all of the employees who have stayed with your company for a long time grew up in the city where your business operates, it makes sense to look for a candidate who also grew up in this city. But profiling job applicants poses the disadvantage of potentially eliminating worthy candidates who do not meet your criteria.

An interview is an employee selection technique that places you face-to-face with job applicants for the sake of dialogue. Interviewing offers an employer the advantage of seeing how a job applicant behaves under pressure, and asking nuanced questions such as enumerating his strengths and weaknesses or asking what he would do if he saw another employee stealing from the company. However interviews not only select for candidates who are right for the job, they also weight your decision in favour of applicants who perform well under pressure, or are particularly good at interviewing.

In the end, many employers rely on instinct or gut feeling as an employee selection technique. Although this may seem whimsical, instincts and gut feelings are not simply frivolous emotions, but rather reactions to stimuli not necessarily perceived at a conscious level. Using instinct as an employee selection technique offers the advantage of responding to cues that may not register through the general five senses. But instincts are not infallible, and sometimes provide deceptive information.