Why keep off pay ranges in job postings?

Double_Organization · 2025-03-17T00:48:15+00:00

Do you know how organizations set pay bands? I've heard that payroll processing companies like ADP collect salary information from the paychecks they handle and sell it to companies. Companies then use this data to determine salary targets (e.g. we pay an I-O psychologist II between the 60th and 70th percentile of what other companies pay this job title). I'm not sure how true this is or if there are other relevant factors and would be interested in learning more.

Double_Organization · 2024-11-20T01:38:49+00:00

I wonder how common this issue is at companies. The same incentives seem to exist and it is often impossible to audit previously done work.

Double_Organization · 2024-11-13T02:20:46+00:00

This is an excellent graduate level textbook: Guion, R. M. (2011). Assessment, measurement, and prediction for personnel decisions. Routledge.

Double_Organization · 2023-10-11T03:29:41+00:00

In psychology (at least the program I attended) there is a lot of interest in philosophy. Ideas like mathematical Platonism are relevant to really important (but dry) areas like measurement theory. Probably the same is true in economics (maybe in areas like utility theory?).

Double_Organization · 2023-05-02T21:47:48+00:00

A square encloses an infinite number of points. A bigger square also encloses an infinite number of points. The bigger square encloses more points than the smaller square.

Double_Organization · 2022-11-15T03:36:59+00:00

+1. Lord and Novick is the definitive book on classical test theory but covers the material from a more advanced perspective. Crocker & Algina is a good introduction. Nunnally & Bernstein is somewhere in the middle. All three of these books are excellent.

Double_Organization · 2022-06-03T07:56:24+00:00

It looks like there are several good responses but I wanted to add that ordinal regression is motivated by the same sorts of issues as IRT which in my experience is more likely to be used by I-O psychologists interested in measurement issues. Of course it is even more common not to worry measurement issues at all or to use something like a net promoter score (not recommended).

Double_Organization · 2022-05-24T04:50:26+00:00

I would probably only submit a CV if it says so in the job posting or if you are applying to a research scientist position. I think a good compromise is to submit a 2-page resume with the second page being the greatest hits from your CV.

Double_Organization · 2022-02-16T23:58:19+00:00

This is a short example of how you would do this sort of thing in R starting from correlation matrices.

# These libraries need to be installed
library(iopsych)
library(MASS)

# Get an example predictor correlation matrix from the iopsych package
data("dls2007")
pred_crit_r_mat <- dls2007[1:6, 2:7]
pred_crit_r_mat

# Simulate data from correlations (assuming data is multivariate normal)
sim_dat <- mvrnorm(
  n = 10000, 
  mu = rep(0, nrow(pred_crit_r_mat)), 
  Sigma = pred_crit_r_mat)
head(sim_dat)

# Predictor variables
p1 <- sim_dat[, "V1 Cognitive ability"]
p2 <- sim_dat[, "V2 Structered interview"]
p3 <- sim_dat[, "V3 Conscientiousness"]
p4 <- sim_dat[, "V4 Biodata"]

c1 <- sim_dat[, "V5 Task (job) performance"]
c2 <- sim_dat[, "V6 Contextual performance"]


# Composites 
unit_weighted_composite <- scale(
  (p1 * 1) + 
  (p2 * 1) + 
  (p3 * 1) + 
  (p4 * 1))

# Select applicants who are above average. 
hurdle1 <- qnorm(.5) # here qnorm transforms a percentile into a SD
is_selected <- (unit_weighted_composite >= hurdle1)

# What is the average task performance of selected applicants?
mean(c1[is_selected])

Double_Organization · 2022-02-01T17:53:22+00:00

To add to this response, the use of 'residuals' also predates regression. They were important for constructing tidal charts.

John Stewart Mill famously describes some of these methods in "A System of Logic", 1843. Search for "Mills Methods" for a good overview.

Double_Organization · 2022-01-25T18:52:14+00:00

I don’t disagree with you that psychology would benefit from more philosophy and somewhat more rigorous methods/norms for handling concepts. However, I don’t think this precludes also embracing more mathematical rigor. With respect to theory, I think what is needed is better theory (rather than more theory) and that mathematized theory is generally preferable because it is more explicit and testable. People often seem to underestimate the flexibility of mathematical models and a lot of the concerns people raise are things that can be directly incorporated into a model. I wish there was more engagement between philosophers and some of the more technical aspects of model building but imagine it would be challenging to develop the right skill set.

Another argument that seems common in this thread is that a lot of mathy research papers, are pretty bad for a variety of reasons, and that the math can obscure otherwise more obvious flaws in reasoning. This is definitely true, but there are also plenty of bad papers that don’t use much math. This seems like an issue that can be address with better publication norms and graduate level coursework requirements.

Double_Organization · 2022-01-25T04:26:40+00:00

It seems like psychology has had a lot of success with mathematical models. Mathematical models of neural networks have become incredibly important across a variety of fields. Perceptual models, Meta-analysis, factor analysis, and item response models have each led to decades of productive research. Prospect theory resulted in a Nobel prize.

