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EMPLOYMENT  PSYCHOLOGY

at  this  point  that  the  difference  between  valuable  and  useless ­
  tests  will  be  discovered  or  overlooked.
The  following  occurrence  will  help  to  show  the  importance ­
  of  preliminary  trials.  A  set  of  trade  tests  for  tool
makers  developed  and  standardized  in  a  certain  industry
were  installed  in  the  employment  office  of  another  company. ­
  After  they  had  been  in  use  for  a  few  months,  three
of  the  former  expert  tool  makers  of  that  company  who  had
left  to  work  with  another  concern  returned  and  asked  for
their  old  positions.  They  were  given  the  trade  tests  and
two  of  the  men  failed  to  obtain  even  an  apprentice  rating
while  the  third  made  a  low  journeyman’s  rating.  All  of
these  men  had  been  considered  among  the  best  in  the  shop,
and  their  failure  in  the  tests  therefore  aroused  the  suspicions ­
  of  the  employment  manager.  He  decided  to  give
the  tests  to  the  seventy-four  tool  makers  in  that  particular
shop,  and  out  of  that  number  forty-seven  failed  completely,
twenty-one  were  rated  as  apprentices,  and  only  six  obtained ­
  a  journeyman’s  rating.  An  analysis  of  the  causes
for  this  low  correlation  showed  that  the  methods  pursued
in  this  shop  were  slightly  different  from  those  used  in  the
shop  where  the  tests  had  originated.  Not  until  the  tests
were  actually  tried  out  under  the  new  circumstances  did
the  real  nature  of  this  difference  become  apparent.
Trades  and  occupations  are  different  in  almost  every
industry  to-day,  and  the  practical  significance  of  these  differences ­
  for  employment  will  be  revealed  only  by  means  of
experiments  and  actual  trials  such  as  have  been  described.
Valuable  as  trade  tests  are,  it  must  not  be  forgotten
that  they  are  limited  in  their  scope.  As  their  name  indicates, ­
  they  apply  only  to  trades;  that  is,  to  occupations
which  involve  a  certain  body  of  standard  knowledge  such
as  may  be  acquired  during  the  course  of  an  apprentice ­