There are many costs associated with hiring personnel who subsequently are not successful. These costs can be measured not only in dollar terms but also by the effect on the lives and careers of the persons involved. One personnel selection technique involves obtaining biographical information(Biodata) from job applicants to predict future job sucess. While resembling the standard job application form, a Biodata questionnaire seeks to obtain more extensive and detailed information. The basis of Biodata predictive abilities is the theory that past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour. Biodata cannot predict all future behaviours but it can give an indication of the types of probable behaviours based on an individual's prior learning history.(Mumford & Owens, 1987). Nichols(1994) stated that "Biodata measures may predict performance across so many aspects of behaviour as well as they do because responses to Biodata items may serve to capture previous manifestations of the constructs and mechanisms that ultimately determine predictive relationships with criteria."
While job application forms of one type or the other have been in use since the turn of this century, it has been only relatively recently that there has been a concerted effort to improve Biodata's reliability and validity. Two of the major concerns are how to minimize the incidence of faking and how to reduce inaccurate responses due to social desirability.
One recent approach to addressing both of these concerns employs differing the instructions given to the applicants. Kluger and Colella(1993) studied the effects of faking Biodata test items by randomly warning 214 of 429 applicants for a nurse's assistant position against faking. While the warning mitigated the propensity to fake, the specific warning effects depended on item transparency. For transparent items, warning reduced the extremeness of item means and increased item variances. For nontransparent items, warning did not have an effect on item means and reduced item variances. These faking effects were best predicted when transparency was operationalized in terms of item- specific job desirability in addition to the item-general social desirability.
Method
My study examines the instructions given to the applicant to see if a forceful caution can reduce the incidence of faking good. It also looks at what types of additional information will increase the accuracy of responses. I am proposing to examine the effects of warning conditions and amount of supporting detail requested on faking behaviours in a simulated job application situation using a two by two between and two by two within factorial design as shown below.. There are two levels of warning(minimum and maximum warnings). In the maximum warning groups, the subjects will be explicitly cautioned that some of their responses will be verified and that any false statements would be grounds for dismissal.
All items will be rated as to the degree it could be perceived as being job related(JR) and
verifiable(V). It is expected that the means and correlations will be different for items that are
highly job related(HJR) and highly verifiable(HV) as opposed to items that are low(LJR & LV).
Within the instrument there is also "fake" (verifiable) item to further assess faking based on a
study by Pannone(1984).
Biodata Study (N = 280)
(Desired power of .80, Effect size .67, sig. .05)
2 X 2 Between
| Short Version | Extended Version | |
| Minimum Warning | 70 | 70 |
| Maximum Warning | 70 | 70 |
2 X 2 Within
Items
| High Job Relevance | Low Job Relevance | |
| Highly Verifiable | 10 | 10 |
| Slightly Verifiable | 10 | 10 |
The subjects will be 300 Psychology 1000 students. These students volunteer to participate in return for receiving credit towards their course participation marks. The subjects will be asked to role play as a job applicant responding to a fictional job advertisement. A set of the materials is enclosed at appendix A.
The responses to the 40 test items will be converted to Z scores. The means and correlations will be compared between and within the groups.
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