Partial profile · Book Profile — full narrative profile planned
Managing Staff Selection and Assessment (Managing Work and Organizations Series)
A critical, multi-paradigm examination of how organizations select and assess staff, arguing that assessment is best understood through four competing lenses—strategic management, psychometric, social process, and critical discourse—rather than the dominant psychometric model alone.
A profile of this book is on the way.
What it’s about
Most textbooks treat staff selection as a technical problem of measuring the right traits accurately; Paul Iles' book breaks decisively from that view by presenting selection and assessment as a strategically vital, socially constructed, and politically charged activity. Weaving together four disciplinary paradigms—American strategic management, differential psychology's psychometrics, European social psychology's social process model, and Foucauldian critical discourse theory—Iles shows how assessment can drive organizational and cultural change, how it is shaped by national and cultural context, how it profoundly affects candidates' self-perceptions and careers, and how it operates as a technology of organizational power. Grounded in real case studies (building societies, IT firms, banks, a Finnish paper multinational) and international comparative research, the book culminates in a rich analysis of managerial competence, revealing both the promise and the limits of competency frameworks. It is essential for anyone who wants to manage assessment thoughtfully rather than merely administer tests.
The through-line
- Who it’s for
- A manager, HR practitioner, or student who must recruit, select, assess, and develop staff and wants to do so effectively, fairly, and strategically.
- The problem
- They must choose and design assessment and selection methods that accurately identify the right people and support organizational change amid restructuring, flexibility, and global competition. They feel uncertain and conflicted—torn between technical 'best practice', political realities, legal risks, and the messy, subjective way selection actually happens.
- The plan
- Understand the classical model and its four alternative perspectives on assessment.
- Locate assessment strategically—link it to corporate strategy, structure, culture, and life-cycle stage.
- Use future-oriented job analysis to derive person specifications and choose valid, fair, useful assessment methods.
- Attend to the social process—candidate reactions, negotiation, diversity, and equal opportunity at every stage.
- Critically examine competency frameworks and the power/knowledge embedded in assessment before deploying them.
- The payoff
- Assessment processes are integrated with strategy and support organizational and cultural change. · The organization uses valid, fair methods that improve person-organization fit, productivity, and retention while advancing equality. · Candidates experience the process as fair and developmental, strengthening commitment and self-understanding.
See our guide
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Additional reading
- Work Psychology and Organisational Behaviour · W. Hollway
Represents the critical 'discourse perspective,' analyzing how psychometric assessment acts as a form of power and knowledge to construct and regulate employees.
- Designing Strategic Human Resource Systems · R. E. Miles and C. C. Snow
Provides the influential strategic typology (Prospector, Defender, etc.) that the book uses to frame the entire strategic management perspective on assessment.
- Selection as a Social Process · P. Herriot
Articulates the core tenets of the 'social process' model, which views selection as an interaction and negotiation between parties rather than a simple predictive measurement.
- Competitive Strategy · M. E. Porter
The book uses Porter's generic strategies (cost leadership, differentiation, focus) as a primary framework for linking HRM and assessment practices to business objectives.