The Client
Founded by Jay Lehman in 1995 to serve the Amish community, Lehman’s carries thousands of non-electric products, including hand-powered kitchen appliances, water pumps, gas refrigerators, a huge selection of wood and cook stoves, and hundreds of other hard-to-find items. Lehman’s has nearly 100 employees who oversee the company’s two retail operations in northeastern Ohio, as well as its catalog and Website sales.
The Solution
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, automatically eliminates a significant portion of the applicant pool enabling recruiters to focus their time on those candidates most likely to succeed.
Employee Reliability Inventory (ERI): The ERI is a risk management tool that helps recruiters determine which individuals are most likely to become valued employees rather than organizational liabilities. This risk management tool evaluates freedom from disruptive behavior, alcohol and illegal drug use, as well as courtesy, emotional maturity, conscientiousness, trustworthiness, long-term job commitment, and safe job performance. The ERI also provides follow-up questions that recruiters use during interviews and reference checks to help clarify an individual’s assessment results.
Hay Aptitude Test Battery: Lehman’s uses the Hay Aptitude Tests to measure the analytical and critical thinking skills of all job candidates. The Hay Aptitude Tests help recruiters identify those candidates who can manage large volumes of detail work with few errors. Aligning the right candidates with these core positions helps improve their 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 an ability to recognize, comprehend and make inferences from numerical relationships.
Amish Retailer Makes Testing a Tradition
While Lehman’s may sell old-fashioned merchandise to Amish communities, and pride itself on its small town values, the company takes a cutting edge approach to screening job candidates. Lehman’s, which sells non-electric products, such as wood burning stoves and hand-crank blenders, uses three Wonderlic tests to evaluate all candidates before making any hiring decisions.Lehman’s HR Manager, Nancy Menotti, has come to rely on the Hay Tests, the Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT) and the Employee Reliability Inventory (ERI) as part of her evaluation strategy. The test scores help her get a feel for candidates’ skills and their attitudes about work. “These tests are definitely valuable to our hiring process,” she says.
Once Menotti prescreens applicants, qualified candidates are then invited to take a series of tests, often testing up to 12 candidates at once.
She begins with the Hay Tests, which is a battery of short number and name recognition measurements that test candidates’ analytical and critical thinking skills. She follows that immediately with the WPT, which is a 50-question test, measuring the candidates’ ability to learn specific jobs, solve problems, and understand instructions. Both tests are timed and together take about half an hour to complete. Menotti then takes their answers back to her desk to score while candidates complete the ERI, which evaluates whether candidates are conscientious, trustworthy and emotionally mature.
Once Menotti scores the ERI, she enters the results into an ongoing spreadsheet that includes the scores of all potential candidates and records who was hired and who wasn’t. She uses the spreadsheet as a comparative tool, noting which applicant scores line up with the scores of successful employees. “The Wonderlic test scores show us who falls in line with other people in the same positions,” she says. “That’s a pretty good way to measure candidates.”
But she doesn’t use any of the test scores as a final judgment; instead she sees them as a guide to shaping the rest of her evaluation. “We don’t see the test scores as black and white, they are just another variable.”
She uses the ERI test, which asks an applicant questions that could indicate disruptive workplace behavior, as a guide for interviews. Based on their responses, she builds questions around areas that might indicate red flags, such as a potential for alcohol abuse or a lack of long-term job commitment. If those applicants are hired, they are closely watched during their initial 90-day evaluation period for signs of errant conduct.
She does have minimum low scores in mind for the WPT and Hay Tests that she tends to adhere to, however the scores alone don’t determine whether or not a person is hired.
Menotti is willing to consider why a person got a low score and whether that’s a reflection of abilities or circumstances. This is especially important because in the rural Ohio communities where Lehman’s stores are based, many of the job applicants are Amish and Mennonite. The children in those communities are rarely educated past eighth grade and they lead sheltered lives that can affect the way they answer questions on some of the tests. “Some of them do poorly because of their background, but they turn out to be quite smart,” she says.
