Finding the right person for the job may be made easier for businesses with the use of a pre-employment test being developed at Central Queensland University in Rockhampton.

Associate Professor Tony Ward and Bruce Acutt of the Faculty of Business and Law have been developing the Intrinsic Personal Characteristics (IPC) test which identifies applicants for customer service positions by providing an indication of expected job performance.

“If firms can recruit the right type of staff for customer service positions it is easier to establish and maintain high levels of service performance,” Assoc. Prof. Ward said.

This project commenced in 1996 and with a grant from CQU is now being progressed towards practical use in helping service businesses.

With about half of the analysis work completed the next data gathering phase is being planned and will involve surveying 5000 respondents from all over Australia.

“The IPC project is a practical application of research into customer service,” explained Assoc. Prof. Ward. “Just over 80% of people employed in Australia are employed in the service industry, not all are direct customer servers however.

The IPC test has predictive capabilities for customer service providers and is much improved on the current range of generic psychometric tests available.

“People who have a certain profile work better at customer service jobs. Basically, the test works as an instrument which identifies people of above average performance potential”.

Different customer service jobs have slightly different requirements so more than one profile is required and identifying the different requirements for the different profiles is quite difficult. It requires a large amount of work, hence the need to survey big populations to continuously refine the models.