Join Us for the Fall 2022 GLEAN Learning Event!
Joel Wiesen, PhD will present an informative webinar on Multiple Ways to Increase Both Diversity and Expected Job Performance in Hiring and Promoting Police Officers on October 26, 2022 from 12-1:30pm ET. This presentation is suitable for academics, practitioners, and students and is open to all.
Session Description: Selection tests often are a barrier to hiring and promoting black Police Officers. There is an often stated claim that increasing diversity in selection comes at the inevitable price of reduced validity. This presentation will disprove this claim. Various selection approaches will be described that are designed to increase both diversity in selection and expected job performance. Hard questions will be addressed such as: (1) How effective are our current approaches to hiring and promoting police officers? (2) When are administrative approaches to ameliorating adverse impact professionally appropriate? (3) What well-intentioned approaches to reducing adverse impact are unlikely to work? (4) How can tests with lower validity result in higher expected job performance? Some real-world examples will be provided.
About Dr. Joel Wiesen: Dr. Wiesen is the owner and Director of the consulting firm named Applied Personnel Research and an expert on employee selection methods and tools. He was awarded a Ph.D. in psychology from Lehigh University in 1975. For over 45 years, he has worked to develop fair and valid personnel assessment methods and instruments for the assessment, selection and promotion of employees. He has developed selection tools for hundreds of police and fire departments as well as private sector organizations. He has taught at the undergraduate and graduate levels. For over 15 years, he worked for the Massachusetts agency responsible for civil service exams. He was hired to lead the program to validate all civil service examinations. Since he left the employ of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, his professional work has consisted mainly of consulting to large organizations and municipalities on personnel assessment and selection matters, developing new written tests for government, business/industry, and education, and serving as an expert witness in testing matters. He served as President of the International Personnel Management Association Assessment Council (IPMAAC, now IPAC), an organization that then had a membership of over 500 testing professionals, and as President of the New England Society for Applied Psychology (NESAP), a Boston-area association of applied psychologists. From 1989 to 2021 he served on the Program Committee for some twenty of the annual conferences of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, a national professional group of several thousand members, reviewing proposed conference presentations. He is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists, providing licensed psychologists with continuing education credits that may be used to satisfy state requirements for license renewal. He has served as an expert in employment discrimination cases pertaining to race, gender, and age discrimination, some of which have gone to trial. He has served as an expert consultant on testing matters for the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office, the Connecticut Department of Administrative Services, the Connecticut Attorney General's Office, the US Department of Justice, smaller governmental entities, and both large and small private sector organizations. His legal work has been for both defense and plaintiffs. He has lectured and published in the areas of personnel assessment, employment discrimination, and civil service examining. He is a published test author. He has made presentations before professional groups, including several invited addresses. He is licensed as a psychologist in the states of New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. Dr. Wiesen has a longstanding interest in the causes of and ways to reduce adverse impact in selection. Many of his presentations on this topic are available on his website: http://aprpsych.com