An Evaluation of Department Store Salespeople by the Interaction Chronograph

Abstract

THE selection of department store salespeople has always been largely a matter of guesswork and the judgment of the employment department. Various testing methods have been tried in the past and the general conclusion has been that little benefit was to be derived from any of them. The results of these attempts have had little more than the slightest statistical confirmation. The correlations found would never warrant any great dependence on any testing procedure as a means of selection. This article is a report of the results of an evaluation of the sales personnel of the Gilchrist Company in Boston by means of the Interaction Chronograph, whose results are in extremely high agreement with individual sales performance. So high was this agreement that within departments with equal opportunity the graphs showed a simple linear relationship between the Interaction Chronograph measurements and the average sales of the individual salesperson. The success of this method among almost 300 salespeople may be due to its approach which is entirely different from that of the usual pencil and paper tests. It measures the salesperson's behaviour in units of time. It does this by recording certain behavioural characteristics of an individual during an interview with a member of the personnel department. The behaviour recorded is the response pattern-the speech and gestures of each individual. What is measured is ;he timing of these patterns-how long each person in the contact talks and is silent, and the synchronization-when each one interrupts and how long he fails to respond. Thus the machine makes it possible to measure the person's activity or drive, his tempo of acting, his initiative, dominance, and capacity to adjust to others, as these characteristics actually occur and not as they might be inferred from what is said in the interview or from answers on a written test.