35° 
EMPLOYMENT PSYCHOLOGY 
and unqualified workers slip through it as easily and indis 
criminately as water through a sieve. In order to make 
a more careful selection and grading of applicants than 
is now being made, the addition of half an hour or more 
to the interview of supposedly skilled workers will be 
fully justified, particularly when it is remembered how 
much time misfits cost once they have been hired and 
lost sight of. Moreover, now that so many unskilled 
workers and semi-skilled workers are being given a slight 
training in some one of the skilled operations, all the 
more care will have to be exercised to discriminate be 
tween those who are really skilled and those who, on the 
basis of a superficial training, claim that they are skilled. 
We now come to those applicants who, possessing 
neither training nor experience, still prefer a definite job 
which requires these qualifications to a greater or lesser 
degree. There is an amazing number of workers who fall 
under this class; for it includes not only those who have 
not yet learned a trade but also those who do not intend 
to learn a trade and who will be content to shift from place 
to place or job to job as circumstances dictate. We have 
divided this large group into two classes, those who have 
a fixed preference for a certain kind of work and those 
who have an accidental or derived preference which is 
subject to modification. In each case, the wishes of the 
applicants should be given every consideration, and they 
should be tested for the work which they desire. The 
nature of the tests, however, must be quite different; 
for these applicants do not claim to have the particular 
skill or training which is required by the work for which 
they are applying. The tests must therefore be such as 
to discover the applicant’s potential skill, his innate abil 
ity, and his general experience and general intelligence.