Biographical Information Blank (BIB) is a type of assessment that uses

biodata In industrial and organizational psychology, biodata is biographical data. Biodata is "...factual kinds of questions about life and work experiences, as well as items involving opinions, values, beliefs, and attitudes that reflect a historical pers ...

in employee recruitment to help determine which of several candidates should be hired for a job. Originally companies would take the information from their job applications forms to see what would be useful in predicting the

job performance Job performance assesses whether a person performs a job well. Job performance, studied academically as part of industrial and organizational psychology, also forms a part of human resources management. Performance is an important criterion for ...

of employees. Over time, the amount and type of biographical information collected by employers has expanded and is now placed into the BIB assessments used today. The modern BIB is a

self-report A self-report study is a type of survey, questionnaire, or poll in which respondents read the question and select a response by themselves without any outside interference. A ''self-report'' is any method which involves asking a participant ab ...

instrument that includes questions about past personal and work experiences, as well as interests, opinions, values, and attitudes. Its items are all presented in the

multiple choice Multiple choice (MC), objective response or MCQ (for multiple choice question) is a form of an objective assessment in which respondents are asked to select only correct answers from the choices offered as a list. The multiple choice format is m ...

format. The emphasis is on past behaviors because they are best predictors of future behaviors. Typically, BIBs are designed to predict success in a particular job because they contribute to a predictor sample, which is used to make personnel selection decisions. There are two types of BIBs: the empirical and the rational. With the empirical BIB, each item is correlated with a measure of

or other criterion of job success. Those items that can predict job success are retained for the BIB. The rational approach is to start with a

job analysis Job analysis (also known as work analysis) is a family of procedures to identify the content of a job in terms of the activities it involves in addition to the attributes or requirements necessary to perform those activities. Job ''analysis'' pro ...

to determine the knowledge, skill, ability, and other job characteristics (KSAOs) needed for the job. Items are chosen that reflect the required KSAOs. Some research has shown that BIBs are able to predict job success. Both types of BIBs, the empirical and the rational seem to work about equally.Stokes, G. S., & Searcy, C. A. (1999). Specification of scales in biodata form development: Rational vs. empirical and global vs. specific. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 7(2), 72-85.

References

Psychiatric assessment {{psych-stub