SITUATION

This health services client has 300 employees, 200 of which are in a high turnover job category. The turnover rate for this group was twenty percentage points above the industry average.

Considerable time and money was being spent interviewing and orienting applicants who when offered employment would not show up on the first day of work.

KEi was engaged to reduce the cost of this unwanted turnover.

ACTION

The client agreed to refine the applicant screening process. KEi recommended adding a standardized approach to screen-in only those candidates who match the basic attitude and behavioral criteria that is required to be successful in this work category.

KEi coached the client in the selection of the appropriate combination of KEi's web-based attitude/behavior screening questionnaires to be given to all job applicants as one of the earliest steps in the screening process.

The Human Resources staff had no difficulty implementing the online questionnaires and the time required for each applicant to complete them was only 15 to 20 minutes..

Secure, confidential results of the scoring were available to the Human Resources representative immediately after each applicant finished answering the final question.

The client was instructed in the interpretation of the score and to use the score as one of several criteria for making their ultimate hiring decision…never saying to an applicant that they were not being hired because of the questionnaire score.

The client measured the success of this screening process by conducting an internal comparison of the actual performance record of those hired that had been scored RECOMMENDED by the screening questionnaire vs. those that had been scored NOT RECOMMENDED.

RESULT

After six months of implementing the online screening questionnaire, more than one-third of all applicants had received NOT RECOMMENDED scores.

66% of the RECOMMENDED candidates were still working vs. 47% of the NOT RECOMMENDED candidates.

6.5% of those RECOMMENDED did not finish orientation or did not show up for work vs. 40% of those NOT RECOMMENDED.

2.5 % of those RECOMMENDED had later been dismissed for cause vs. 13% of those NOT RECOMMENDED.

In the second six-month period, the client stopped hiring applicants with a NOT RECOMMENDED or a MARGINAL score. This saved a considerable HR department time that was re-directed to other priority duties.

The investment of less than $2,500, that paid for the cost of the questionnaires plus the time of the HR administrator, returned a savings of more than $60,000 by eliminating the orientation for those applicants who received a NOT RECOMMENDED score.

This translates to an impressive Return on Investment ratio of 24:1.

In addition to these continuing financial benefits that the client enjoys, improved employee morale was evident due to reduced frustration with the performance of new recruits.

Attitude/Behavior Screening is one of four reliable cost effective tools that KEi offers in its web-based Hiring Solutions Package to improve the workplace and increase profits.