Quantifying Human Resources. Clotilde Coron

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      Supiot (2015, p. 104, author’s translation) also notes the growing importance of numbers, particularly in the Western world: “It is in the Western world that expectations of them have constantly expanded: initially objects of contemplation, they became a means of knowledge and then of forecasting, before being endowed with a strictly legal force with the contemporary practice of governance by numbers.” Supiot thus insists on the normative use of quantification, particularly in law and in international treaties and conventions, among others. More precisely, he identifies four normative functions conferred on quantification: accountability (an illustration being the account books that link numbers and the law), administration (knowing the resources of a population to be able to act on them), judging (the judge having to weigh up each testimony to determine the probability that the accused is guilty) and legislation (using statistics to decide laws in the field of public health, for example the preventive inoculation of smallpox that could reduce the disease as a whole but be fatal for some people inoculated in the 18th Century).

I.2. The specific challenges of human resources quantification: quantifying the human being

      Ultimately, these authors agree on the central role of quantification in our history and in our societies today. More recently, the rise in the amount of available data has further increased the importance of this role, and has raised new questions, leading to new uses and even new sciences: the use of algorithms in different fields (Cardon 2015; O’Neil 2016), the rise of social physics that uses data on human behavior to model it (Pentland 2014), the study of social networks, etc.

      Organizations are no exception to this rule: quantification is a central practice in organizations. Many areas of the company are affected: finance, audit, marketing, HR (human resources), etc. This book focuses on the HR function. This function groups together all the activities that enable an organization to have the human resources (staff, skills, etc.) necessary for it to operate properly (Cadin et al. 2012). Thus, it brings together recruitment, training, mobility, career management, dialog with trade unions, promotion, staff appraisal, etc. In other words, it is a function that manages the “human”, insofar as the majority of these missions are related to human beings (candidates during recruitment, employees, trade unionists, managers, etc.). HR quantification actually covers a variety of practices and situations, which we will elaborate on throughout the book:

       – quantification of individuals: measurement of individual performance, individual skills, etc. This practice, the stakes of which are specified in Chapters 1 and 2, can be identified during decisions regarding recruitment, salary raises and promotion, for example;

       – work quantification: job classification, workload quantification, etc. This measure does not concern human beings directly, but rather the work they must do. Chapters 1 and 2 will examine this practice at length;

       – quantification of the activity of the HR function: evaluation of the performance of the HR function, the effects of HR policies on the organization, etc. This practice, which is discussed in detail in Chapter 4, becomes all the more important as the HR function is required to prove its legitimacy.

These uses may seem disparate, but it seemed important to us to deal with them jointly, as they overlap on a number of issues. Thus, their usefulness for the HR function, or their appropriation by various agents, constitutes transversal challenges. In addition, in these three types of practices, quantification refers to the human being and/or their activities. However, the possibility of quantifying the human and human activities has given rise to numerous methodological and ethical debates in the literature. Two main positions can be identified. The first, which is the basis of the psychotechnical approach, seeks to broaden the scope of what is measurable in human beings: skills, behaviors, motivations, etc. The second, resulting from different theoretical frameworks, criticizes the postulates of the psychotechnical approach and considers on the contrary that the human being is never reducible to what can be measured.

The psychotechnical approach was developed at the beginning of the 20th Century. It is based on the idea that people’s skills, behaviors and motivations can be measured objectively. As a result, the majority of psychotechnicians’ research focuses on measuring instruments. They highlight four qualities necessary to make a good measuring instrument: standardization, ranking result, fidelity, and validity (Huteau and Lautrey 2006). Standardization refers to the fact that all subjects must pass exactly the same test (hence the importance of formalizing the conditions for taking the test, for example). Similarly, the correction of the test must leave as little margin as possible for the corrector. The stated objective of formalization is to make the assessment as objective as possible, whilst trying to avoid having the test results influenced by the test conditions or the assessor’s subjectivity. Then, the test must make it possible to differentiate individuals, in other words to rank them, usually on a scale (e.g. a rating scale). This characteristic implies having items whose difficulty is known in advance, and with a variation in the levels of difficulty. Indeed, the easy items, passed by the vast majority of individuals, are just as low ranking as the difficult items, passed by very few individuals. As a result, psychotechnicians recommend that items of varying levels of difficulty be mixed in the same test in order to achieve a more differentiated ranking of individuals. Accuracy refers to the fact that test results must be stable over time. Individual test results are influenced by random factors such as the fitness level of individuals, and the objective is to minimize this hazard. Finally, validity refers to the fact that the test must contribute to an accurate diagnosis or prognosis that is close to reality. This is called the “predictive value” of the test. This predictive value can be assessed by comparing the results obtained on a test with the actual situation that follows: for example, comparing a ranking of applications received for a position based on a test with the scores obtained on individual assessments by successful candidates, so as to infer the match between the test used for recruitment and the skills of candidates in real situations. Two typical examples of this approach are: the measurement of intellectual quotient (IQ), and the measurement of the factor (Box I.1).

      The psychotechnical approach is therefore very explicitly part of an approach aimed at measuring the human being and demonstrating the advantages of such a measurement. Thus, psychotechnical work emphasizes that measurement allows for greater objectivity and better decision-making if it follows the following three assumptions (McCourt 1999). First of all, a good evaluation is universal and impersonal. Second, it must follow a specific procedure (the psychotechnical procedure). The last assumption is that organizational performance is the sum of individual performance.

Box I.1. Two incarnations of the psychotechnical approach: the IQ test and the theory of the g factor (sources: Gould 1997; Huteau and Lautrey 2006)

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