The Client
Intermountain Farmers Association has been serving the needs of agriculture since 1923. From its humble beginnings in Gunnison, Utah, IFA has grown to an operation that includes more than 25 outlets in five states. Its mission is to provide professional products and services to the agricultural community. It supplies feed, garden supplies, pest management, soil testing, fertilizer, and other assorted farming related products.
The Solution
Hay Aptitude Test Battery: The Hay Aptitude Tests measure the analytical and critical thinking skills of all job candidates. They help recruiters identify those candidates who can manage large volumes of detail work with few errors, aligning the right candidates with these core positions to help improve efficiency and profitability.The Hay tests include:
- Warm-Up Test—A one-minute exercise that can reduce test-taking anxiety.
- Number Perception Test—A four-minute test that assesses numerical character recognition and short-term memory retention.
- Name Finding Test—A four-minute test that measures alphabetical character recognition and short-term memory retention.
- Number Series Completion Test—A four-minute test that evaluates ability to recognize, comprehend, and make inferences from numerical relationships.
Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT): The 50-question WPT, which has been used by thousands of organizations since 1937, is a 12-minute, timed test that accurately measures a candidate’s ability to learn a specific job, solve problems, understand instructions, and apply knowledge to new situations.
This test provides hiring managers with objective information about candidates and, based on minimum test scores, may automatically eliminate a significant portion of the applicant pool, enabling recruiters to focus their time on those candidates most likely to succeed.
Testing Gets Farmers Co-Op The Cream of the Crop
Intermountain Farmers Association is not about to take the “warm body” approach to hiring. This preeminent agricultural supply company operates nurseries, mills, farm service centers, distribution centers, and garden centers in five states across the northwest; offering everything from garden plants and fertilizer, to livestock feed and pest management services to consumers as well as nearly 300 independent business owners.
As a co-op, with 400 employees working in 25 outlets, one of its missions is to “treat employees with respect and fairness and provide opportunities for growth and development in a safe working environment.” On the flipside of that mission, says Bryan Coulter, Director of Retail Operations for IFA, is that the co-op will hire only people it knows can do the job.
Determining ability isn’t easy, he admits. Because of all the legal issues surrounding hiring and firing, he knows that recommendations from previous employers won’t tell him much. “If someone was a really good employee, maybe I’ll get some indication, but most of the time all you get is verification that they worked there,” he says, noting “that’s our policy too.” And, because many of his clerks are young, they rarely have résumés or any noteworthy background experience to indicate whether they are capable of performing the job, Coulter then has little information with which to make his hiring decisions. “An interview is nice, but unless I have some other measure of their skills, I’m just making a guess as to whether this person will work out.”
Unwilling to settle for “gut instinct” alone, for the last eight years Coulter has relied on two Wonderlic tests to screen candidates’ abilities before hiring them. “In today’s world, if you don’t screen potential employees when everyone else does, you get the people that the others don’t want,” Coulter says. “…and that hurts the company in the long run.”
Coulter uses the Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT), which measures a candidate’s ability to learn specific jobs, solve problems, and apply knowledge to new situations; and the Hay Number Perception Test and Number Series Completion Test, which measure whether candidates can recognize and work with complex numerical sequences—critical skills for people working with large amounts of inventory. “The heart of our business is inventory management,” Coulter says of his reliance on the Hay number tests.
“There are dozens of different product lines and they all get cycled through on different schedules—some are restocked monthly, while others are quarterly, or annually, and they are all tracked through software programs that link stock to shipping and receiving.”
The IFA team is constantly managing inventory to make sure every product line is appropriately stocked and shipped on schedule, and even small mistakes, such as transposing a product number incorrectly in shipping documents, can result in customers getting the wrong orders and inventory supplies getting out of whack. “If our tracking system isn’t accurate, the business doesn’t work,” he says. “Accuracy is everything for us.”
Coulter relies on his employees to make sure the inventory process doesn’t break down, and the Hay Tests, which each take only four minutes to complete, give him the confidence he seeks. He looks for candidates who can score close to 160 on the Number Perception Test, which indicates a very high accuracy rate with numbers. “By using the Hay tests, we can isolate people who don’t have the ability to work with numbers,” he says.
It also means he can take people right off the street, with no experience or résumé, and determine in a matter of minutes whether they are a good fit. “If they score above a 160 on the Hay, we know they can do the job.” Along with the Hay tests, Coulter uses the WPT to measure candidates for key positions. He knows that there are extraordinarily bright candidates out there, and he uses the WPT to find them. “In our part of the country we have more college graduates than we have jobs available,” he says. “That means we can keep our standards high.”
Coulter prefers to hire candidates who score at least a 24 on the WPT, which is Wonderlic’s suggested minimum score for customer service representatives. The national average on the WPT across all jobs is 21. Coulter says he regularly is able to select from candidates who score in the low 30s—slightly higher than the average score for college graduates. “Candidates who score higher on the WPT are much better at dealing with customers, and they are much better at multi-tasking,” he says. “If candidates score too low, they have a harder time reasoning out tasks as they need to be done, and they have a harder time serving customers.”
Coulter is so confident that the Wonderlic tests work that he will not fill any key position at IFA without first putting the candidates through testing. “Wonderlic tests take the bias out of hiring,” he says. “It’s a practical approach to screening and it gives us the upper hand.”
