MLDR 6010 Week 3 Lead Technician Selection Case Example

Criteria Dated Before Any Application Was Opened: A Lead Technician Selection Case Using a Surgery-Board Work Sample, Independent Panel Ratings and an Explanation the Floor Favorite Would Receive

Student Name

Walden University

MLDR 6010: Managing People and Promoting

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Criteria Dated Before Any Application Was Opened: A Lead Technician Selection Case Using a Surgery-Board Work Sample, Independent Panel Ratings and an Explanation the Floor Favorite Would Receive

Criteria and the Date They Were Fixed

The criteria for the lead technician role at the Westerville clinic of Olentangy Animal Hospitals were fixed on February 3, before the posting closed and before I opened any application. All four come from the role analysis completed in Week 2: fixing the day's schedule quickly when someone calls out, handing out work only to people trained for it, remaining at the board instead of joining a procedure, and keeping the anesthesia and controlled drug logs complete. Announcing the day's plan and teaching new hires were listed as trainable and were observed but not scored. Each criterion has three anchored levels, weak, sound and strong, written on the same date and reproduced in the appendix table below.

The Exercise

Three senior technicians applied: Kelsey, nine years at the clinic and the floor's favorite; Andrea, five years, who had run the board informally at a sister clinic; and Marcus, four years. Each spent forty minutes alone with a mocked-up surgery board for a real Tuesday from the previous month, altered in three ways. A spay and a dental cleaning had been double-booked in the same suite at 8:00. A technician had just called out sick. A kennel assistant stood at the board waiting for instructions. Candidates could use the phone, the staff training records and the schedule software, and a panelist played the kennel assistant and any client they chose to call. Roth et al. (2005) found that work samples predict job performance well when they reproduce the job's actual content, and this exercise was built from the two highest-priority tasks in the role analysis rather than from conversation about them. Schmidt and Hunter (1998) reported that structured methods built on job content outperform unstructured interviews, which is why there was no unstructured interview at all.

Independent Ratings

The panel was the clinic's medical director, the lead technician from the Dublin clinic and me. Each of us watched all three exercises and entered ratings on the form before we spoke to one another. Kahneman et al. (2021) describe how judgments made in a group tend to converge on the first or loudest opinion, and how independent ratings collected first reduce that noise.

Table 1

Independent Panel Ratings by Criterion (Medical Director / Dublin Lead / Practice Manager)

Composite candidates. Ratings entered before discussion.

Reconciliation

The panel then met. Two ratings moved. The Dublin lead had rated Kelsey weak on rebuilding the schedule; the medical director and I had rated her sound. When we compared notes, the Dublin lead pointed out that Kelsey had resolved the double booking only by moving herself into the second surgery as an extra technician, which fixed the suite conflict but left the board unmanaged for twenty minutes. The medical director and I agreed that this was weak under the anchor, and Kelsey's rating moved to weak. I had rated Marcus weak on delegation because he sent the kennel assistant to recovery; the others noted he had checked her training record first, and I moved my rating to sound. No rating for Andrea changed.

Decision

Andrea is selected. She rated strong or sound on every criterion from every panelist and was the only candidate to rebuild the day, delegate within training records and stay at the board throughout. The result that would have changed the outcome is stated plainly: had Kelsey rebuilt the schedule without leaving the board, she would have matched Andrea on three criteria and exceeded her on logs, and the panel would have needed a further exercise to decide. Marcus was a sound candidate throughout and would be the next choice if Andrea declined.

Rating Form

Table 2

Anchors for One Criterion: Remaining at the Board

Anchors for all four criteria were written on February 3. One is shown here.

Explanation for Kelsey

Kelsey will hear the decision from me, in person, before it is announced. The draft explanation reads: "The panel chose Andrea. We judged everyone on four things the lead job needs most, which we wrote down before applications were opened. Your logs were the best of the three. On the morning exercise, you solved the double booking by scrubbing into the second surgery yourself, and for twenty minutes nobody was running the board. That is the part of the lead job that matters most, and it was the difference. I want to talk with you about a plan to build that skill for the next opening." Every sentence in that explanation can be checked against the criteria, the anchors and the ratings above.

References

Kahneman, D., Sibony, O., & Sunstein, C. R. (2021). Noise: A flaw in human judgment. Little, Brown Spark.

Roth, P. L., Bobko, P., & McFarland, L. A. (2005). A meta-analysis of work sample test validity: Updating and integrating some classic literature. Personnel Psychology, 58(4), 1009-1037. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2005.00714.x

Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. E. (1998). The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings. Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 262-274. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.124.2.262