The following review is reprinted in its entirety with the permission of Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, UK.

Personnel Psychology Summer 2004 Vol. 57, Issue 2, (Copyright 2004)

Book Review

Charles A. Handler and Steven T. Hunt. Rocket-Hire: Buyer’s Guide to Web-Based Screening and Staffing Systems. New Orleans: Rocket Hire, 2003, 253 pages, $375 softcover.

Reviewed by Lynn Summers, Vice President Research, Workscape, Framingham, MA.

Soon you’ll be able to walk into a store, pick up the goods you want, and walk out. No lines at the checkout counter. No checkout counter. The goods you select will have little embedded chips that will be detected by a scanner as you walk out. Your credit card will be automatically charged. Such is the promise of radio-frequency identification.

Technology is changing how things get done. Not only how consumers buy their goods, but also how corporations recruit, assess, select, train, manage, and administer their human resources. Although it seems like application of technology in the world of human resource management is lagging its application in other worlds, it nonetheless is being applied and is beginning to change the very nature of human resource management. Recruitment was an early benefactor and, as a result, writing a résumé will never be the same.

Rigorous employee selection, involving systematic candidate assessment and data collection for the purpose of predicting their future performance – in other words, the meat and potatoes of industrial/organizational psychology – may be the next benefactor. Several established consulting firms have begun to offer software to facilitate assessment for staffing purposes, and a number of small companies have sprung up specifically to offer technological solutions to assessment problems. Practitioners whose organizations are ready to take the plunge and need help sorting out what’s going on in this rapidly evolving area will find comfort and wisdom in Handler and Hunt’s Buyer’s Guide.

There are, in essence, two main parts to this Guide. The first part provides a good background to online staffing assessment (OSA). In the second part, the authors dish up descriptions of what the principal vendors of OSA software and services have to offer.

Handler and Hunt observe that the majority of US companies have yet to adopt OSAs, probably for two reasons. First, they don’t understand the tools and how to use them. And, second, they don’t realize the financial benefits. The authors claim that OSA affords organizations the opportunity to transform their staffing process and thereby enhance organizational performance. Enhanced performance occurs because the organization using OSAs selects better employees, experiences less turnover, avoids catastrophic hires, and enjoys increased efficiencies in its staffing process, according to the authors.

A quick look at the vendors Handler and Hunt evaluate in their Guide reveals a wide range of OSA offerings. At one end are vendors who have taken a test and put it online. At the other end of the spectrum are vendors who have created a Web-based mechanism for managing the staffing process plus a wide range of assessment tools that can be administered online in a highly integrated manner plus the consulting services needed to design and install the whole system. I think it is fair to say that simply moving a selection test from paper to the Internet won’t give much of a boost to organizational performance. On the other hand, using technology to transform the staffing process holds tremendous promise, and that is what all the excitement is about.

HR directors intending to move to a technology-facilitated selection process face at least two major challenges: figuring out how to evaluate the vendors and selling the investment in OSA to senior management. The Guide is especially useful in tackling the first challenge. The second challenge? Experienced vendors can be quite helpful in building the case for the internal sell.

The authors offer a classificatory scheme of OSA tools, providing good descriptions of their eleven types and the respective plusses and minuses. They conclude that talent measures, consisting of both ability tests and personality measures, are the best predictors. They caution that ability tests need to be checked out for adverse impact and helpfully point out that many vendors, perhaps believing that “personality tests” have a bad reputation, refer to them euphemistically as “workstyle measures.”

They list five pre-hire steps in a selection system, but note that most companies would use online technology to support only one or two of these steps. Which steps a company chooses to facilitate by technology depends on staffing volume, candidate characteristics, financial resources, and technical constraints. They also list three post-hire steps in which OSA can be used to foster development and link to ongoing performance management. They say few companies are taking advantage of the post-hire linkage to performance management, but I suspect this “overlooked opportunity” is rapidly being seized—the OSA and online performance management marketplaces are both evolving very quickly.

Handler and Hunt offer a very useful matrix showing which types of assessment tools are most effective at predicting which types of job behaviors. They cite no authority, however. In fact, there are no references at all in these 253 pages. This will irritate the hardcore scientists among us to no end. On the other hand, this is just the sort of “inside” scoop you get when eavesdropping on conversations at I/O psychology get-togethers. Handler and Hunt’s generalizations probably represent a fair consensus. HR practitioners down in the trenches would love to get their hands on these generalizations.

HR directors shopping around for an OSA vendor will most likely define their requirements and put out a request for proposals (RFP). This is a process fraught with complexity and anxiety on both sides. So my guess is, if you’re an HR practitioner, you’ll find Handler and Hunt’s outline of a vendor selection process in Chapter 6 the most valuable part of this book. Their eleven-step process highlights the critical decisions you must make in order to craft and publish an RFP and the information you need to gather to properly evaluate vendors and their proposals.

A little more than half the book is devoted to comparative and individual reviews of the principle OSA vendors. Included are five vendors whose products are primarily concerned with candidate management (e.g., AccuHire, Kenexa), twenty vendors offering products that measure candidate potential (e.g., AON, DDI, ePredix, TMP), and five that focus on measuring candidate technical capability (e.g., eSkill, TekChek). These in-depth (four-page) reviews of the thirty principal vendors are followed by brief overviews of online assessment tools offered by thirty-four additional vendors.

Reading the marketing literature at vendors’ Web sites, you’d think their products were the solutions to world hunger. Handler and Hunt describe the survey process they used to try to “get beyond vendors’ marketing brochures and web pages.” They list the pros and cons of each vendor’s offerings and separately describe a vendor’s assessment and technology capabilities – not surprisingly, many are very advanced in one arena but not the other. For each of the thirty principal vendors, they offer Charles and Steve’s Wrap-Up, a neat paragraph or two that captures what a vendor is capable of doing.

Handler and Hunt are in the business of assisting companies in designing OSA systems and selecting vendors and are not affiliated with any vendor. They appear to be objective, willing to be critical of the well-established consulting firm as well as the tiny niche vendor. They are especially critical of those vendors that take a one-size-fits-all approach, offering a single assessment instrument to be applied to all situations with no job analysis to establish job relatedness.

The OSA market is rapidly evolving. Vendors are continuously adding functionality, improving their platforms, and figuring out new ways to use technology to achieve the goals of effective and efficient employee selection. There are a lot of “point solution” vendors, many quite small and not exactly stable from a financial standpoint, though their products may be quite good. It is natural for an industry at this stage of growth to be going through consolidation.

To address the issue of rapid change, the second edition of the Guide will be an online subscription service and the authors will update it at least quarterly. If all goes well, according to Charles Handler in a personal communication, the service should be available by the time this review is published.

In the world of human resource management, where will technology take us? Handler and Hunt do not wax philosophic, thank heavens. But you can’t help wonder. Information about candidates and employees—assessment results, performance data—is accumulated. This information follows them around throughout their careers, acting as a passport for entry into certain professions, organizations, and jobs. Sort of like having data-laden chips embedded…. Ah yes, technology is changing how things get done.