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In recent years, many customers for whom a recruitment office was working have requested more detailed information on the interpersonal competencies of candidates in the first selection stage. However, they were sceptical about using self-report personality inventories. The recruitment office was looking for an efficient way of measuring interpersonal competencies in preliminary selection stages.
The Armed Forces were facing a high attrition rate among newly hired officers. Apparently, the officers hired had a too romanticized image of the Armed Forces as an employer. The Armed Forces wanted to include a realistic job preview on the recruitment web site. So, a test was put on the web site wherein potential applicants for officer jobs were given short military leadership scenarios (including pictures) and were asked what to do. Feedback on the correct answer was provided.
In many countries, cognitively-oriented predictors are typically used in admission exams. Although these cognitive tests are valid for predicting academic performance, they also exhibit large adverse impact. One is seeking standardized tests that broaden the competencies assessed and that can be administered to large groups of people.
These three situations are only some examples which illustrate why situational judgment tests (SJTs) have become increasingly popular in personnel selection in the USA ([41] Ployhart, 2006). In a nutshell, as contextualized measurement methods SJTs are attractive to practitioners because they enable to measure mostly interpersonally-oriented skills among a large group of people in preliminary selection stages. Similarly, in recent years empirical research with regard to SJTs has been flourishing ([58] Weekley and Ployhart, 2006). Despite these developments in practice and research, SJTs have not made strong inroads in selection practice in Europe and other parts of the world. For example, the most recent worldwide survey of the usage of selection practices ([49] Ryan et al. , 1999) shows that in virtually all countries SJTs were substantially less used than more common selection procedures such as cognitive ability tests and personality inventories. Only in two of the 20 countries (the USA and Hong Kong) this was not the case. In addition, it is striking that important handbooks on personnel selection (e.g. [8] Cook, 2003) do not include a chapter on SJTs. One of the reasons might be that practitioners are relatively unfamiliar with...