Overcalculating nonsense: labor market experts.

This description of the work of personnel recruitment and, in particular, o f recruiters' interpretative activities questions the idea of perfect ratio nality and shows how recruiters' opinions are distorted during two major op erations, namely as applicants are ranked and as formalized tests are organ ized. The makeshift nature of these operations is basically linked to the f act that recruiting entails an activity of evaluation based on criteria fro m the marketplace and from the firm. By giving priority to the first kind o f criteria, procedures fall out of line with real, on-the-job situations. T his opens room for recruiters who try to bring both kinds of requirements c loser together. To move beyond this opposition between the marketplace and the company, a typology of four interpretations along two axes is proposed: a planned or negotiated interpretation, and an individualistic or sociolog ical interpretation. To avoid reducing the activity of evaluation to indivi dual criteria, a parallel is drawn with the questions of liability and of f ault in the context of insurance policies. Thus freed from a purely individ ualistic notion, evaluation incorporates criteria that place the person in the collective setting of the workplace. (C) 2000 Editions scientifiques et medicales Elsevier, Paris