EMPLOYMENT  PSYCHOLOGY

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employment  purposes  than  general  vocabulary  tests  or
vocabulary  tests  per  se.
Although  specific  language  tests  like  those  given  have
been  of  undoubted  value  in  the  selection  of  employees,
experience  has  hitherto  tended  to  prove  that  their  chief
value  lies  in  their  ability  to  eliminate  the  most  unfit.
Those  who  know  nothing  whatsoever  about  a  certain
kind  of  work  will  fail  signally  in  these  tests,  and  thereby
eliminate  themselves  from  the  necessity  of  further  interviewing. ­
  On  the  other  hand,  there  are  those  who  have  a
bowing  acquaintance  with  a  certain  kind  of  work,  sufficient
to  enable  them  to  pass  the  language  tests.  Actual  trials,
however,  may  reveal  that  their  verbal  ability  was  somewhat ­
  in  excess  of  their  actual  ability.  In  spite  of  this
limitation,  language  tests,  when  properly  devised  and
applied,  are  of  great  help  in  the  selection  of  the  best
workers  available.

LITERACY  TESTS
One  of  the  great  industrial  problems  of  the  day  is  the
problem  of  literacy.  When  a  foreman  or  gang  boss  gives
a  set  of  orders  and  finds  a  little  later  that  his  orders  have
been  entirely  misunderstood  and  that  as  a  result  great
damage  has  been  done,  his  patience  is  sorely  tried.  And
yet  this  is  only  a  single,  though  typical,  instance  of  the
results  of  illiteracy.  Recently,  this  problem  became  particularly ­
  acute  in  a  large  manufacturing  concern,  the
principal  difficulty  arising  over  the  inability  of  many
machine  operators  to  make  out  their  own  work  tickets.
In  order  to  make  out  these  tickets,  only  the  simplest
knowledge  of  arithmetic  and  English  was  required.
Nevertheless,  so  frequent  had  been  the  mistakes  in  addition ­
  and  subtraction  and  in  failure  to  understand  the