Given the success of eHarmony and Outback Steakhouse, what ...

[lbcchick]

Given the success of eHarmony and Outback Steakhouse, what principles would you use to design a process for pairing police partners based on personality factors?
 
  What will be an ideal response?

Question 2

Describe one example, mentioned in the textbook, of hiring practices improved by the use of personality tests.
 
  What will be an ideal response?

[Jsherida]

Answer to Question 1

Answer: eHarmony used a questionnaire of 400 items and then used statistics, including factor analysis, regression analysis and discriminant analysis, to define key personality attributes. A similar process could be used to define key traits that would be valuable in police work. This could then be combined with the process that Outback used which was to assess current successful employees and match prospective employees on these variables. Successful police partner pairings could be defined using the key traits and matching of traits that are present in successful existing partner pairs, then those traits could be used to generate new pairings.

Answer to Question 2

Answer: The most salient example in the book is that of Outback Steakhouse. In an industry with an average turnover rate of 200 annually, they have used personality testing to reduce their turnover rate to less than 60. They used empirical methods to identify what personality variables correlated with their current successful employees and used those same tests to hire new employees. The traits they identified and targeted were sympathy, adaptability, gregariousness, sociability and meticulousness. The student could also use the example of Universal Studios Hollywood Theme Park.

[lbcchick]

Thank you!

[Jsherida]

Happy to help