Workplace readiness and personnel selection: Setting the stage

This chapter addresses four principal topics. First, it provides an overview of definitions for the concept of workplace readiness and presents a summary set of dimensions on which these definitions differ. Second, it presents overarching themes describing personnel selection procedures in work organizations. The chapter focuses on the design and use of selection systems, with an emphasis on factors affecting personnel selection strategy decisions, such as choices about organizationally valued criteria and contextual factors such as selection ratios. Third, the chapter summarizes efforts to identify and converge on a substantive taxonomy of workplace readiness model content, with an emphasis on the attributes in readiness models. Fourth, it presents recent integrative research as an example of one avenue for investigating the importance of personality attributes as they relate to workplace readiness. This final section describes work that drew on consideration of many of the topics presented throughout the chapter.