The Client
Scott Chevrolet is one of the largest auto dealerships in the Emmaus, Penn. area with 130 employees. The dealership is located on the busy Lehigh Street Auto Mile in the company of a dozen or more competing dealerships.
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 of cognitive ability 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 only those candidates who are most likely to succeed.
The WPT Keeps Scott Chevy on Top of Fierce Competition
In a competitive automotive marketplace like Emmaus, Penn., where the Lehigh Street Auto Mile is home to a dozen or more dealerships, it’s critical to have star employees at every level of the business, from accountants and finance people, to service technicians and the sales force. For a dealership to be successful in an environment in which customers can literally walk next door to a handful of competitors, everyone has to be firing on all cylinders every day—and be matched to the right jobs in the first place.
Hiring mistakes can and do send frustrated customers down the street. That’s why Scott Chevrolet, one of the largest dealerships in the Emmaus area with 130 employees, has been using the Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT) in all its hiring decisions for more than six years, according to Human Resources Manager Mary Ellen Solomon. The 12-minute timed test accurately measures a candidate’s ability to learn a specific job, solve problems, understand instructions and apply knowledge to new situations.
“The WPT tells me many things about job applicants,” she says. “Can they take direction? Will they listen and learn? Are they intelligent enough to handle the job?” Those are critical skills for Scott’s employees, says Solomon, who administers the WPT to all applicants, roughly 100 per year.
Instead of relying on one minimum score, Solomon bases her ideal test scores on the jobs themselves. “Hiring is complicated because all of our people, including salespeople, mechanics, and office staff, need different skills-sets,” she says. “People need different levels of intelligence for different jobs. If they’re detailing cars or doing maintenance work their math ability is relatively unimportant. But salespeople need to add and subtract.”The knowledge gleaned from the WPT is vital she says, because in a busy, ultra-competitive environment like the Lehigh Street Auto Mile, nobody has time to train and retrain, hire and rehire. “If it is difficult to train a person, or if a person can’t read once you hire them, it’s a problem,” says Solomon.
In addition to the information she learns from the test scores, Solomon has discovered an unexpected side benefit to using the WPT. “The way candidates react to the test itself is an indicator of future behavior,” she says. “If people are annoyed or impatient about taking the test, or they don’t listen to my directions, that tells me something about how they’re going to behave on the job.”Solomon acknowledges that people react differently to testing— some have test anxiety or just plain don’t perform up to their own abilities. “Taking a test like this can be intimidating for some of our applicants, so I try to take the pressure out of it for them,” she says. “I tell them not to worry about finishing absolutely every question on the test and that their test score will remain confidential.”
In fact, she doesn’t share the test scores with the employees she hires, or with the ones she doesn’t. “I just don’t feel that’s necessary,” she says. “It’s part of the hiring process, and when the hiring’s over, we put that away.”
