The Client
Peoples Flower Shops is a second-generation, family owned, retail flower company, that has been operating since 1944.
It has 53 employees with eight shops across Albuquerque, New Mexico as well as an order department and wholesale facility.
Peoples Flower Shops offers one of the Southwest’s largest selections of beautiful fresh cut flowers, plants, and unique containers that together make a visual statement.
The Solution
Comprehensive Personality Profile® (CPP®): If candidates score high enough on the WPT, they complete the Comprehensive Personality Profile (CPP), which measures key traits as they relate to job performance.
The 88-question personality profiling system describes a candidate’s character in terms of job-related strengths and weaknesses including: emotional intensity, intuition, sensitivity, assertiveness, and motivation.
The CPP test data helps recruiters match candidate personalities against a custom profile of their highest performers, optimizing the person-to-job fit.
When candidates complete the test, Wonderlic returns a comprehensive report outlining their raw scores, where they fit on a scale of ideal performers, and an explanation of what these scores mean.
They also receive a one-page summary, highlighting key scores so that the office manager can see, at a glance, how well the applicant did.
Smart Picking Reduces Florist’s Turnover by 25%
Bill Dow has evaluated a lot of employment tests. As the general manager of Peoples Flower Shops, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he needs to be sure that every person he hires not only fits the company culture, but also has the emotional skill set to succeed in the position in which they are placed. “Peoples Flower is a customer service centered business,” Dow says “We aren’t just dealing in flowers, we are dealing with people’s emotions. When you buy flowers you are sending a message that says ‘I love you’, or ‘I’m sorry’. Our service people need to be in tune to a customer’s emotional needs or they won’t come back.”
When Dow is hiring customer service representatives and call center personnel, their emotional profile is critical. He knew he couldn’t make an informed choice based on interviews alone, and after evaluating many of the assessments on the market he discovered that few of them deliver the kind of information he needs to make the best choice for his company and his people. “Most other tests only address trust issues, drug use, or intelligence,” he says. “That didn’t serve our purpose.”
He needed a tool that gave him insight into how a person would respond to customers.
I don’t need to know who has the highest cognitive ability, but I do need to know if they are sensitive, tolerant, and task-oriented,” he says. “The Wonderlic Comprehensive Personality Profile (CPP) tells me that.”
The CPP is an 88-question, personality profiling system that describes a candidate’s character in terms of job-related strengths and weaknesses including emotional intensity, intuition, sensitivity, assertiveness, and motivation.
Dow gives the test to any applicant he is seriously considering hiring. When they complete the test, Wonderlic returns a comprehensive report to Dow, outlining the candidate’s raw scores, where they fit on a scale of ideal performers, and an explanation of what these numbers mean.
He also receives a one-page summary, highlighting key scores, so that he can see at a glance where the applicant’s strengths are and place them accordingly. For example, if the CPP results tell him someone is sensitive and task oriented, he might place them at a store that’s having operational problems, he says. “That way they can work with customers and help reorganize the system.”
Similarly if someone’s results show an aloofness toward other’s needs, a low drive for results or a lack of self-motivation, it’s a red flag that they will not handle customers effectively in any role.
“When you talk to someone for 45 minutes they’ll be on their best behavior. But once I read their CPP profile I know what I need to be concerned about,” he says.
The CPP also verifies how much candidates know about themselves. “A candidate may say they are assertive but then the scores show that’s not the case,” he says. “Or it may show they are distrustful without realizing it.”
Dow doesn’t use the CPP results as the final decision making tool, but he does bring applicants back to talk if any issues show up in their scores. “The CPP helps me address their issues. It allows me to be more open with them and helps us all communicate better.”
The CPP also helped Dow reduce turnover by 25 percent in the last two years. “Since implementing the CPP we’ve become a lot pickier about who we hire. It’s made a real difference.”
