Employee selection in a total quality management context: Taking a hard look at a soft issue

The aim of the paper is to examine issues surrounding the importance, nature and evaluation of employee selection procedures within a total quality management (TQM) context. The growing recognition of the positive contribution that can be offered by effective human resource management policies is highlighted and discussed. The paper reports research on current trends in employee selection practice. The move towards competency-based employee selection procedures is critically examined from a TQM perspective. Traditionally, the effectiveness of employee selection procedures has been evaluated from psychometric and legal perspectives, typically on the basis of outcome-based data. The paper explores a number of problems that are associated with these outcome-based approaches to evaluation and proceeds to highlight specific process-related factors that should also be considered when evaluating employee selection procedures in a TQM context.