Resources
The Client
Apple Chevrolet is a busy 100-employee dealership that sells a full line of Chevys, Acuras and Subarus in York, Pennsylvania. Apple uses the CPP and the WPT in hiring all types of employees, from the sales force to clerical workers.
The Products
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.
CPP test results can be used to match candidates’ personalities against a custom profile of their highest performers, optimizing the person-to-job fit.
The CPP provides summarized reports allowing hiring managers to quickly identify candidates with the best chance of performing successfully on the job.
Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT): The 50-question WPT 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.
Wonderlic’s has the largest database of cognitive ability scores by job title in the private sector.
CPP and WPT Help Apple Chevrolet Hire Stars
These days, it takes more than a little creativity to make good hiring decisions. Recruiters, who have few avenues for gathering real data about job candidates, are hamstrung by the legal limitations on the types of questions that candidates may be asked. Even such simple questions as to whether a person is married or has children places employers at risk. “In an interview, there are a lot of questions you just can’t ask anymore. So you’re basically hiring a person blind,” says Sheri Roseberry, Human Resources Manager at Apple Chevrolet, a bustling, busy Acura and Subaru dealer in York, PA. And references from previous employers are of little help either. “Job references don’t mean as much as they used to,” she says. “They’re non-specific. Because of legal considerations, former employers can only tell you that the person served from this date to that date. They can’t really tell you what he or she was like as an employee.”
“In an interview, there are a lot of questions you just can’t ask anymore. So you’re basically hiring a person blind.”
— Sheri Roseberry, Human Resources Manager for Apple Chevrolet
Roseberry understands that in an auto dealership, where people are making major purchasing decisions and trust is critical to cementing the final deal, every employee she hires impacts organizational success. From the salespeople who work with the customers from the moment they walk through the door, to the maintenance team who care for the vehicles, to the finance or accounting personnel who write up the sales, each employee impacts the customers’ perception of the dealership. One bad employee could send those customers to the competition. With all that at stake, Roseberry is not willing to make hiring decisions based upon weak or incomplete information.
Seven years ago, the lack of access to applicant background information forced Roseberry to rethink her approach to evaluating job candidates for the 100 employee dealership. “We needed to come up with some way to predict how individuals would actually perform on the job.” That need led Roseberry to Wonderlic in 1998, where she found the Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT) and Comprehensive Personality Profile (CPP), which she now uses regularly in hiring new people for any position at the dealership. The WPT is a short, timed measure of cognitive ability that tells Roseberry whether a candidate is able to do the job.
The CPP is a personality profiling system that defines a candidate in terms of job-related qualities, such as emotional intensity, intuition, and assertiveness. That lets her know if they have the motivation, maturity and attitude to be successful. “By using the Wonderlic tests combined with interviews, and a person’s resumé and experience, we’ve come up with a solid method of predicting how a candidate will perform on the job,” she says.
Roseberry uses the CPP when hiring employees who are responsible for generating income, such as sales and service employees. These individuals become the all-important “face” of the dealership and they need to represent character traits like trust, enthusiasm and drive. Buying a car is a major financial decision in most people’s lives. It’s critical to have the right person on the sales floor to help them with that decision. “The CPP shows me the strengths and weaknesses of those applicants,” she says. “Some weaknesses, you can live with. Some, you can’t.”
In a busy car dealership like Apple, there are, of course, many employees that deal directly with the public. But much goes on behind the scenes as well. There are accountants and finance people, clerical staff, technical workers and others. For these positions, Roseberry uses the WPT. “The WPT shows me how well candidates process information,” she says. “It tells me whether they have the mental capacity to do the job they’re applying for. Can they only be trained to do routine tasks, or are they capable of performing tasks that are more complex? The test tells me all of that.”
“The fact that Wonderlic has been doing this for so long – they have years of compiled information and data behind them – was very important to me.”
— Sheri Roseberry
Testing is a cost-effective, easy solution that delivers the information she just couldn’t get from other sources. But the tests alone weren’t the sole reason Roseberry chose Wonderlic. She based her final decision on the company’s impressive track record. “The fact that Wonderlic has been doing this for so long—they have years of compiled information and data behind them—was very important to me,” she says. “They help you understand what you’re testing for, and what the test scores mean, because Wonderlic has all those years of data to compare with your job applicants. If someone just developed a test last year, you wouldn’t really know how solid it is and they wouldn’t have the history to back up the test.”
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