Assessing the candidate as a whole: A historical and critical analysis of individual psychological assessment for personnel decision making

Although individual assessment is a thriving area of professional practice in industry, it receives little, if any, attention from textbooks on industrial psychology or personnel management. This article is an attempt to establish individual assessment's place in the history of personnel selection, and to examine why the practice has survived despite receiving little attention in research and graduate training. It is argued that the clinical, holistic approach that has characterized individual-assessment practice has survived primarily because the "elementalistic" testing approach, focusing on traits and abilities, has often been dismissed as inadequate for addressing the complexities of the executive profile. Moreover, public displeasure with standard paper-and-pencil testing in the 1960s and 1970s made the holistic approach to assessment an attractive alternative. The article contrasts individual assessment practice with the current state of knowledge on psychological assessment and personnel decision making. Like psychotherapy in the 1950s, individual psychological assessment appears to have achieved the status of functional autonomy within psychology.