Roleplaying was offered as a solution -- and the procedure worked as follows: all candidates were invited to a hotel conference room, where the president explained the difficulty he had, and how unnecessary it seemed to him to hire people who just did not work out. In place of asking salesmen to fill questionnaires, checking their references, interviewing them, asking them to be tried out, he told them he would prefer to test them. Each person was to enter the testing room, carrying a suitcase of samples. Each salesman was to read a sheet containing a description of the product. In the testing room he was to make, successively, three presentations to three different people.

In the testing room, three of the veteran salesmen served as antagonists. One handled the salesman in a friendly manner, another in a rough manner, and the third in a hesitating manner. Each was told to purchase material if he felt like it. The antagonists came in, one at a time, and did not see or hear the other presentations. After each presentation, the antagonist wrote his judgment of the salesmen; and so did the observers consisting of the president, three of his salesmen and a psychologist.

Ten salesmen were tested in the morning and ten more in the afternoon. This procedure was repeated one day a month for four months. The batting average of one success out of seven increased to one out of three. The president of the firm, calculating expenses alone, felt his costs had dropped one-half while success in selection had improved over one hundred per cent.