With more than a hundred job openings at any one time, the 5,000-employee Applied Biosystems is constantly looking for ways to more efficiently sort the wheat from the chaff. This includes giving candidates specific open-ended questions, whose answers are standardized and assigned a score based on factors such as core skills, leadership, and cultural compatibility. As a check on the validity of the approach, director and higher-level candidates that make it through this round have also recently been asked to take a psychological test. Of the approximately 50 candidates of this grade that the Foster City, Calif., company has assessed since it started the practice, only a few failed the test, says Angela Peters, the company's director of staffing, confirming the move towards using more consistent and objective measurements in the company's screening process.
Applied Biosystems is not alone in striving to bring additional rigor in evaluating its job candidates. ...
