A Prevue Case Study: Reducing Turnover with Assessments

Using psychometric assessments like Prevue in the hiring process enables hiring managers to focus their limited time and resources on those applicants who are more likely to exhibit the attributes that are typical of top performers.

As many of you would be familiar with, Mindset are the Australian distributors for Prevue HR Systems; a system that we not only recommend as a tool for our clients, but also use as an integral part of our own sourcing and selection activities.

I wanted to share this recent case study from Prevue HR Systems, about an organisation in the US who had a turnover rate of 41.4%. Using Prevue Assessments, this organisation has reduced that to less than 20% within two years.

The company: The client was a financial institution based in the Pacific North West that specializes in automobile financing and leasing as well as consumer debt consolidation. The collection department had 300 collection agents that struggled under an employee turnover rate of 41.4%. This high turnover rate required the company to be recruiting 365 days a year.

The Need: First and foremost, the company needed to reduce turnover. At the same time they wanted to hire consistently better people without increasing their time or cost to hire. The company had tried several tools and programs to remedy the problem but none had proved successful.

The Solution: As the first step in developing a hiring solution, the Prevue Consultant worked with the company to identify the employees who best represented the profile of a top performing Collection Agent. The selected employees were invited to take all three Prevue Assessments, namely the Prevue Abilities Test, the Prevue Interest Inventory and the Prevue Personality Inventory. At the same time four of the company’s best supervisors were invited to complete an online job survey that asked specific questions regarding the demands and expectations of a collection agent.

Both the testing of the top performing employees and the completion of the job surveys were administered online using the Prevue Assessment System. Once completed, the assessment results of the job incumbents and the surveys from the supervisors were analyzed to provide a Prevue Job Fit Benchmark for the collection agent position within this company’s unique environment. This benchmark defined the preferred profile of abilities, interests and personality traits of a collection agent.

Typically a Prevue Job Fit benchmark is used by a customer to identify the best or most ideal candidate for a job opening and is quite specific or restricted. As with many high turnover positions the types of persons who perform well in the collection agent position are more diverse. In these cases the benchmark is used more for screening than selection. The company needed to identify and screen out applicants who were not likely a good fit to the demands of the collection agency position or the company’s work environment.

The Prevue consultant therefore widened the benchmark for most of the abilities, interests and personality trait measures that are addressed by the Prevue Assessments. At the same time, those measures that were proven to be more significant predictors of top performers were identified and emphasized in the company’s hiring process. Although this modified benchmark qualified a higher number of applicants it was effective at distinguishing those who did not exhibit a basic level of job fit. This approach enabled the hiring manager and her recruiters to focus their limited time and resources on those applicants who were more likely to exhibit the attributes that are typical of top performers. Thus the company was effectively using the Job Fit benchmark to identify poor fit applicants before devoting time to an in depth review of those applicants’ resumes and conducting interviews.

The company implemented a policy to test every applicant and interview only those who exhibited an 80% match to the benchmark. Further, the hiring manager and her recruiting staff used the Interview questions provided in the Prevue Selection report to focus quickly on areas where an applicant might be challenged by the demands of the position.

This revised screening and interviewing process resulted in reduction of the turnover rate for the position to 31% in 6 months. After 2 years the collection department had reduced their turnover to less than 20% and attributed the implementation of the Prevue Assessments System as one of the major contributors to this success.

Mike Campanella & Ken Danderfer
Prevue HR Systems

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