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When one sees the application forms of some organisations, one is led to wonder how they ever manage to obtain any applicants. The scanners of the job advertisements in the newspaper may without too much difficulty be enticed to send off a quickly‐written letter for further details and an application form. But when they receive the requested form and find that they are asked at length and in badly worded English for much seemingly irrelevant information, several of them will opt out and decide that it is worth remaining in their present organisation a little longer.

If one of our training programmes is not fully satisfactory, what steps should we take to put things right? Should we attempt to improve the quality of our training on the assumption that we have recruited the right trainees to the course? Or should we attempt to improve our procedures for recruiting and selecting trainees to the course on the assumption that our training is of a sufficiently high standard? In this article I shall be concerned to show how we can decide whether we have a selection or a training problem on our hands.

Many companies today are concerned to increase the effectiveness of their personnel selection procedures. The more money a company invests in the training of its new employees, the more certain it needs to be that its newly appointed employees have been wisely chosen. Yet, when personnel and training officers are asked how they know that their selection procedures are faulty and what exactly is wrong with them, they are often extremely vague and imprecise in their replies. If you can answer the questions below, you may be some way towards diagnosing your selection problems and arriving at some solutions.

Most selection procedures consist simply of an interview. Tests of aptitude and attainment, personality questionnaires, group discussions and other group exercises are all used in personnel selection. But in by far the majority of instances the applicant will be confronted by none of these techniques. It will be on his performance at interview alone that he will be accepted or rejected. Selection research often shows the interview to be a rather ineffective selection device. Yet in view of its extensive use and its general acceptability both to interviewer and applicant we should consider how we may increase its effectiveness. In this and a subsequent article I shall be attempting to answer a number of questions about the interview, questions incidentally which I have found to be regularly raised on courses and lectures on the subject.

what are tests? In this article I shall restrict the use of the word test to those measures of attainment, intelligence and aptitude which consist of questions to which there are right and wrong answers. I shall not be discussing here the use of questionnaires which measure a person's interests or personal qualities. The distinction between a test and a questionnaire is a useful one. If in an interests questionnaire a person was asked whether he would prefer to write a novel, to do research into chemistry or to lecture on mathematics, there is nothing right or wrong in preferring one activity to another. If, however, in a test of numerical ability a person was asked to subtract 76 from 135, 59 would be the right answer and all other answers are wrong.

Most applicants take the selection interview seriously and those applicants who have not attended an interview for several years and who do not in the course of their work have to establish new relationships with people, often approach the interview with a little uneasiness, if not undue fear. In order to bring out the best of a nervous and taciturn applicant the interviewer can probably learn something from the strategy of the constructor of aptitude tests. It is customary in the devising of a test to begin with a few questions which all the testees should be able to answer and thereafter to increase the order of difficulty of the test items with the really tricky questions at the end. It would be considered unfair of the test constructor to insert a particularly hard question into the early part of the test, since it might confound the testee who may well have been able to do it if he had been allowed to work up to it gradually.

At selection we are keen to determine whether an applicant is interested in the job for which he is applying. If he is, we predict that he will do the job better and for longer than an otherwise similar person who lacks the interest. Interest questionnaires purport to measure a person's degree of interest in different types of activity. Some people mistakenly use interest questionnaires as selection instruments. However they are essentially instruments for use in vocational counselling and things can go wrong if they are used in the selection situation for which they are not technically designed.

the purpose of selection assessment forms Several organisations, and especially larger ones, make use of some kind of selection assessment form on which personnel selectors record information about an applicant and their assessment of his suitability or unsuitability for employment. These selection assessment forms serve many purposes.

LIBRARIES have come impressively into the public picture in the past year or two, and seldom with more effect than when Their Majesties the King and Queen opened the new Central Reference Library at Manchester on July 17th. In a time, which is nearly the end of a great depression, that the city which probably felt the depression more than any in the Kingdom should have proceeded with the building of a vast store‐house of learning is a fact of great social significance and a happy augury for libraries as a whole. His Majesty the King has been most felicitous in providing what we may call “slogans” for libraries. It will be remembered that in connection with the opening of the National Central Library, he suggested that it was a “University which all may join and which none need ever leave” —words which should be written in imperishable letters upon that library and be printed upon its stationery for ever. As Mr. J. D. Stewart said at the annual meeting of the National Central Library, it was a slogan which every public library would like to appropriate. At Manchester, His Majesty gave us another. He said: “To our urban population open libraries are as essential to health of mind, as open spaces to health of body.” This will be at the disposal of all of us for use. It is a wonderful thing that Manchester in these times has been able to provide a building costing £450,000 embodying all that is modern and all that is attractive in the design of libraries. The architect, Mr. Vincent Harris, and the successive librarians, Mr. Jast and Mr. Nowell, are to be congratulated upon the crown of their work.

OUR next number will contain our impressions and those of others of the Blackpool conference. Any anticipations made now will be obsolete by the middle of June. All that need be said here is that we hope no drastic change will have been suggested in the examination syllabus; all other matters are, in our view, legitimate matters for debate in general meetings, but where the syllabus is concerned only Fellows have the necessary qualifications to vote upon it. This we have expressed sufficiently perhaps in the past; there is, however, no harm in repeating it.