The Client
The Bell Group is one of New Mexico’s largest private employers, and has been a part of the business community of New Mexico since 1944. Founded by Saul Bell as a supplier of jewelry supplies to primarily Native American jewelry craftsmen, the company has grown to supply jewelers in every country though catalog sales, dealers and their own sales forces.
The Bell Group employs more than 500 associates in a variety of business areas including manufacturing, engineering and product development, distribution, supply chain management and purchasing, sales and marketing. Saul’s sons Hugh, Eddie and Alan own the company, and together with four other board members run the team-based company through their example of teamwork.
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.
Non-Traditional Workplace Culture Requires Critical Thinkers at All Levels
The corporate culture at The Bell Group, an industrial distributor of jewelry supplies to clients around the world, is uncommon for most employees. The company operates under “participative management.” Even though the Bell Group employs more than 500 associates in areas such as manufacturing, engineering, distribution, sales and marketing, corporate hierarchy is nearly non-existent and associates work on functional teams where every employee has equal status.
The teams supervise themselves, and employees are accountable to themselves, their team members and the company, says Margaret Xavier, one of the company’s personnel specialists. “Employees have a lot more freedom and autonomy but they are also required to do more and take greater responsibility.”
For example, each employee is expected to make decisions in response to customer needs, evaluate cost and profitability scenarios, and react to changing business drivers. “For a lot of employees used to working in other kinds of companies this is really different,” she says. “They either love it or they hate it.”
Distinguishing those people who will thrive in this unique business environment is vital to The Bell Group’s hiring strategy, which is why the company requires every applicant to take the Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT) in the early stages of recruiting, along with other screening tools. The WPT is a timed measure of basic skills such as problem solving and an ability to apply knowledge to new situations. “The people who do well in our company have higher critical thinking skills and the WPT identifies that,” Xavier says. Because employees at all levels need to understand and evaluate the impact their performance has on the company, it requires strong thinking abilities. For example, customer service representatives have to constantly evaluate the speed and accuracy of their customer interactions, and they have the freedom and responsibility to meet difficult-to-accommodate requests from customers. “Critical thinking ties into everything we do. It’s the way employees wrap their heads around problems and make them work for customers.”
In fact, the cognitive abilities of its employees and the way their use their skills to meet the needs of customers is what separates the Bell Group from its competition, Xavier notes. “Our people are willing to go the extra mile and have the ability to think outside of the box.”
The WPT, along with three other screening tests, have become powerful tools for The Bell Group, not only for identifying skilled employees, but also for screening out those applicants who are unlikely or unable to succeed in the environment. Up to 90 percent of applicants are eliminated based on their test scores. Xavier says of the company’s hiring process, “It narrows the candidate pool really quickly.”
That saves the whole company time and money because each work team makes its own hiring decisions. Xavier’s group does the initial screening, using the WPT and other tools to identify the top few candidates for each position. Those candidates are then interviewed by the entire team. “It costs so much to pull a whole team off the floor for interviews, we want to be sure that we are only sending people who are likely to work out,” she says. “If we didn’t use the WPT it would be difficult to know who would be a good fit.”
The strategy appears to be working. The company has never had a lay-off in its 59 years of operation, and it has less than 10 percent turnover, even in its warehouse and customer service centers. “Our screening process is a big part of that.”
