Review of The scientific selection of salesmen

Abstract

Reviews the book, The scientific selection of salesmen by J. L. Rosenstein (1944). The reviewer states that the audience for, and major objective of, this book is stated as follows by the author: "This book is for sales executives who are long-range minded. Its purpose is to describe, to explain, and to teach the steps in a scientific salesman selection program." For many reasons the publication fails by a wide margin to meet either the needs of its intended audience or its primary objectives. According to the reviewer, throughout the book there are evidences of hasty, superficial writing. Important concepts are ignored or treated so sketchily that they might better have been ignored. On the other hand, certain simple ideas, such as the computation of an average, are heavily labored. Part of the difficulty encountered by the author arises from his attempt to over-simplify psychological tools and techniques which just cannot be so simply treated for lay readers. An example of this is the attempt to teach interpretation of complex psychographs to laymen in fewer than forty pages (211-244). In the section on interviewing, such terms as "substitution," "persecution," and "projection" are introduced with little explanation for naive readers. In the opinion of the reviewer, this is a poor book on a topic which is deserving of much better treatment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)