Measuring Up

With more than a hundred job openings at any one time, the 5,000-employee Applied Biosystems is constantly looking for ways to more efficiently sort the wheat from the chaff. This includes giving candidates specific open-ended questions, whose answers are standardized and assigned a score based on factors such as core skills, leadership, and cultural compatibility. As a check on the validity of the approach, director and higher-level candidates that make it through this round have also recently been asked to take a psychological test. Of the approximately 50 candidates of this grade that the Foster City, Calif., company has assessed since it started the practice, only a few failed the test, says Angela Peters, the company's director of staffing, confirming the move towards using more consistent and objective measurements in the company's screening process.