Assessing Interests in the Twenty-First-Century Workforce: Building on a Century of Interest Measurement

Abstract

Recent research has re-emphasized the importance of vocational interests for understanding workplace attitudes and behavior. As a result, there is a renewed interest in the assessment of vocational interests in organizations. Numerous interest assessments have been developed over the past century, and they are now administered to millions of people throughout the world. Nevertheless, there is still work to be done, particularly as interest assessments are increasingly being used in organizational settings. This article reviews developments in interest assessments and discusses the implications of their use for both research and practice. It discusses the advantages and disadvantages of examining vocational interests in organizational contexts and proposes future research directions. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, Volume 9 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Understanding, detecting, and deterring faking on interest inventories

“…Namely, Jones et al, (2021aJones et al, ( , 2021b found that group differences in interests have decreased over the decades (Jones et al, 2021a), and are small compared to other predictors (e.g., cognitive ability). If used for selection, they have the potential to mitigate concerns over adverse impact (Jones et al, 2021b), making them an important selection consideration for practitioners (Nye, 2022). Despite this, there has been very little attention granted to the use of interest inventories as a selection device (Iliescu et al, 2015;Nye et al, 2012Nye et al, , 2017Ryan et al, 1999;Van Iddekinge et al, 2011).…”

Getting interested in interests for employee selection: Key concerns and areas for future research

“…As with other noncognitive assessments, the high-stakes nature of the hiring process presents several unique challenges. This is particularly important for interest assessments given that most existing interest measures were developed for low-stakes career counseling or vocational purposes (Nye, 2022). In other words, many of the most popular existing interest inventories were not developed with the unique characteristics of the selection process in mind.…”

Improving Graduate-School Admissions by Expanding Rather Than Eliminating Predictors

“…For example, Sackett and Ellingson (1997) showed that weighting conscientiousness and cognitive ability equally, rather than putting a higher weight on assessments such as the GRE, can dramatically reduce subgroup differences. Moreover, combining these predictors will not only reduce the race differences that would be observed with use of the GRE alone but also mitigate the observed differences between men and women on vocational interest measures (Nye, 2022). Likewise, recent work on pareto-optimization provides another approach to combining predictors (De Corte et al, 2007; Song et al, 2017), but a detailed discussion of this approach is beyond the scope of this commentary.…”