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EMPLOYMENT  PSYCHOLOGY

therefore  be  deficiencies  which,  under  favorable  conditions, ­
  the  natural  capacity  of  the  worker  can  easily  overcome. ­
  Workers  of  this  kind  are  of  the  utmost  potential
value,  and  should  be  given  the  most  careful  consideration
by  the  employment  and  educational  branches.  It  is  in
discovering  cases  of  this  kind  that  the  use  of  tests  can  be
of  great  value  in  helping  industrial  organizations  to
make  the  best  possible  use  of  the  human  material  at
their  disposal  and  in  providing  for  the  vocational  adaptation ­
  of  their  employees.
Wherever  tests  indicate  that  an  applicant  for  a  certain
kind  of  work  is  poor  in  both  ability  and  training,  it  is  unwise ­
  and  unprofitable,  from  the  point  of  view  both  of  the
individual  and  of  the  organization,  to  hire  him  for  that
work.  It  is  advisable,  in  such  cases,  to  try  out  the  applicant ­
  with  other  tests  in  order  to  discover  whether  he  is
better  fitted  to  learn  some  other  kind  of  work.  All  employment ­
  managers  and  educational  directors  are  troubled
with  the  urgent  pleas  of  candidates  who,  in  their  opinion,
are  unfit  for  the  work  or  training  they  demand.  Hitherto
there  has  always  been  a  sense  of  injustice  or  apparent
injustice  in  situations  of  this  kind  because  the  disappointed
candidate  felt  that  he  was  not  being  given  a  square  deal-And
  as  long  as  it  was  a  question  of  one  man’s  judgment
against  that  of  another,  there  was  always  a  measure  of
truth  in  this  suspicion.  The  use  of  tests  makes  it  possible
to  decide,  with  much  less  ambiguity  and  on  much  more
impersonal  grounds,  whether  a  person  shall  be  chosen  of
not.  Often,  however,  when  an  applicant  is  particularly
insistent  upon  a  trial  at  a  certain  kind  of  work  or  training*
it  is  advisable  to  give  him  the  opportunity  even  though  his
performance  in  the  tests  is  poor.  This  is  because  the
presence  of  a  genuine  and  driving  ambition  will  sometimes