The Client
Biotronic is a subsidiary of Calder Development Associates, Inc. CDA provides intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring through its subsidiary companies, Biotronic and NeuroMed.They have provided a complete array of neurophysiological monitoring services throughout the Midwest and Southwestern regions for the last 20 years.
Biotronic employs 42 clinical specialists and currently monitors more than 5,000 surgeries per year. The company is dedicated to providing the highest quality surgical monitoring services available.
The Solution
Personality Characteristics Inventory® (PCI®): The PCI forecasts job-related behavior in five areas enabling Biotronic to select technician trainees who are far more likely to successfully complete the training program than candidates chosen based on interviews alone.
Developed by personality experts Murray Barrick, Ph.D., and Michael Mount, Ph.D., the PCI links five key personality dimensions, known as “The Big Five,” to successful job performance.The Big Five measure agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, stability, and openness.
Regardless of job type, the core personal characteristics measured by the PCI are critical factors to the long-term achievements of employees.
Using the Big Five and its 12 personality subscales, Biotronic has see substantial drops in its turnover rates saving the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in training costs.
Biotronic Saves Thousands of Dollars Using the PCI
John Schneider, Director of Human Resources for Biotronic, is in a business where nothing can be taken for granted. Biotronic provides neurophysiological monitoring of patients during surgery, and it’s Schneider’s job to identify, hire and train the technicians who perform those duties. He has to be sure the people he hires not only have the background and skills for the job, but that they also have the dedication, patience, willingness, and personality to do it successfully. Every technician he hires gets about $40,000 worth of training before they even begin working, which means hiring mistakes have a serious financial impact on the company.
Schneider hires technician trainees in groups of 8 to 16 and in the past he’s had a fifty percent or greater failure rate. “There was a piece missing from our selection process,” he admits. “We needed something that was more comprehensive.”
His candidates have to have a science background and must be recent college grads so their math and science skills are fresh, but they also have to be smart, driven, and independent but willing to work as part of a team within a very structured environment. He simply couldn’t get that information through interviews and résumés. He needed a tool that would qualitatively evaluate candidates’ personalities.
Schneider’s research into the assessment tool industry showed him that most companies had neither the tools nor the ability to identify these traits. “A lot of the companies either weren’t in tune with what I wanted or just didn’t support my needs,” he says. “Then I talked to Wonderlic.”
The Wonderlic consultants understood his needs and based on the qualities he wanted to identify they provided him with the Wonderlic Personality Characteristics Inventory. The PCI measures performance-related personality traits by identifying a job applicant’s standing on five critical characteristics: stability, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. Candidates’ PCI results forecast job-related behavior and compare them to occupational norms for optimal job-person compatibility.
Schneider liked the structure and style of the PCI and decided to try it out on a group of trainees to see what kind impact it would have on his selection process.
Forty of the candidates who applied had good enough résumés and initial interviews to be invited in for testing, he says. Of those, he only hired 15 largely based on how their PCI scores compared to established ranges that he and Wonderlic determined were ideal for the technician position. “Some of their scores were a big surprise,” Schneider says, admitting that he didn’t expect certain candidates to get the scores they did.
One of his 15 trainees got perfect scores in almost every category. His only score below a 90 was his need for recognition. “He blew the test away,” Schneider says. But the most astounding thing about that candidate was not just his perfect scores but the fact that he applied for the position once before and was turned down. At the time he initially applied, Schneider wasn’t sure he was serious about the job, but once he saw his test scores he had no doubts about wanting him. “He’ll be president of the company some day,” he jokes.
Scoring high on all the categories is important, but Schneider is particularly interested on how candidates rate on conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness and stability, and how the combined scores relate to each other. “If a person has high marks for conscientiousness and extroversion, but low scores for agreeableness you get ‘the jerk factor’,” he says, noting that one of the applicants he accepted into the program defined the jerk factor for him and has since caused him to raise the bar on agreeableness scores. “Nobody likes to work with someone who’s extroverted but not agreeable. They are not nice.”
The initial group he hired using the PCI is almost through with their training, and, Schneider says he expects 14 of the 15 applicants to graduate successfully. “This is the best group of trainees we’ve ever selected.” That compares to his last training group where seven of the eight trainees quit or failed the program, costing the company roughly $280,000 in unproductive training dollars. “If I can continue to replicate the success we’ve had with Wonderlic, I’ll easily drop turnover by more than 50 percent.”
In fact, the only one in this group of trainees who has quit so far was chosen despite several scores that fell out of the established ranges, including a very low score on stability. “She had a great interview and seemed smart,” Schneider says, admitting that he questioned the Wonderlic test in the beginning and let her in, but says he won’t make that mistake again.
“The PCI is the best tool I’ve ever used.”
