Regardless of whether they sit in HR, every manager makes people decisions. From hiring and promotion to performance evaluation, managers are constantly assessing talent. When these judgments are intuitive or unstructured, they can undermine strategy, damage team performance, and unintentionally reinforce bias. In this masterclass, Prof. Yi-Ren Wang draws on her research in people judgment, social norms, and socioeconomic mobility to show how organizations can design structured, evidence-based hiring systems that are precise, fair, and strategically aligned.
Participants will engage in a hands-on, short job analysis exercise to:
1) Identify key competencies required for a role
2) Translate strategic priorities into measurable competencies
3) Align assessment tools with critical competencies
4) Identify hidden sources of bias
5) strengthen the defensibility and impact of hiring decisions.
This session is designed for current and aspiring leaders who want to make smarter talent decisions, and build teams that are both inclusive and high-performing.
Agenda:
Yi-Ren Wang is an Associate Professor I of Organizational Behavior and the Faculty Director of Professional and Personal Growth at Asia School of Business. She received her PhD in Management from the University of Alabama. She received her master’s degree in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from the University at Albany, State University of New York, and her bachelor’s degree in Psychology from National Taiwan University.
In 2022, she was selected by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology to receive the 2022 S. Rains Wallace Dissertation Award. Her research interests include precarious work, workplace inequality, behavioral poverty trap, socioeconomic mobility, work motivation, fairness, work-family dynamics, employee well-being, and workplace trauma. The ultimate goal of her research is to identify ways to reduce social disparities and promote upward mobility, particularly for workers in underprivileged conditions.
She has ongoing projects aiming to 1) explain the motivational and behavioral challenges faced by underprivileged workers at work, 2) highlight the importance of organizational justice for promoting a long-term perspective and career investment for workers in precarity, and 3) theorize the transmission of occupational strain across life boundaries and between individuals.
