Case Studies Tri City National Bank Sees Quick but Powerful Results with Criteria

Challenge

The recruitment team at Tri City National Bank was facing a very relatable challenge in the hiring process. Tri City National Bank is a community bank based in Southeastern Wisconsin, and the company regularly hires for front-line roles, such as tellers, relationship bankers, and assistant branch managers.

In the hiring process, Tri City would spend a lot of time reading resumes, interviewing, and selecting the best candidates based on their personalities, to occasionally later discover that some of the new hires were struggling to pick up on the training.

For Joseph Stebbins, the Assistant Vice President | Recruitment at Tri City, the hiring process wasn’t providing hiring managers with enough information about which candidates were most likely to succeed on the job. He explains that the new hires had the personality requirements but sometimes “didn’t have the fundamental skill set to succeed in a teller role, which involves a lot of multitasking and attention to detail.”

To overcome this challenge, the recruitment team was looking for a better way to identify which candidates were more likely to succeed once hired.

Solution

Tri City National Bank began to incorporate Criteria’s assessments into its recruiting and onboarding process in order to identify high-potential candidates. In particular, the bank started administering the Criteria Basic Skills Test (CBST) to all incoming front-line candidates. The CBST is an assessment that measures a candidate’s job readiness and trainability, learning ability, attention to detail, and verbal and math skills.

Tri City also started using a few assessments for post-hire, including the Employee Personality Profile (EPP) for leadership development, and Illustrait for new hires. Both assessments provide useful information about a person’s work styles and communication skills, empowering both managers and employees to work better together.

Results

Within less than a year of using Criteria’s assessments, Tri City National Bank reports that it is already experiencing dramatic results. In particular, the bank achieved lower turnover, faster time to hire, and better training outcomes.

Lower Turnover

Tri City’s turnover rate is the lowest it’s been in the last five years after just a few months of using Criteria. In particular, Tri City’s Director of HR was thrilled to see that involuntary terminations are significantly lower, which indicates that more of the new hires are succeeding on the job.

Faster Time to Hire

Tri City was able to reduce its time to hire by 50% with the introduction of Criteria’s assessments. The level of speed and agility the bank is able to achieve provides it with a huge advantage when it comes to securing the best candidates and filling vacancies as quickly as possible.

Faster Training

Tri City’s new hires are able to get up to speed much faster thanks to Criteria’s assessments. According to Stebbins, “we’ve seen a world of difference with people coming in, how quickly they catch on to training, how quickly they understand the concepts and how quickly they acclimate to their roles.”

Because the recruitment team at Tri City is now bringing in candidates with the appropriate skill set to succeed, the team has heard glowing reviews from both hiring managers and the training department. As soon as the bank began using the CBST to evaluate candidates, the training department reported that the first batch of new hires were far more aligned in their skillset compared to the previous new hire groups. This has made the training department’s job a little easier because they can move everyone along at a more robust pace and transition them into the field much faster.

More Promotions

Tri City is already noticing that many of the new hires are excelling and able to progress into their banking careers at a faster pace than before. Tri City offers a career pathway that enables team members to gain promotions over time upon reaching certain benchmarks. According to Stebbins, “we’ve seen a lot of individuals that have taken the CBST fly through the career pathways and get from ‘Bank Teller I’ to ‘Bank Teller II’ within three to six months, when usually the average for that prior to the CBST assessment was closer to a year.”

The faster promotion track not only fills Tri City’s internal candidate pipeline with talented people, but also improves retention by rewarding its best performing bankers with great opportunities to advance their careers.

Leadership Development

Tri City also uses the EPP and Illustrait assessments as leadership and development tools. The EPP provides an individual report called the Workplace Insights Report, which provides test takers with useful information about their work and communication styles. Tri City provides this report to newly promoted managers during their leadership development training, and the reports have added value to these sessions.

In particular, the reports provide managers with an opportunity to increase their self-awareness, learn more about their own management styles, and improve their ability to communicate effectively with their teams.

With these assessments in place, Tri City National Bank has already experienced a wave of positive benefits impacting the business across the entire talent pipeline. We look forward to checking back in with them later to hear more about their success!