Le différentiel de sélection multiple

Abstract

An important aim of personnel selection is to maintain and hopefully increase the company's productivity, a similar rationale underlying the recruiting of athletes in a sports league or the admission of students or candidates in limited enrolment programs. To help raise the 'performance' of the organization, one of many ways is to submit candidates to an aptitude test and select only those whose score exceeds some predetermined threshold value. The eventual 'performance' of such abler candidates should be superior to that of un-selected personnel, inasmuch as there is a positive relation between performance in the organization and the score obtained at the aptitude test. The expected gain in performance, i.e. the positive score difference between the sub-population of selected and abler persons and the whole pool of candidates is called 'selection differential', a very old concept. Brogden, in 1951, introduced the idea of differential selection in the specific sense of testing candidates on two or more aptitude tests in order to assign each meritorious candidate to the job wherein the expected gain is higher. Taking up this idea, we propose and develop the concept and mathematics of the multivariate selection differential, with three variants. A few worked-out examples and tables of differentials of order 2 to 5 complete the paper.