For Immediate Release
February 4, 2005

LANSING — Michigan Retailers Association has partnered with Ann Arbor-based HRgems to provide its members with a sophisticated but affordable human resource tool designed to improve their hiring process.

The new service, called TraitSet™, is an online employee screening and assessment tool like those used by large businesses to identify the most promising candidates for a position.

Michigan Retailers Association makes available the TraitSet suite of online employee screen and assessment tools to its members through its website, www.retailers.com. MRA is the first association in the nation to offer the TraitSet service.

TraitSet assessments help employers get a sense of the potential employee’s "soft skills"—those which focus on attitudes and behavior. Assessments of soft skills might address questions such as "Will this person have a sense of integrity and work ethic?"

When employees are fired, it is most often due to problems with these soft skills, but employers find it difficult to evaluate such skills in interviews. By identifying early those candidates with the soft skills that are important to a business, an employer can save time, money and headaches.

"Small businesses have not typically been able to afford the employee screening tools that large corporations use to minimize the high costs of employee turnover," said MRA President and Chief Operating Officer James Hallan. "We hope this service will help small and mid-sized retailers hire the best employees," said Hallan.

Working with psychologist Dr. Ed Murray, Ann Arbor-based HRgems has compiled online assessments designed for screening workers regarding their readiness to work, work ethic, sales potential, customer service, leadership and antagonistic behavior.

"With online tools, the cost of employee screening becomes affordable even for small businesses," said Dan Longton, President of HRgems. "We are thrilled to partner with Michigan Retailers Association to bring our online screening and assessment tools to the retail industry."

Michigan-based HRgems provides a patent-pending web-based toolset that revolutionizes the way assessments, surveys, tests, and knowledge-transfer instruments are created, presented, scored and integrated with other organizational data. These web-based tools enable anyone to create, present and tabulate surveys; assessments, tests and knowledge transfer instruments through a simple web-browser. For more information, contact TraitSet at 231.250.8444 or visit the company’s website at www.traitset.com.

The Michigan Retailers Association is the unified voice of retailing in Michigan and the nation’s largest state trade association of general merchandise retailers. MRA’s nearly 6,000 retail business members operate more than 13,000 stores across the state.