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Personnel Assessment from War?

In 1917, as America entered World War I, military leaders were overwhelmed. With more than a million soldiers arriving in training camps, old methods (e.g., interviews, gut instincts, hastily made judgments) weren’t just outdated recruitment strategies but they were dangerous.

Misplacing a soldier could cost lives.

Enter Robert Yerkes and a team of psychologists. As they walked through the rows of raw cadets, they asked themselves:

Some literate, some not. Some fluent in English, others recent immigrants. These and other concerns made fairness a difficult objective to achieve.

They didn’t just want to assess intelligence. They wanted to understand capacity under pressure, learning speed, decision-making in uncertainty. So they designed the Army Alpha test for literate recruits, and the Army Beta test for those who couldn’t read or speak English. It was one of the first mass-scale applications of psychology to address real human problems.

That decision, in a moment of global crisis, changed everything. It sparked the birth of military psychology and ultimately laid the foundation for how we assess people in the workplace today.

Rethinking Talent Assessment?

At XMscience, we help organizations bring scientific clarity to complex human decisions—integrating research-driven methods into hiring, development, and engagement strategies.

If you’re questioning how well your current assessments align with role demands, cultural fit, or future readiness, we’d be honored to explore it with you.

Whether you’re refining a selection process, implementing structured interviews, or measuring experience across the employee journey, we bring psychological precision and practical insight to every stage.

📬 No pitch. Just perspective.