KSA Quandaries

FedSmith, following up on Emily Long's article on the reasons not to abolish KSA statements--and some of the barriers to doing so--has an interesting meditation on KSAs. I thought this was a particularly good point:

Several readers touched on an issue that I failed to address, observing that another value of KSAs is that they enhance applicants' understanding of what the job is about. I agree that the requirement to respond to KSAs does, as these folks opined, force applicants to really think about their qualifications for the position. I have had preliminary interest in vacancy announcements, only to be brought back to reality by reviewing the KSAs for the position.

I am certainly thankful that I've never had to fill out a KSA, though for my first job, I had to take a strenuous and time-consuming edit test to see if I was qualified to be a fact-checker. The test served a couple of useful functions: it weeded out candidates who weren't qualified, and gave me a fairly good sense of the work that I'd be doing, and how I'd have to do that. That was a useful exercise. It might make sense to administer limited KSAs to weed down serious candidates part of the way through the job search process, or to design more relevant and specialized tests for certain positions.