The selection decision of which job candidates to accept and which to reject can have powerful implications for future business success. At the executive level, the selection decision determines what kind of leadership is going to guide the organiza- tion and shape its future. We first will briefly examine general principles of selection that increase the likelihood that an employment decision will benefit the organiza- tion and encourage you to seek additional specialized sources of information on the general practice of selection. We then will discuss important considerations and methods of selection pertaining particularly to international assignments.
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RINCIPLES ANDP
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ELECTIONTriangulation
This term literally means to measure something from three different angles to achieve an accurate assessment. Many human resource selection techniques and tools are available to provide information about a candidate for making a selection decision— whether or not to hire. And each measure used to assess a candidate generally has
particular strengths and limitations. The more kinds of measures used provides a field of data, and the areas of agreement or convergence of the data from these mea- sures tend to provide much more accuracy in predicting the future success of a can- didate than data provided by a single measure or assessment. When only one approach or measure is used, the quality of that decision will be vulnerable to the limitations of that particular measure. To illustrate, there reportedly was once a company president who desired to surround himself with brilliant employees and decided to use a stan- dard I.Q. test alone to select all new employees. In time the president found that he had indeed hired a large number of intellectually superior employees. However, he regrettably noted that company performance and productivity had deteriorated con- siderably due to internal conflicts and poor coordination of effort—his individually brilliant employees didn’t know how to work together as a team. Clearly, additional and different selection measures would have been helpful.
Focus on Job Relevance
The actual requirements of a job should guide all selection activities and decisions, and the results of the various assessments of a job candidate should be judged against those relevant job requirements. We recently noted in a newspaper in Argentina that the qualifications requested in a job announcement for a secretary included such characteristics as “young woman” and “attractive.” Although an employer might personally desire a particular gender and attractiveness in a candidate, those charac- teristics in themselves will be inadequate in getting the required work done. Of course, local mores may prescribe particular characteristics such as those related to age and gender, and in these cases a fit with local cultural expectations might represent an important job qualification. Nevertheless, to increase the likelihood of making effec- tive selection decisions in hiring the best talent—and in some countries, to also avoid costly litigation due to claims of unfair treatment and discrimination related to age, gender, ethnic background, and so forth—a general rule to follow would be to be sure that all selection methods and decisions are clearly job-related.
In some cases a strict focus on job-relatedness and a candidate’s ability to perform the actual requirements of a job can result in the hiring of candidates who otherwise might not even be seriously considered. For example, in the United States the Ameri- cans with Disabilities Act requires that employers make reasonable accommoda- tions for hiring people with disabilities who, with accommodation, would qualify for a job opening. Employers are now not allowed to simply rule out a candidate with a disability without consideration of possible accommodation. And as part of the se- lection process, managers are strongly encouraged to not refer directly to the disabil- ity but to ask the candidate to demonstrate or explain how, with a reasonable accommodation, he or she would perform the critical responsibilities of the job. We have met several managers who have indicated that if they had not been directed by these legal guidelines when considering candidates with disabilities, they would have simply dismissed many of these candidates, assuming that they would be unable to perform the job. But when forced to allow the candidates to demonstrate their ability
how wrong their assumptions proved to be, resulting in the hiring of very valuable employees for the company. They clearly learned how their faulty assumptions and negative expectations regarding people with disabilities were much greater and lim- iting than the actual disability.
Investment in Developing Interviewing Skills
The employment interview is generally the most frequently used method for em- ployee selection, yet in the hands of untrained managers and supervisors, it often has one of the lowest validity rates in predicting the future company success of a job candidate.106 Therefore, to increase the accuracy of this widely used and potentially valuable selection method, organizations should invest in training on interviewing skills for their managers and supervisors and other employees involved in the selec- tion process. Such training should cover different interviewing approaches and when they can be most effectively used, practices for conducting an effective interview, and what to avoid in an interviewing situation (for example, interviewer domination, asking of questions unrelated to the job, and premature judgments of the candidate). An important focus of this training should be on the behavioral interview tech- nique, which is becoming a primary and highly successful interviewing tool for many organizations. Based on the strong evidence that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior,107 this approach requires the candidate to describe specific expe- riences in the past in which he or she demonstrated an important job-related behav- ior. Situational interviews can also be effective, which require the candidate to describe how he or she would solve a particular problem relevant to the job. For both behav- ioral and situational interview approaches, the interviewer should carefully prepare beforehand by examining the critical behaviors needed for the job and developing behaviorally based questions that elicit a picture of how the candidate performed those behaviors in the past or how he or she would perform those behaviors in a particular situation relevant to the job.
