Visions Marketing Hires Employees Who Stay Longer with SELECT
By Tracey McGraw

Leola (PA) - In February of 2000, Visions Marketing Services began using pre-employment testing.  Bryan Rutt, community relations director, says the Lancaster firm was experiencing difficulties with turnover rates.  Rutt says the company was looking for ways to retain employees.       

Visions Marketing Services, located in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is a financial marketing company.  The majority of business is conducted through telemarketing, says Rutt.  “We call homeowners on behalf of mortgage companies or banks to help find ways to better suit the customers’ needs,” Rutt explains. 

In his 5 ½ years with Visions Marketing Services, Rutt says he has seen much growth in this company, which has always had a policy of promoting within.  “Virtually everyone started out on the phones, myself included,” states Rutt.  Through this policy, he feels the company has managed to retain a solid core group of employees who’ve been there for 2 to 4 years. 

However, Rutt says it’s the nature of the telemarketing business to have a high turnover rate.  “Industry-wide, the life span of employees doing telemarketing is about 6 months,” he states. 

“We were looking for ways to be more cost efficient and to stem the flow of the turnover,” says Rutt.  When an employee leaves, Rutt explains the loss to a company is more than just monetary.  He says there are losses on productivity, time, and manpower, too. Rutt says Visions Marketing Services contacted Success Performance Solutions in Leola, Pennsylvania, to help with the turnover problem.  Headed by Ira Wolfe, the team at Success Performance Solutions was able to help Visions Marketing Services make smarter hiring decisions and choose candidates better suited to the job of telemarketer.

Working initially with two groups of existing staff members by administering various personality and behavioral tests and conducting group and individual interviews, Wolfe’s team was able to determine a commonality among the company’s employees who perform well in the job of telemarketing.  This commonality was then used as a measuring stick, says Rutt, for future hires.  “If a person is successful in his job and enjoys it, naturally he’ll want to stay,” says Rutt.  “There is no gray area in telemarketing.  You either love it or you hate it,” he states.

Wolfe suggested the SELECT method of pre-employment testing.  Rutt says the version of SELECT that Visions Marketing Services uses is specific to call centers.  He explains that the questions generate scores in two main areas – integrity and performance. 

Rutt says candidates complete the SELECT survey when they fill out an employment application.  “The bulk of the people who respond to our employment ads respond by phone,” says Rutt.  This type of response helps Rutt screen candidates initially since the job would require good phone skills.  When a candidate is asked to come in for an interview, he or she is first given an application to fill out along with the SELECT survey.  Rutt says scoring the survey, done via the Internet, becomes part of reviewing the application. 

Rutt says the SELECT survey also generates results in other areas such as job safety, acceptance of diversity, and frustration levels.  “These results help me very much in interviews,” says Rutt who often bases interview questions on survey results.  Rutt cautions that Visions Marketing Services does not base hiring strictly on the results of this pre-employment testing.  “This test is part of the grand scheme here,” he states.

Much of the problem that his company had in hiring, says Rutt, was getting candidates to show up for and commit to the required weeklong training.  Since implementing the SELECT method of pre-employment testing in February of 2000, Rutt says the company has seen great improvement in this area.  In the year 2000, with approximately thirty positions to fill, nearly 440 applications were received. Three hundred candidates presented for interviews and 153 were committed to the training classes.  Twenty-one new hire training classes were scheduled throughout the year.

Of that number, 126 (or 82%) actually showed up for the first day.  By the end of the week, only 96 remained (63%).  Despite attending job fairs, running classified and display ads in newspapers, and hosting open houses, the pipeline for new hires couldn’t keep up with the churn. Floor supervisors and trainers were continually running just to fill positions, answer phones, train new hires, and adjust schedules for no-shows.

In the year 2001, 132 candidates committed to the training classes.  109 (82%) showed up for the first day, and 95 (87%) finished the training. This allowed Visions to reduce the number of training classes from 21 to 10.  Rutt says so far this year (2002), 69 candidates have committed to training, 66 (96%) have attended the first day, and 57 (87%) have finished. 

“In just one year’s time, there was an incredible amount of growth in the number of candidates who started and finished the training,” says Rutt.  “We are very happy with the success we’ve seen with the SELECT method of pre-employment testing,” he states.

Visions Marketing Services has been in the Lancaster area since 1977.  The company also has an office in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.  The Lancaster staff is made up of about 45-55 people that add into the total number of 200-250 employees.