Case Study: Trucking Company in the Southeast US

Problem
A different pre-employment test a trucking company in the Southeast US used for years had been unable to show meaningful results. When the trucking company’s HR lead met Optimize Hire reps at an iCIMS customer event in 2017, the choice was easy - a shorter test with proven results couldn’t hurt to try.

Process
This company was assigned our standard pre-employment test, built by Dr. Adam Grant during the founding of Optimize Hire. It has nine traits from published, peer-reviewed industrial and organizational psychology research and has shown consistently positive results across job types and industries.

This client had no specific goal in mind, just the knowledge that their money could be better spent with Optimize than their current assessment, at least on a trial run. That trial run turned into a years long partnership with multiple successful validation studies proving that a short, well-researched assessment could get the job done. 

This partnership was one of the first Optimize Hire had that lasted several years and included interest from the client to continuously monitor the assessment’s impact on hiring. This allowed us to complete a multi-year study showing how the assessment had a continual positive impact on hiring practices at this company over time.

Results

• High scorers were 21% less likely to turn over within six months than low scorers

• New employees had higher scores than the applicant population, showing that the tool was being used for hiring purposes and the above metric is within a restricted range

How we found this
Our partners at the Wharton School conducted a validation study to investigate how using the assessment at this trucking company improved hiring practices.

In this case, a validation study includes implementing the assessment in the hiring process, and then several months later looking at the real time results. We can see each candidate's Optimize Hire score and then look at how long they lasted in the job, controlling for promotion and terminations that can't be avoided (like an illness or a death in the family). We hold all of our studies to the rigorous scientific standard of 95% confidence, or a p-value of <.05. In this particular study, the p-value was .022, meaning we can be 97.8% confident that these results are not due to chance.

Are you interested in reducing turnover, improving performance and saving your company money? Optimize Hire creates behavioral assessments at a fraction of the cost of most of our competitors. Our tests are created and validated by experts from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and testing licenses include unlimited use. Request a demo here.