Technology-Enhanced Assessment of Talent

Technology-Enhanced Assessment of Talent (a volume in the Jossey-Bass SIOP Professional Practice series) is filled with research-based guidelines that are designed to help practitioners make better decisions on using technology to assess talent at all levels of the organization. The book offers a review of the various ways technology can enhance the administrative ease, credibility, validity, and cost effectiveness of assessments used in the candidate evaluation and selection processes and provides a series of case studies that demonstrate effective usage.

Edited by Nancy Tippins and Seymour Adler—two experts on employee assessment—this important resource shows how to balance the opportunities of technologically-enhanced assessments with the potential challenges to the validity of the measurements produced by these tools. They identify the key measurement, administrative, and legal factors that need to be considered in assuring that virtual assessments generate useable and useful information. The book explores important topics such as cheating, faking, equivalence with paper and pencil forms, fairness, validity, and bias.

The book contains illustrative case examples from organizations world-wide on the use of technology-enhanced assessments in real-life settings from both the private and public sectors. These cases provide a description of the particular solution adopted, the implementation of the system and ts ongoing maintenance, success metrics, and lessons learned.

Looking to the future, the authors offer an agenda for future practice and research on technologically enhanced assessments. Technologies are likely to emerge that open opportunities for new ways of creating, delivering, and using assessments in organizations. They examine the wide range of theoretical and methodological issues that need to be addressed so that practice in this exploding area is more effective.

About the Editors

Nancy T. Tippins, Ph.D., is a senior vice president and managing principal of Valtera Corporation, where she is responsible for the development and execution of firm strategies related to employee selection and assessment. She has extensive experience in the development and validation of tests and other forms of assessment that are designed for purposes of selection, promotion, development, and certification and used for all levels of management and for hourly employees. She has designed and implemented global test and assessment programs as well as designed performance management programs and leader- ship development programs. Prior to joining Valtera, Dr. Tippins worked as an internal consultant in large Fortune 100 companies, managing the development, validation, and implementation of selection and assessment tools.

She is active in professional affairs and is a past president of SIOP and a Fellow of SIOP, the American Psychological Association, and the Association for Psychological Science.

She served on the Ad Hoc Committee on the Revision of the Principles for the Validation and Use of Personnel Selection Procedures (2003) and currently sits on the committee to revise the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. She has served as the associate editor for the Scientist-Practitioner Forum of Personnel Psychology and a member of the editorial boards for Personnel Psychology and the Journal of Applied Psychology. She has published numerous papers on tests and assessments and unproctored Internet testing. Most recently, she co-edited the Handbook of Employee Selection and co-authored Designing and Implementing Global Selection Systems.

Dr. Tippins received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in industrial and organizational psychology from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Seymour Adler, Ph.D. is senior vice president in Aon Hewitt’s Talent Consulting practice. He is based in New York and consults with client organizations throughout the country and with Global 500 organizations. He has served as co-practice leader for the Talent Solutions practice at Aon as well as head of the Human Capital Global Practice Council.

Dr. Adler directs the development and implementation of talent assessment, talent management, and leadership development programs, with an emphasis on sales, customer service, and management positions in the financial services, telecommunications, and high technology industries, as well as in the public sector.

He was a founder and principal of Assessment Solutions Incorporated, a firm he helped take public in 1997, which was acquired by Aon in 2001. In addition to a thirty-five-year career as a practitioner, Dr. Adler has taught in graduate programs at Tel Aviv University, Purdue University, Stevens Institute of Technology, New York University, and currently is an adjunct professor at Hofstra University’s doctoral program in applied organizational psychology.

A graduate of the doctoral program in industrial/organizational psychology at New York University, he is a Fellow of the Society of Industrial/Organizational Psychology, has served as president of the Metropolitan New York Association of Applied Psychology, and has contributed to both the scientific and practitioner literatures in industrial/organizational psychology.