The Client
Founded in 1982 by college student Fred Meyers, The Queensboro Shirt Company has become the nation’s leading source for high-quality, customized, embroidered apparel at affordable prices. With a four-piece minimum order, free embroidery, and a ten-year unconditional guarantee, Queensboro provides businesses, institutions, organizations, and individuals with a wide variety of custom-embroidered products. Queensboro’s low minimum order, fast turn-around, and personalized service have fostered long-term relationships with many of America’s best-known companies and organizations. Queensboro is headquartered in Wilmington, NC.
The Solution
Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT): The Wonderlic Personnel Test is a short-form measure of cognitive ability designed for simple administration and interpretation. The WPT is a crucial component of any successful hiring program. More effective than résumés, education, references, or interviews; cognitive ability testing gives you the objective information employers need to make the right hiring decision.
The WPT takes only 12 minutes to complete and accurately measures a candidate’s ability to:
- Learn a specific job.
- Solve problems.
- Understand instructions.
- Apply knowledge to new situations.
- Benefit from specific job training.
- Be satisfied with a particular job.
The WPT enables companies to match people with positions that suit their learning speed and aptitude. The Wonderlic Hire Results process combines research information from the U.S. Department of Labor with an analysis of your specific job to establish an appropriate minimum score for each position.
How Wonderlic Helps an Entrepreneur Hire the Right Staff
Often, when an entrepreneur comes up with a great idea for a business, he or she hasn’t had much experience in actually running one. The hottest chef in town who opens a restaurant, for example, knows his way around the kitchen, but knows very little about managing staff, accounting, or advertising. That sort of experience tends to be hard-won for many new entrepreneurs, through trial and error on the job.
That’s exactly what happened when college student Fred Meyers started a logo embroidery business, The Queensboro Shirt Company, in 1982. He got the idea from the Izod and Ralph Lauren craze in the early 1980s, when the hottest fashion statement around was a cotton t-shirt with a polo pony or an alligator emblazoned on the chest.
“I thought it would be great to take fabulous cotton polo shirts like the ones Izod and Lauren were selling and put different kinds of logos onto them,” Meyers says. His great idea caught on. Nearly 25 years later, Queensboro employs 55 people and is known for its high-quality work.
However, Meyers soon found that coming up with a great business idea was the easy part. Creating a successful, stable company was the challenge. One of the main problems Meyers faced was hiring the right people for the job.
“Like many entrepreneurs, I thought I was a great judge of talent,” Meyers says. “I hired on instinct, and despite being proven wrong time and time again, I kept on believing it.”The result was an unstable workforce with a very high rate of turnover.
“I was hiring the wrong people,” Meyers explains. “Finally, in 1998, somebody told me about Wonderlic. I was initially skeptical—‘Could a test really help me hire better workers?’—but I decided to give it a try. It didn’t take long for me to see that a fancy résumé paired with a low score on the Wonderlic test didn’t add up to a good hire.”
Meyers began using the Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT), a 12-minute, timed test that measures a candidate’s cognitive ability, to hire customer service representatives who handle custom orders and deal with questions and problems that arise. He was so pleased with the results of those initial hires that he began using the WPT for all employees, including managers, accountants, and the operators who run the high-tech, computer-based embroidery machines.
Since he began using the WPT in hiring, he has seen a dramatic reduction in turnover.
“Before I started using the Wonderlic test, I didn’t have a single employee who had been with me for three years or more,” Meyers says. “Today, I have several employees who have been with me for a decade. The average tenure of employees is four years.”
Specifically, in 1998, only 50 percent of Meyers’ employees had been with the company for more than one year. Today, that percentage has shot up to 90 percent.
“There’s cost with turnover in terms of time spent in the hiring and training process, but there’s another cost that people don’t often talk about,” Meyers says. “There’s the psychological cost to morale in the workplace. When people see their co-workers coming and going like there’s a revolving door, it’s really bad for morale. Since I’ve been using the WPT in hiring, my employees see a workplace where people stay. That’s so important.”
Meyers credits the WPT with helping him find the best employees for the job.
“I’m a big fan of Wonderlic,” Meyers says. “The main thing is, I’ve learned that if a person doesn’t have the basic skills to do the job, all the other things like a great attitude and a wonderful personality don’t matter. Using the WPT eliminates that question for me. I’m not saying, ‘This person seems right, but can they do the job?’ Now I know for sure.”
Meyers learned that lesson early on when he chose to ignore WPT scores, or skip that step in the process.
“Once, I didn’t give the WPT to someone I hired as a manager, thinking they were an absolute perfect fit. Big mistake,” he says. “This person ended up doing tremendous damage to the company. I won’t make that mistake again.”
Using the Wonderlic test has helped this entrepreneur become a more savvy business owner, creating a more stable, reliable workforce in the process.
