Major Retail Chain
The retail organization has more than 70 stores and 6,000 staff covering a large part of Canada. With their focus on providing superior customer service and a positive shopping experience for all their customers, the organization continually evaluates its recruitment and training processes.
Based on these priorities, they wanted a recruitment solution that would improve their screening for high quality candidates in all of their stores. They worked with Psychometrics Canada to develop an efficient and effective assessment process to identify candidates with better communication, customer service, teamwork and dependability who could also drive sales.
The organization identified the following key performance areas where successful employees excel:
The majority of these key areas are impacted by personality – those behavioural traits which are measured by the Work Personality Index. The validation study was complete to determine the likelihood that the Work Personality Index could identify candidates who will be productive, dependable, team players.
The study showed that the Work Personality Index traits correlate significantly with employees’ overall and specific areas of performance based on managers’ ratings. To help managers make selection decisions Psychometrics Canada developed a scoring algorithm that used candidates’ assessment results to calculate a Job Fit Score. Those with the highest Job Fit Scores were rated as much better in sales performance, customer service and dependability. High scorers also had much higher ratings on overall job performance, and were much more likely to be recognized as good hires.
Figure 1
Work Personality Index scales with the strongest relationship to job performance include Ambition, Initiative, Energy, Persistence, Attention to Detail, Rule Following and Dependability.
To help managers make selection decisions Psychometrics Canada developed a scoring algorithm that used candidates’ assessment results to calculate a Job Fit Score. The correlation between the Job Fit Score and employees overall rating of performance is .428. Figure 2 shows the average Job Fit Score for employees that were classified into 3 different performance groups. Those employees with the highest performance ratings had a significantly higher Job Fit Score than those employees whose performance was rated as unsatisfactory or good.
The Work Personality Index was then incorporated into the organizations’ applicant assessment and tracking system, allowing each store manager to easily administer the assessment to job candidates and view their candidates’ results. This integrated system also provided the head office with the ability to track results from each of the stores – giving them the opportunity to examine individual store activity, while also looking at overall assessment results for the entire organization – all from a central interface.
