Academic personnel selection: Description and prognosis of the decisions made by the committee for the selection of candidates for a full professorship

Abstract

On the example of filling the vacancy of a full professorship for general psychology, the usefulness of the least-squares variant of Guttman's scalogram analysis (method of principal components for multicategory items) is demonstrated for giving assistance the process of personnel selection. Using some criteria being available per applicant such as adequacy of field of work, age, and number of publications this scaling procedure results in weights for each of the categories of the criteria indicating the relative importance of each criterion, and scores for all applicants pointing at their aptness. Since the recommendations deduced from the applicants' scores matched the decisions of the selection committee to a high degree, some aspects of the selection committee's decision process could be reconstructed as well as the predictive power of the method of principal components is exemplified. From the observation that this method worked well in case of 46 applicants and up to 7 criteria altogether having 18 categories, but did fail if applied to 9 candidates only, its suitability for moderate sample sizes can be infered which can be seen to be typical of the first screening steps within a multi-stage selection process.