Employee Selection Research

Charter school 2 and Charter school 1 are cooperating in an initiative to conduct research to determine the characteristics of outstanding teachers. Like most schools, the selection process used to hire teachers is a very qualitative interview based process. While this component is probably essential to determine if a teacher will work well in the particular culture of the organization, there is some published research on teacher selection that indicates the utility of more systematic assessments. The consultants are presently interviewing teachers and leaders from both schools to determine the best step forward for the research.

A military training program is a reminder that not all projects can be done. A community college and the Navy wanted to make sure that the apprentices they chose to send to the college were sufficiently motivated and mature to learn and to apply what they learned on the job. Our consultants were engaged to develop a selection assessment instrument so that a higher proportion of apprentices would be successful in this program. However, half-way through this three year project, after developing criteria and questionnaires, the consultants and both clients agreed to end the project because we all discovered that both organizations had policies in place that effectively barred access to key information about the specific individuals who were or were not competent performer.