I've always had a slightly ambivalent relationship with matching in careers. On the one hand, it seems very intuitive - we are surely all of us looking for a job which suits us (whatever that may mean). On the other, it seems very out of favour in career research at the moment. It's criticised for being rigid, for assuming that individuals and jobs are stable, and for not conceptualising career decisions as holistic.
I've tended to make sense of this by believing that the concept of matching is still a good one, the problem is just what we've been trying to match. Matching as a concept doesn't need to be rigid - you can only make a decision on the basis of the information you've got right now - none of us can predict how we our our jobs are going to change in the future, but decisions still need to be made.
And the criticism that matching doesn't acknowledge the holistic nature of career decisions could be countered simply by choosing different elements to match. Most matching exercises are based on career interests, values or personality, but there's nothing to say that you couldn't match people with jobs on the basis of flexible working arrangements, stress levels or the shoes you'd need to wear.
I've just read this paper by Tinsley which unpicks this a bit. It's from 2000, so isn't exactly cutting edge, but it sets things out more helpfully than anything else I've come across.
My take home message from this paper is that matching per se does work, but matching based on Hollands' RIASEC model doesn't.
There seem to be a lot of studies which give us statistically significant correlations between person-environment fit and various work outcomes including job satisfaction and job involvement and negative correlations between P-E fit and absenteeism and job turnover.
But research based on Holland's RIASEC model doesn't show these links. Tinsley points out that there are over 100 P-E fit models which have been proposed in the literature, but that career literature and research has focused disproportionately on the RIASEC model at the exclusion of nearly everything else. And he cites meta-analysis after meta-analysis with tens of thousands of participants, which show no significant correlation between RIASEC and job satisfaction, stability, achievement or performance.
Tinsley goes into some scientific detail of possible explanations for this lack of link, but (I think) suggests that it might be because Holland simplified his ideas to make them usable, but in doing so has watered down his theory, or that the RIASEC framework just isn't very good.
I guess my next move is to try and find some of the other frameworks of P-E fit which Tinsley cites and see whether they might be of more use to us in our practice.
Tinsley, H.E.A. (2000) The Congruence Myth: an analysis of the efficacy of the person-environment fit model Journal of Vocational Behavior 56 (2) 147 - 179
