1. To have on one’s hands some incubus, a king’s son or a king’s mistress or some political henchman, and to create a position for the incubus to fill, “duke of this” or “countess of that,” or a fat contract on city work. In England this is called “finding a berth for a friend”—a berth—a place in which to fall asleep.
2. The second way, and the more usual one, is to see a real vacancy and to shove a friend into it, hoping he will make it a go. The man and the job stand as good a show of fitting each other as a man would of getting the right clothes by drawing a suit in a raffle. It was Roosevelt who saw a vacancy in the Presidency, grabbed Mr. Taft, shoved him into the place, and now declares he does not fit. Personal liking is not the proper basis for a Presidential preference.
3. The third way to fill a definite vacancy is to find the man fitted for the place, and, after test, put him into it, even as we find a suitable wire for a bridge and put it in.
If we have a locomotive of definite design and we need an exhaust nozzle, there is only one design of nozzle that will answer. So if in the organization there is a position to fill, the best man for that position must have certain qualities and not have others, not every man, not the convenient man in ten, probably not one man in ten thousand is the man for the place. The employment department seeks diligently for the right man, the man who combines experience with aptitude. If it had to choose it would prefer the man without experience but with all the aptitudes to the man of experience without aptitudes. The man with aptitudes can learn quickly, reliably and fast; the man without aptitudes can never be anything but a misfit. Therefore the employment department having secured a number of prospects, carefully tests the most promising.
The old-fashioned plan is to ask a few questions, secure a few recommendations, take a look at the man, and if a hunch is felt that he will do, accept him. I know all about this plan, for I have tried it for twenty years, and in some years it has cost me $50,000. The plan does not work. I received the best set of recommendations I ever saw about a sea captain, and when we entrusted him with a $140,000 steamer he deliberately wrecked her in order to make some graft out of the repair bills.
That the man was a scoundrel was written in large type all over his face, but in those days I could not read plain print and I was better fitted, and that was not at all, to navigate the steamer than to select a captain.
When I taught in college I got an inkling of the right way. I taught German, and at the beginning of the year my classes were filled up with sixty students, and at the end of the year there were only twenty left. I worked on the theory that there was no profit to any one in making a bluff at studying German. It was either worth while or it was not. If worth while, learn German; if not worth while, don’t waste time on it. So I weeded and weeded my German garden until only those were left who could really learn. They learned to know German as well as they knew English. The weeding process was hard on me and hard on the misfits, hard on the good students. I gave an immense amount of rough effort to no purpose in an absolutely useless attempt to make silk purses out of sows’ ears. Then sows’ ears might have made good mince meat, but the carving and slashing I gave them hurt them to no purpose. My time was taken up on rough work until the misfits and the good students failed to receive the specially skilled attention and help their progress required. After a couple of years of this I tried a new plan. It was evident that any students who did not know English, English grammar, English spelling, English pronunciation, were not fit to study German, so I examined all applicants as to English, but I gave those who failed a week’s test, lest some genius should by chance be overlooked. I never found the genius. Under this plan I started out with a class of twenty-five instead of sixty. I gave my time to those who could profitably make use of it, and not to those who could not, and every one of the twenty-five learned German.
A man or woman can be tested in five minutes for fundamental aptitudes and traits of character as easily and reliably as I tested the prospective German pupils. It would take one too far to go into the whole subject of character analysis. A great composer like Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, can originate music, but there are thousands who can learn to play it well. So with character analysis. It requires a special and rare gift to uncover the lessons written in the coloring, in the texture, in the shape of head, in the expression of the face, of the body, of the hands, in the clothes, in the personal tricks of habit, to cross-check these tests by others as the answers to test questions, but this knowledge has been so formulated that all can learn. So instead of trying to play bumbly puppy by ourselves, of missing the accumulated researches that have been going on all over the world, of repeating all the mistakes that others have made, we do as the Japanese did when they adopted the British navy, the German army and the American schools as models. We are advised as to our employment department by a specialist of the highest skill in character analysis, in all problems relating to the handling of people. The tests are rapid but they are many and they interlock so far as to be conclusive. A man can lie with his eyes or with his lips or with his body, but no man is skillful enough to lie at the same time with eyes and lips and hands and body.
After men have been tested they are employed, not before, and they are only employed because they have the qualities that fit them for a particular place. They may be at the time only 30 p. c. men, they may be succeeding an 80 p. c. man, but the great fact is that the 30 p. c. man can and will become a 100 p. c. or a 110 p. c. man, while the 80 p. c. man is perhaps in reality an overstrained 70 p. c. man. Starting with the best of human material years are not lost gradually collecting it. Not only are the unfit excluded, but what is very much more important, the fit are rescued, they are given opportunity, they jump at once into the places they can fill instead of waiting for years.
What is the unnecessary cost to a business of a 30 p. c. man compared to a 100 p. c. man?