True or False: You're Hiring the Right People

True or false: Slow people irritate you. you do things carefully so you don't make mistakes. You don't act polite when you don't want to. You can easily cheer up and forget a problem. Statements drawn from a self-help personality quiz? Far from it. They are excerpts from four different employment questionnaires developed by Unicru, an application-service provider that's based in Beaverton, Oregon. As part of a larger "Smart Assessment," a patent-pending artificial-intelligence program, Unicru's questionnaires screen for management, dependability, customer-service, and salesmanship potential among what may be the most valuable employee pool: hourly workers. Such companies as Bennigan's, Target, and Universal Studios use Unicru's personality-assessment tool to fill their ranks with hourly employees who are better qualified and more likely to stay with a company.

"Our system allows you to clone your best, most reliable people," says industrial psychologist David Scarborough, who helped develop the current set of assessment tests that Unicru administers for its clients. Taking one of the tests is simple: Sit down at a computer in a mall or retail store, spend half an hour typing in answers to questions about everything from your job experience to your hourly availability, respond to a few personality-related statements, hit "send," and then wait to hear from a hiring manager. Ten minutes (or less) after you've completed the application, the hiring manager receives a report (via email or fax) that gives you a green, yellow, or red light. In many cases, green gets you an automatic follow-up interview. Yellow offers discretion for the hiring manager and provides suggestions for particular areas of the application in which to probe further. Red is usually an automatic discard.

This automated process has helped Unicru's customers reduce their hiring cycle (the time from the initial job interview to a new employee's start date) by an average of 7 days -- cutting it from 10 days to just 3. In the case of Blockbuster, chief operations officer Mike Roemer estimates even better results. "We've taken a two-week hiring process and brought it down to 72 hours," says Roemer. "Given that we hire, on average, one employee per store per month -- and we have about 4,300 company-owned stores in the United States -- this is a huge improvement."

As useful as the Unicru tool has been for Blockbuster's hiring process, Roemer prefers to think of the system as a vital investment for employee retention. "All retailers face a recurring dilemma: how to hire the best possible people while lowering retention problems," he says. "But with so many stores, Blockbuster faces that issue constantly. We not only need to hire people who like movies and who like to serve people's entertainment needs, but we also need to find hourly workers who will stay on as assistant managers and store managers."

Now that the holidays have passed, employers may think that hiring hourly employees is no longer an urgent need. In fact, based on last year's statistic, retail turnover for 2002 will average 130% to 150%. In light of this, Unicru's most impressive achievement is a 20% to 30% reduction in the turnover rate that the company secures for its first-year clients.

How do they do it? Here is the breakdown of the five ingredients for recruitment and retention success, Unicru style.

1. Walk in your employees' shoes on a regular basis.

The best thing about hourly employment is that we've all been there. Back in your hourly wage days, did you wish that your boss cared more about your opinions? Make feedback forms a key part of the job-review process. Were you often scrambling for cash? Make it easy for employees to take on extra shifts.

"Understanding the needs of the people whom you're hiring and how they will work with you in the future is vital," says Bob Gregg, Unicru's CEO. "This is so important that we put it on our business cards." He's not kidding: Right under "Chief Executive Officer" on Gregg's card is the statement "I used to run the corrugator in a box factory."

2. Job performance and tenure do not correlate.

According to Scarborough, the most important myth to debunk is that high performers are more-reliable, longer-term employees. "It's just not true," says Scarborough. "There are high and low performers at both ends of the tenure continuum." The reality is that an employee can be extremely capable of carrying out a job, and might even do it quickly and without making a lot of mistakes. But if that person is bored or doesn't like his coworkers, it will only be a matter of time before he's out the door.