The Client
Savannah Luggage Works is a USA manufacturer of custom, cut-and-sewn finished products, as well as components and assemblies for many OEM, military & industrial applications including travel, footwear, flooring, sports, and military.
SLW features 150,000 square feet of fabric fabricating facilities, 450 personnel, and state-of-the-art CAD/CAM cutting, sewing and fabricating equipment. The company is based in Vidalia, Georgia.
The Solution
Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT): The 50-question WPT 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. The WPT provides hiring managers with objective information and job-specific minimum scores that enable recruiters to focus their time on those candidates most likely to succeed. The WPT has been used by thousands of employers around the world.
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. The ERI 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.
Wonderlic Basic Skills Test (WBST): The WBST measures a candidate’s basic verbal and math skills and compares those scores to the minimum required for a specific job. Available individually or as a set, the WBST Verbal and Quantitative tests quickly and accurately measure skills required to succeed in nearly every occupation. WBST content and results are directly tied to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network (O*NET) and Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) General Educational Development Scales (GED). A grade-level equivalency score is also provided.
Comprehensive Personality Profile® (CPP®): 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 recognition motivation. The CPP test data allows recruiters to match candidates’ personalities against a custom profile of their highest performers, optimizing the person-to-job fit. CPP reports allow managers to quickly and decisively identify candidates who will achieve the greatest success in their position and corporate culture.
Intuitive Thinkers Need Not Apply
David Rice is no stranger to psychological tests. The Vice President of Operations for Savannah Luggage has always been personally interested in industrial psychology and puts great stock in the value of testing employees. For more than eight years Rice has relied on a series of Wonderlic tests to help him hire the best people for his manufacturing environment. “Wonderlic tests tell you a great deal about people that you wouldn’t otherwise know unless you hired them and then it’s too late.”
Savannah Luggage is a cut-and-sew manufacturer based in Vidalia, Georgia that began 25 years ago making high-end bags for premiere American luggage lines. When the bulk of their clients took their business overseas Savannah Luggage reinvented itself as a maker of military gear and now manufactures 75 percent of the body armor used by American soldiers, along with tents and load bearing equipment.
Rice has very specific expectations of the intelligence and personality of his manufacturing team and he puts them through rigorous testing before making hiring decisions.
When recruiters think an applicant might be a good fit for a position they give them the Wonderlic Personnel Test, a short-form test that measures a candidate’s ability to learn a specific job, solve problems, understand instructions, and apply knowledge to new situations. “Brains are important,” Rice says. “If someone doesn’t score well on the WPT we automatically reject that person.”
If they score high enough on the WPT, the applicant takes the Employee Reliability Inventory. The ERI is a risk management tool that determines which individuals may have disruptive behavior and measures traits such as courtesy, emotional maturity, conscientiousness, trustworthiness, long-term job commitment, and safe job performance. Rice considers candidates’ scores in all the ERI categories but is especially interested in scores for risk aversion, trust, and conscientiousness.
ERI scores may automatically eliminate candidates if they score wildly outside the range on the critical traits, he says, but it also helps him ask the right interview questions to explore why individuals scored the way they did. He’s hired some people who scored very low in the trust category, and he uses that knowledge to shape the way he works with them. He has a manager who scored a five on trust, which is extremely low. “It’s my goal in life to get her to trust me,” he jokes.
After passing the ERI, applicants for clerical positions take the Wonderlic Basic Skills Test on which they are required to achieve a 12th-grade score to pass. Finally, everyone takes the Comprehensive Personality Profile. The CPP describes a candidate’s character in terms of job-related strengths and weaknesses such as emotional intensity, intuition, sensitivity, assertiveness, and recognition motivation.
CPP scores are critical to Rice, who prefers people who have high analytical skills and low intuition. “High intuition is great if you’re in sales, but it has no place in manufacturing,” Rice says. “As a manufacturer, we encounter a number of problems that need to be solved every day. You need strong analytical skills for that.” The CPP has helped him identify those problem solvers and create a team of highly analytical thinkers.
“Wonderlic tests who you are at a gut level,” he adds. “The tests give me a window into who a person is.” And in an industry where many applicants’ previous employers have gone out of business, test scores are all he has to rely on. “Without references the tests become that much more important.”
While Rice has never measured the impact testing has had on turnover, he believes the Wonderlic tests have a significant impact on his ability to hire the right people. “Wonderlic tests are an accurate measure of how a person will perform,” he says. “If you aren’t using psychological testing for hiring, you don’t know who you are going to get.”
