HR staffing experts reduce turnover 17% with eight minute Wonderlic test
For nearly 25 years, the mission of Express Employment Professionals has been to help people find jobs and help businesses find the people and human resource services they need. They accomplish this mission through a network of over 600 locations in the United States, Canada, South Africa and Australia. Each Express office is locally owned, operated and backed by the expertise and support of an international headquarters.
One of Express Employment Professionals goals is to best serve their clients by finding and placing the most qualified candidates into their clients open positions. Achieving their mission starts by prescreening candidates for a variety of skills and abilities prior to placing them on the job.
One Dallas-based Owner/President, Cindi Gilmore, found that using Wonderlic tests as part of this prescreening process has decreased her client’s turnover 17 percent in a six month period. This decrease in employee turnover was stunted by the addition of the Wonderlic Personnel Test – Quicktest (WPT-Q) to the screening of positions that required a higher level cognitive ability.
The Client
Express Employment Professionals is tasked with placing job seekers into a variety of temporary and permanent placement jobs year round. At Gilmore’s Dallas office, they mainly focus on filling administrative based positions such as file clerks, accounts payable/receivable, executive administrative assistants, receptionists, etc. Express had over 400 tests in place to measure applicants skills, however, even with such an expansive library of tests, they didn’t have a tool to measure applicants cognitive ability, or aptitude.
“We weren’t using Wonderlic before and we noticed certain positions were experiencing high turnover,” said Gilmore. “When we went back to the client to look into why this was happening we discovered that the data entry position actually had aspects of data analytics involved. This meant that the person in this position had to be smarter and actually think about what they were doing.”Once Gilmore realized that certain clients’ positions were slightly more advanced than straight data entry and administrative, she knew she had to add additional screening tools to place candidates in these jobs that had higher ability levels than before.
The Solution
Wonderlic recommended the WPT-Q to Gilmore as a short-form measure of general intelligence or cognitive ability—one of the most powerful predictors of job success. The WPT-Q in combination with whatever additional testing is needed for that particular position has proven to be a successful combination for placing people with the necessary aptitude.
The Results
After the WPT-Q was implemented, Gilmore ran reports for the period of July 1, 2007 through January 31, 2008, pre-Wonderlic and the turnover rate was 37%. Once Wonderlic was implemented at her office she tracked the numbers for the period of February 6 through July 29, and the turnover was at 20%.
“Almost immediately after we started using Wonderlic we noticed the caliber of people increased,” said Gilmore. “Not only did we notice but the clients did too and shared with us how pleased they were in the quality of people we were placing.”
The 17% drop in turnover has saved valuable time and money for Express Employment Professionals as well as their clients.
“It’s beneficial to us because we are able to retain people longer which is always a good thing. You don’t have to spend the resources to find candidates,” says Gilmore. “For our clients they can find candidates more efficiently to convert to payroll and reduce training expenses.”
The numbers spoke for themselves – Wonderlic changed the way Express Employment Professionals placed people into businesses. “Using Wonderlic assessments has proven to be great because I’m seeing actual results.”
