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Tecumseh Public Schools

“Now our supervising staff can focus on curriculum and student achievement instead of documenting a misfit employee.”
The Tecumseh Public School district has one high school, one middle school, and four elementary schools with over 3,100 students and 270 employees. With a district this big, there are many roles to be filled in Tecumseh, Michigan, but teaching positions are listed highest on the district’s “need list”. Hiring the right person shouldn’t be a hard lesson to learn.

Now our supervising staff can focus on curriculum and student achievement instead of documenting a misfit employee.

Donna Elsner, HR Manager

The Challenge

For years the district had been using traditional hiring methods: post an advertisement, receive hundreds of resumes, manually go through them all, select a few for interviews, and make a decision based on a person’s education, employment history, and interview. Can you say ‘extracurricular’? In addition to their tedious nature, these methods proved unreliable in predicting a person’s suitability for the position. In one instance, the district had a new hire leave after only seven weeks on the job - costing them a whopping $40,000. “We had to pay his salary for one year, legal fees, a sub, not to mention everyone’s time involved in replacing him,” says Donna Elsner, HR Manager for Tecumseh Public Schools. “But perhaps the worst of it is that the students had seven weeks of subpar instruction.” While many hires over the years had been successful long-term employees, the high cost of a few bad apples was enough to send Donna on a mission to find a better way to select faculty and staff.

The Solution

A colleague recommended Wonderlic pre-employment assessments.  “We needed the ability to forecast employee behavior,” she says. “Teaching requires a high level of cooperation, patience, and the willingness to go above and beyond.” Donna opted to add Wonderlic assessments to her hiring process. Prescreening features helped screen-out unqualified candidates. While candidate sorting and filtering based on scores allowed her to select who to bring in for an interview, without making an educated guess.

The Results

Tecumseh is grateful for the simplicity and flexibility of Wonderlic assessments. They now happily look forward to hiring employees who don’t have extensive personality conflicts, who possess a strong work ethic, and who have the willingness to extend themselves to others – especially students. “Wonderlic provided us with an objective tool that supports the HR office in candidate selection. And now, our supervising staff can focus on curriculum and student achievement instead of documenting a misfit employee.”

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