Organizational Hiring Standards

Abstract

The authors gratefully acknowledge the comments of James Baron, Mark Granovetter, and John Meyer on an earlier version of this manuscript. Organizational hiring criteria help determine which individuals enter organizational labor markets as well as serving as an important component of organizational control systems more effort placed on screening workers at entry means that less emphasis may be placed on training and socialization or on monitoring them once in the organization. The determinants of organizational selectivity in hiring, including the use of educational credentials, written and unwritten tests, and screening on the basis of workers' characteristics were examined using a sample of 254 establishments in the San Francisco Bay Area. The analyses suggested that hiring standards for different occupations (both white and blue collar) within establishments were positively correlated with each other and were affected by the same set of factors. Formal hiring standards were positively related to the presence of a personnel department, to the amount of training and technological change, and to the presence of an internal labor market. The proportion of the workforce covered by collective bargaining was negatively related to organizational selectivity, and there was no effect of economic sector (core versus periphery) and organizational size once other organizational factors were controlled. The results indicate that hiring standards reflect not only organizations' skill requirements but also the preferences of various groups for such standards and their ability to enforce these preferences.