Resources
The Client
Ameritas Life Insurance Corporation has been meeting its customers’ insurance needs from its headquarters in Lincoln, Nebraska since 1887. The company, which today employs 1,000 people, offers a diverse range of products, including life insurance, annuities, investments, retirement plans, banking, dental and eye plans, and worksite benefits.
The Product
Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT): The WPT 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.
Research has proven that cognitive ability, or general intelligence, is the single greatest predictor of job success—for any position. More effective than resumés, education, references, or interviews; cognitive ability testing gives you the objective information you need to make the right hiring decision.
The WPT takes only 12 minutes to complete. It 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 you 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 your position.
The WPT Is Invaluable in Hiring Salespeople for a Diverse Company
Would a stellar salesperson working in the showroom of a car dealership be similarly great if his product was computer hardware instead of cars? Some people would say “yes” while others believe it’s a matter of how well that salesperson understands the product and the people that buy it. Someone who can charm car buyers in a showroom might not do as well in technical sales to IT professionals.
So, what do you do if your company sells a whole host of different products, and you need to hire great salespeople for each of them? Ameritas Life Insurance Corporation, headquartered in Lincoln, NE, solves this dilemma by giving the Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT) to every sales applicant.
“We use the WPT because our product line is so diverse and there is so much specific learning required to be successful in each position.”
— Barb McIntyre, Human Resources Specialist
“We use the WPT because our product line is so diverse and there is so much specific learning required to be successful in each position,“ says Barb McIntyre, Human Resources Specialist for Ameritas, whose group hires approximately 30 salespeople each year. “We use the WPT as a benchmark for all positions, to ensure that each candidate has the basic cognitive skills required for the position.“
Barb explains that the insurance industry today is so diverse and so specific; it’s not simply a matter of choosing whether to insure life, health, car, home, or all of the above. There are plans tailored to nearly every industry, option and eventuality. As diverse as the insurance industry is, it’s also fiercely competitive. That’s why it’s critical to hire sales people that can learn quickly and hit the ground running—and then—run a marathon. These are the people that literally keep the insurance business alive.
Ameritas, which employs 1,000 people in its busy Nebraska headquarters, has a myriad of insurance plans from which to choose, and the company hires salespeople for each type of plan. For example, Ameritas has a division that deals only with selling retirement plans (401ks, investment options, etc.) to diverse clients in small business, large business and everything in-between. Ameritas also employs insurance brokers and dealers who buy and sell stocks and bonds. It has departments for life insurance, annuities, term insurance; a department that specifically deals with benefits that companies can offer their
workers over and above their current insurance offerings; and a dental plan and a vision (optical) plan division. All of those divisions and departments have salespeople that focus specifically on their niche and that deal with the constant changes in the industry.
“Today, we won’t hire anyone who doesn’t score close to our benchmarks,” McIntyre says. “It’s a great indicator of whether or not they have the cognitive ability to do this job.”
Because there are different profiles for salespeople who succeed in selling retirement plan management to large companies than for sales people that sell optical insurance to small businesses, McIntyre relies on the WPT to tell her whether or not an applicant is a good fit for the specific position for which they’re applying.
“Take the retirement plans department as an example,” McIntyre says. “We’ve got salespeople that sell us as the best company to manage a business’ retirement plans, like pensions, investments and such.” That salesperson must be creative, going out into the marketplace, developing relationships, making contacts and finally making those sales, while an internal salesperson acts as a touchpoint for clients and handles the procedural needs of those clients after the sales are made. Both roles require very different sets of aptitudes and abilities to be successful.
To make the best fit between the salesperson and the sales role, McIntyre gives every potential salesperson the WPT and uses an internal baseline of her existing team’s scores to see who measures up. “We started benchmarking our great people internally by having them take the test, and we noticed a trend,” she says. They saw that the star salespeople in each department were getting test scores in the same general range. That similarity gave McIntyre the formula she needed to assess sales candidates. “Today, we won’t hire anyone who doesn’t score close to our benchmarks,” she says. “It’s a great indicator of whether or not they have the cognitive ability to do this job.”
If an applicant passes the WPT to McIntyre’s satisfaction, she will then interview the applicant. Using the WPT scores to weed out undesirable applicants saves her considerable time in the interview process, because she’s interviewing only the people she knows have the ability to perform successfully.
“It does save time, because I’m not wasting it interviewing people who don’t have the basic qualifications for the job,” she says.
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