It is quite possible that the applicant, besides being interviewed, will be asked to take a variety of tests. This is particularly important when hiring inexperienced people to become part of a training program. The employment office is then more interested in his aptitudes than in what the worker experience has been.
Tests may be divided into three classes:
(1) Intelligence,
(2) Trade,
(3) Aptitude.
Many personnel people do not have much respect for intelligence tests as a means of selecting applicants. Unless the applicant is a moron-this can usually be detected without a test-the intelligence test does not tell too much. Many people with high IQ may make thoroughly unsatisfactory employees.
The trade test is the most positive and useful of all the tests. If a girl says she can type so many words a minute, there is nothing simpler than to give her a typewriter and a supply of paper and see whether she can do it. If a girl says she can take dictation and she takes dictation but is then unable to read it back, she is not quite so good a stenographer as she imagines herself to be. If a man says he is a lathe hand but is unable even to perform the first step in setting up the job when he is given a blueprint, a lathe, and a piece of work, he is no lathe hand.
Aptitude tests are the most promising but the most difficult to use. They are becoming more and more important because business prefers to start with fresh material and train it rather than to depend upon experience. Hence, it is much more important to know what the potentialities of the worker are than merely to evaluate what he has done in the past. Aptitude tests are designed to find out the capabilities of the worker. From a theoretical point of view, aptitude tests are the answer to many problems, and if it were possible to depend 100 per cent upon them, the hiring problem of business might almost be solved. However, even the most sanguine of people who have used aptitude tests realize the possible fields of error.
In the first place, aptitude tests are very good for developing mass generalizations. Such mass generalization, for example, develops the fact that most people who have manual dexterity lack social dominance, and conversely, most people who have social dominance lack manual dexterity. What this means in words of one syllable is that the average mechanic is a poor salesman, and the average salesman is a poor mechanic. This is very interesting, but there are exceptions, and it does not answer the individual problem of a person who takes an aptitude test and receives an equally good score in manual dexterity and social dominance.
Aptitude tests have been used by many colleges. One of the primary functions of the work is to prevent students from entering an engineering curriculum who were manifestly unsuited for such a career. Some cases are clear-cut; the student very definitely showed absolutely no aptitude for structure, visualization, or anything of the nature that is used to detect an incipient engineer; thus it was safe to reject him. On the other hand, where an applicant showed absolutely no aptitude for structure, visualization, or anything of the nature that is used to detect an incipient engineer; thus it was safe to reject him.