Influence of Culture on Selection Measures
In carrying out employee selection on a global scale a careful consideration should be made regarding the possible influence of cultural differences in affecting the re- sults and conclusions of selection tests and other methods and measures for assess- ing candidate fit and qualifications. For example, in some Western cultures nonverbal behavior, such as a firm handshake and considerable eye contact, exhibited by a job candidate in an initial interview might convey the impression that the candidate is confident, enthusiastic, and forthright, whereas a weak handshake and evasive, mini- mal eye contact might convey to the Western interviewer the impression of insecu- rity, low self-esteem, or even untrustworthiness and intent to withhold truth. However, in many Asian cultures the latter behavior by an interviewee would be considered very appropriate, with direct eye contact held to a minimum as a sign of respect for the interviewer.
tion techniques. But their often culture-bound assumptions about “appropriate” can- didate behavior in one country might not effectively translate elsewhere. For ex- ample, British Airways experienced difficulty in applying its standard approach in recruiting Japanese candidates for its Graduate General Manager Program. The can- didates found it difficult to take the lead in group exercises or to use the word “I.” But with some modification in exercise design and cross-cultural sensitivity train- ing, candidates were able to demonstrate in their own culturally comfortable ways the relevant competencies targeted for assessment.108
Differential effects of culture are particularly problematic in the use of person- ality tests. The subtle interaction between language and culture make it hard to discern if test results are due to national cultural differences or individual candi- date characteristics. For example, the personality assessment questionnaire item, “I work hard,” although meaningful to British managers, is associated with the much less desirable concept of “toil” for French managers.109 Consistent with the principle of triangulation, for overcoming potentially misleading effects of cul- tural differences it is preferable to use multiple selection methods and not to place too much weight on one approach.110
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SSIGNMENTSThe cost of making a poor selection decision can be great, especially so when it involves a foreign assignment. In the final section of this chapter we will examine key considerations and important methods for effectively selecting employees for foreign assignment. Although we will present this information in terms of expatriate selection, in many cases these considerations and methods are applicable across in- ternational employee categories of PCN, TCN, and HCN.
Focus on the Most Important Criteria for Success
Related to the previously mentioned important general practice of focusing all selec- tion efforts on job relevance, the most important criteria for achieving success with the international assignment should be considered carefully. And the most important selection criteria depend on the nature of the international assignment. An extended assignment that will feature considerable interaction with a foreign workforce whose culture is very different from that of the expatriate (for example, one with high cul- tural distance) might point to important selection criteria such as a candidate’s local language fluency, ability to adjust, and ability to relate in a sensitive way with other cultures. However, these abilities might not be as important in a much shorter assign- ment to a foreign operation representing little cultural distance (for example, from Southern Germany to Austria) or involving predominant interaction with PCNs and little HCN interaction.
The primary criterion for selecting employees for a foreign assignment tradition- ally has been “demonstrated technical competence”—again based on the notion that past behavior is a strong predictor of future performance. However, the major flaw with that reasoning is that the past technical competence likely took place in a do-
mestic work environment without the significant number of uncertainties, unfamil- iar conditions, and differing cultural variables contained in the intended new foreign work environment. Selection criteria are now gradually changing to a wider range of skills and personality characteristics—such as interpersonal skills, personal intent and motivation for obtaining international work experience, cross-cultural sensitiv- ity, adaptability, tolerance for ambiguity, and overall inquisitiveness—all deemed appropriate for the flexible manager in the foreign work environment.111 In particu- lar, because the ability to adjust to the foreign environment—both on the part of the expatriate and any accompanying family members—appears to have as great or even greater determination in foreign assignment success than the expatriate’s technical competence;112 the measure of this adjustment ability should likely be given signifi- cant weight in the overall selection decision.
Methods for Selecting Employees for a Foreign Assignment
Three major approaches can be used, often in combination, for selecting employees for a foreign assignment: (1) a psychometric approach for predicting international man- agement competencies, (2) an experiential approach, and (3) an overall clinical risk assessment approach. We now will briefly examine each of these major approaches.
Psychometric Approach. This general approach using personality tests argues that there are identifiable competencies associated with foreign assignment success and that the accurate measurement of these competencies can be used to identify and predict effective performers in international assignments. As with domestic selec- tion measures, many MNCs develop their own customized competency measures. For example, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication measures thirty critical success factors, and one of primary importance they assess is “international mind-set.”113
However, significant challenges facing these assessments based on a psycho- metric approach include their difficulty in measuring predictive success and reli- ability due to the questionable quality of data from the greatly variable and diverse foreign work environments. They also may tend to be too cumbersome in the international staffing setting where more of a concern may be placed on simply finding willing internal candidates for foreign assignments. Thus, many MNCs may decide not to emphasize the use of psychometric testing for expatriate selec- tion purposes. This inclination is reflected in the following experienced advice to other international human resource professionals by Michael Schmidt of Human Resource Consulting:
I don’t think that psychometric testing is required prior to sending people abroad. Nor is it established HR practice, to the best of my knowledge. . . . Personally, after twenty-five years of HR experience in managing international transfers and having been transferred from Germany to the United States myself, I am unconvinced that any single personality trait can be identified that either helps or hinders an employee’s (or their family members’) transferability across country and culture borders.114
Experiential Approach. There are three main forms of this second approach, which emphasizes the expatriate candidate’s direct experience with many of the realities of the future assignment. These forms differ primarily in their level of time perspective and expense. The first approach, which utilizes an assessment center technique (in- cluding in-basket exercises, relevant job assignments, and work simulation), places the candidate in various relevant situations and with common and critical tasks that he or she likely would face in the foreign assignment. Therefore, the assessment and comparison of competing candidates’ performance on these job-related tasks would tend to have a high degree of validity.
The second form of experiential approach, which requires more time and expense, is a foreign site preview visit, or familiarization trip. Here the candidate and her/his spouse and even children may be invited to visit the actual area of the proposed foreign assignment to experience it firsthand. It is of great importance that this brief visit be planned and made as realistic as possible to provide an accurate preview rather than