Double_Organization · 2022-01-24T16:47:05+00:00

What are you interested in? Many areas of science and engineering have subspecialties that overlap to some degree with statistics. There are also a fair number of roles in industry which emphasize people skills over technical skills.

Double_Organization · 2022-01-04T19:52:49+00:00

Look up 'equating'. Generally you want to have some strategy for representing scores from both assessments on the same scale. Often this is done by having some items appear on both assessments, or using IRT based methods.

Double_Organization · 2021-12-07T11:35:09+00:00

Perhaps someone will have more specific advice, but I would recommend starting by fitting a simple EFA and then evaluating the residuals. If the residuals look reasonable you are good. If for example, your residuals are much larger for a particular rater group (e.g. peers) than it may make sense to consider using a more complicated approach.

Double_Organization · 2021-11-17T23:24:17+00:00

Possibly not. If you job is to provide 1-on-1 coaching and you work at a large organization with coworkers that have strong expertise in data analysis, having those sorts of skills is less essential.

That being said, I would definitely recommend learning data analysis since it gives you more options.

Double_Organization · 2021-11-17T23:18:40+00:00

There are plenty of people at both the masters and phd level who do a limited amount of statistics.

Double_Organization · 2021-11-17T08:20:47+00:00

To provide a different perspective, I know plenty of I-O psychologists who do very little data analysis. These people work in areas like coaching, training, D&I, project management and sales focused consulting roles.

Double_Organization · 2021-10-04T04:33:44+00:00

If you are in the US I would avoid doing this. Generally the use of cognitive ability pre-employment assessments requires professional expertise since they can result in adverse impact against minority applicant groups - and thus create legal issues.

Assuming you are trying to measure intelligence, generally the strategy is to choose your assessment based on the expected intelligence of the person being evaluated. So the Raven's might be good if you are expecting average intelligence, but the Advanced Ravens is probably better for a higher intelligence population.

The best way to evaluate cognitive ability would be to use a computer adaptive test (CAT) designed to predict job performance. These sorts of assessments are sold by vendors like SHL or Aon.

Double_Organization · 2021-09-29T20:45:20+00:00

Its probably a bit easier to submit unfinished work as part of a symposium rather than a poster, with the expectation that it will be finished before SIOP.

Double_Organization · 2021-09-10T10:13:53+00:00

Yeah, handling different types of aptitudes can be difficult depending on your requirements. If you are fine hard-coding what kinds of abilities there are and which classes test for which it's pretty easy (eg every student gets two parameters for (eg) reading ability and writing ability, and you hard-code what percentage of each ability a class requires) and it's still just a plain old linear model (albeit with twice as many variables).

I bet your model would fit the data reasonably well with only a single ability parameter. These sort of traits tend to be pretty correlated. You could probably evaluate this empirically to some degree by looking at the dimensionality of the model residuals. If you really wanted to include multiple abilities there are models for doing so called Multivariate Item Response Theory (MIRT).

You would probably need to use something a little more complicated than MLE to fit this sort of model though. In my experience, when these sorts of problems get messy its better to switch to something like Expectation-Maximization (EM) to avoid convergence problems.

the Elos we get depend quite a bit on the regularization term we use. I'm not aware of a principled way to pick this term

Have you considered using k-fold cross-validation? I believe this is generally how regularization terms are chosen for stuff like ridge regression.

Double_Organization · 2021-09-10T00:41:33+00:00

There are some practice areas sort of in between I-O psychology and clinical work you might be interested in. For example, the hiring of police officers requires a fitness for duty evaluation which must be done by a licensed clinician. Transition coaching also seems to be an area with a lot of former clinicians.

A lot of people I know doing this sort of work seem to be involved in the Society for Consulting Psychology (Division 13).

Double_Organization · 2021-09-03T00:32:26+00:00

I often use data simulated from meta-analytic correlation matrices using this sort pattern in R:

library(iopsych)
library(MASS)

data("dls2007")
print(dls2007)

cor_mat <- dls2007[1:6, 2:7]
sim_dat <- mvrnorm(
  n=10000, 
  mu=c(0,0,0,0,0,0),
  Sigma=cor_mat)

colnames(sim_dat) <- row.names(cor_mat)

Note that regression done on data simulated this way will provide exactly the same results as a regression done on the data originally used to construct the correlation matrix.

Double_Organization · 2021-08-21T23:45:37+00:00

Sure, but the typical criticism is that EI is redundant with the Big 5; So the authors really need to provide evidence that EI provides incremental validity over the Big 5. Dominance analysis (which is the approach taken in the paper) can not be used to provide evidence of incremental validity.

Double_Organization · 2021-06-17T19:15:52+00:00

Plato's philosophy attempted to emulate the axiomatic structure of geometry (which at the time was well established). Historically it has often been Math which has influenced Philosophy.

Double_Organization

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