The Client
The Dead River Company is one of the largest distributors of petroleum products to residential and commercial customers in northern New England. They deal in a variety of petroleum products on both the wholesale and retail levels, including home heating oil, kerosene, diesel fuel, propane and gasoline.
As for the somewhat unusual name, it comes from the company’s original location. Founded by Charles Hutchins in 1907, Dead River Company started out in the timber harvesting industry along a remote branch of the Dead River in scenic western Maine. Dead River got into the gas business in the early 1930’s, when it acquired franchise rights to a chain of gas stations in northern and eastern Maine, setting up corporate headquarters in Bangor. From these beginnings, Dead River steadily expanded into the sale of a wide range of petroleum products throughout Maine.
Still a family-owned company 90 years later, Dead River has become one of the largest retailers of home heating oil and propane in northern New England.
The Solution
Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT): The WPT is a short-form measure of cognitive ability designed for simple administration and interpretation. The WPT is a crucial component of any successful hiring program. Research has proven that cognitive ability, or general intelligence, is the single greatest predictor of job success—for any position. More effective than résumés, education, references or interviews, cognitive ability testing gives you the objective information you need to make the right hiring decision. The WPT takes only 12 minutes to complete. It accurately measures a candidate’s ability to learn a specific job, solve problems, understand instructions, apply knowledge to new situations, benefit from specific job training and be satisfied with a particular job.
WPT Finds Customer Service Reps Who Perform Well Under Pressure
With volatile oil prices causing sticker shock at the gas pump, it’s safe to say that people are generally unhappy about having to pay more and more for necessities like heat for their homes and gasoline for their cars. In fact, sometimes people get downright angry. Who bears the brunt of that anger? It certainly isn’t oil company execs or politicians. It’s the customer service representatives at petroleum companies who deal with disgruntled customers every day.
“These can be stressful jobs, especially now,” says Paul Hoyt, Human Resource Manager for the Dead River Company, based in Bangor, ME. Dead River, is one of the largest distributors of petroleum products to residential and commercial customers in northern New England. Their 1,000-employee staff deals in a variety of petroleum products on both the wholesale and retail levels, including home heating oil, kerosene, diesel fuel, propane and gasoline.
Dead River’s customer service representatives take orders for heating oil, answer customer questions about oil prices, make service appointments and deal with billing questions on a daily basis. “Frankly, some of those calls can be, well, irate,” Hoyt says. “Irate calls are quite common these days, unfortunately.” That’s one of the reasons why the Dead River Company relies on the Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT), a timed measure of a candidate’s cognitive skills, when hiring administrative positions like Customer Service Reps. Hiring managers at Dead River need to make sure new hires have the ability to find solutions while under pressure.
The Dead River Company was founded 90 years ago and remains family-owned. Because of the company’s long-lasting reputation in New England, it’s vital to everyone at Dead River that customer relations are good. “I need to know that the people we hire are going to be able to interact intelligently with our customers and with other employees,” Hoyt says. “The WPT tells us that they have the cognitive ability to do that. It substantiates and verifies what we’re finding out in an interview.”
A candidate’s WPT score is vital to Hoyt and other hiring managers because, not only is the job stressful, it’s also varied, requiring candidates to master a wide range of skills. Dead River cross-trains its people in clerical work, inventory, accounts payable, data input, running reports, analyzing accounts to look for discrepancies, setting up appointments and dispatching delivery drivers, in addition to taking customer calls on a variety of issues.
“These people really multi-task,” he says. “There are lots of skill sets involved. That’s another reason we use the WPT. Our people have to possess the cognitive ability to successfully perform many different types of tasks.” “The WPT scores are an accurate way to measure a candidate’s cognitive abilities,” says Hoyt, but he has also found that the timed nature of the test itself is a helpful tool. Candidates are given 12 minutes to take the 50-question test. “The fact that the WPT is a timed test is important because it tells us whether or not a candidate can perform well under pressure,” he says. “There’s lots of it in this job. We need to know they can handle it.”
The company has been using the WPT for more than 20 years. “Over two decades, we’ve validated for ourselves that the people who score well on this test will be successful in these jobs,” Hoyt says. “We’ve seen it for ourselves. Using the WPT along with an interview assures that we’ll get good hires.”
