The Client
Wheel City Auto Sales has been providing dependable and affordable transportation to thousands of customers since 1993. The dealership is one of the largest independent dealers in the Sioux Falls, SD, area, stocking a full line of SUVs, vans, cars, trucks and motorcycles. Through its exclusive lender, Auto Loan Acceptance Corp., the company provides financing for all credit histories.
The Solution
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. Wheel City Auto uses the CPP to hire some of its most important employees: its sales force. The company administers the test to the top five applicants for a sales job, usually about 25 to 30 per year.
The CPP test data allows recruiters to match candidates’ personalities against a custom profile of their highest performers, optimizing the person-to-job fit.
The assessment data is delivered to the hiring managers through summarized reports allowing them to quickly and decisively identify candidates who will achieve the greatest success in their culture.
The CPP is an Amazing Predictor of New Hire Success at Wheel City Auto
Like most entrepreneurs, Bruce Nerison, owner of Wheel City Auto in Sioux Falls, SD, takes hiring very seriously. It’s a well-considered leap of faith every time anyone says those two little words, “you’re hired”, but it’s even riskier for Nerison because his policy is to not hire any salespeople who come to him with experience selling cars for other dealers.
“I don’t want to be put in the position of having to retrain someone into our way of doing things,” Nerison says. “It’s much easier to teach someone from the ground up than to retrain them.”Wheel City is one of the largest and busiest auto dealers in the Sioux Falls area, stocking a full line of vans, SUVs, cars, trucks and motorcycles. It’s important to Nerison to make the right hiring decisions to keep his successful business humming along. Yet, he’s ruling out candidates with a proven track record of success in his industry. So, how does he choose the right people? Along with interviews and references, Nerison relies on the Wonderlic Comprehensive Personality Profile (CPP).
The CPP is a personality profiling system that describes a candidate’s job-related strengths and weaknesses. It measures traits such as intuition, sensitivity, assertiveness and recognition motivation.Nerison has been using the CPP for three years, ever since a colleague at a convention of car dealers told Nerison about his own success with the test. Nerison thought it sounded like it would help to predict good hires, so he decided to give it a try. It has worked far better than he ever thought it would. He says the results of the CPP are nothing short of astounding. “The CPP is amazingly accurate. I mean, it’s weird how accurate it is. I’ve seen it, over and over again. An accountant is going to score very differently than a good sales person. Are we really that predictable? The answer is, yes.”
Before he gave the CPP to a single job candidate, Nerison first asked his existing star employees to take the test. He uses their test scores as a benchmark to see how well potential hires stack up against his best performers. For Nerison, the closer those potential hires get to his stars’ scores, the better. “I want people to have high emotional intensity, high trust, and a lot of drive,” he says. “But, if they score too high on emotional intensity, they’re the ones who go from job to job to job, every time they think the grass might be greener. I don’t want that, either. So this test is really valuable for predicting who is going to stay put for awhile and do a great job for me.”
Now he relies on the CPP to help him make his final selections. “When I’ve got a job opening, I usually narrow the candidates down to the top five, and then give those candidates the CPP,” he says. “Everyone is going to put on their best face in an interview. Everyone is going to really try to look good and talk a good game. But without that proven track record in the car business, how do I know that they really have the drive to succeed? The CPP figures that out for me.”
The proof of his success with the CPP shows in the salespeople Nerison sees every day on his sales floor. “We don’t have a lot of turnover here,” he says. “That’s because we hire the right people who are capable of doing the job. You can have the best work environment in the whole world, but if you hire the wrong people, you’ll have turnover. We don’t.”
Although the CPP is just one tool in Nerison’s hiring process (along with asking the right questions in an interview, a résumé and references), he believes it is invaluable and relies on its accuracy – he learned that lesson the hard way. “Once, I got down to the wire with a candidate who I really liked,” he admits. “But this person took the CPP and was totally opposite of our ideal profile. Totally opposite! On the other hand, this person looked and sounded good and we had all kinds of warm and fuzzy feelings. So I disregarded the test and went ahead and hired this candidate. Big mistake. It didn’t work out. I went back and looked at the profile and thought, ‘Well, it was all right there in front of me on this profile.’ I won’t make that mistake again.”
