Resources
The Client
The Arizona State Prison Complex, located in Phoenix, has 120 employees, of which 58 are prison guards. The facility has been contracted by the state to house people serving time for DUIs, driving under the influence, for as many as 450 male felons. The State of Arizona requires that new hire prison guards pass the Wonderlic Personnel Test.
The Product
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 cognitive ability, or ability to learn a specific job, solve problems, understand instructions and apply knowledge to new situations.
Cognitive ability is the strongest single predictor of job success. 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.
The WPT Helps Guards Keep the Peace at the Arizona State Prison Complex
Being a prison guard is one of the most difficult, stressful, thankless—and important—jobs on the planet. That’s why the state of Arizona requires that all potential new hires pass several aptitude, personality and psychological tests, including the Wonderlic Personnel Test (WPT), which it has used since 1999 as part of its selection criteria.
“In this type of hostile environment, a guard’s ability to react quickly and intelligently is critical.”
— Barbara Grammar, Human Resource Technician
The state requires testing because being a prison guard isn’t the type of job that just anyone can do, or more importantly, do well. Prison guards are public servants just like fire fighters or police officers, but there’s no glory to go with the job. It’s as vital as any job in public service, yet hardly anybody grows up dreaming of being a prison guard. Nobody’s making television dramas about heroic prison guards, no school children are taking field trips to see how prisons work, and—especially this—the people whose safety they’re ensuring on a daily basis never thank them for doing the job well. Day in and day out, these guards are exposed to harassment, insults and provocation from the very people they’re sworn to protect.
“We are required by the state to give the Wonderlic Personnel Test to everyone who we’re considering for this job,” says Barbara Grammar, Human Resource Technician for the Arizona State Prison Complex. The WPT is a 12-minute, timed test of a person’s cognitive ability. “We rely on those results. We look at the individual scores, compare all the scores, and if they don’t pass, we don’t consider them.”
The Arizona State Prison Complex, located in Phoenix, has 120 employees of which 58 are prison guards. The facility has been contracted by the state to house people serving time for DUIs (driving under the influence.) It’s such a big problem in Arizona—and around the country as well—that as many as 450 males are housed at the complex at any one time.
“These are felons, and it’s a hostile environment,” she explains. Inmates at the complex serve an average of six months to 10 years.
“I need to be able to predict their behavior on the job,” says Barbara Grammar “Can they deal with all the different kinds of situations that come up? The WPT tells me if they can.”
Barbara explains that she’s looking for several qualities in a good prison guard. First, they must be non-violent by nature in order to resist being provoked by hostile inmates. This is determined by a personality test. But equally as important is their ability to take direction, follow orders and respect authority. For this information she relies on the WPT.
The WPT score tells her whether or not her guard candidates have the cognitive ability to react well in a whole host of different, critical, and spur-of-the-moment circumstances that are often life-threatening. “I need to be able to predict their behavior on the job,” she says. “Can they deal with all the different kinds of situations that come up? The WPT tells me if they can.”
The WPT also tells her whether they will do well in training, which is critical, because the applicants come from all walks of life. “We even have a retired anesthesiologist who is now one of our guards,” she says.
Training consists of an eight-week course that includes weapons training and a self-defense course in addition to basic job training. Grammar needs to know that her applicants will respond well to training, that they can assimilate new information and be able to apply it on the job, even under stressful conditions. Unlike other tests, that measure what a person has already learned, the WPT tells her whether they can learn, and that’s the key.
It’s not like it is in other businesses, in which the WPT’s biggest advantage is saving considerable training time and trouble by determining beforehand whether or not the applicants have the capacity to learn and do the job. It’s not a matter of saving Grammar or the state of Arizona training time—it’s a matter of saving the lives of these guards. “If they don’t have the cognitive abilities to absorb the training fully, if they can’t think on their feet in a variety of circumstances, and if they can’t apply what they’ve learned to new and different situations, it could mean disaster. In this type of hostile environment, a guard’s ability to react quickly and intelligently is critical.”
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