Pre-employment screening to weed out "bad apples".

New approaches to testing applicants' integrity

The solution to the problem of internal theft, resident abuse and poor employee attitude and performance seems clear enough: simply don't hire people who lie, steal, use drugs or abuse residents. What is not so simple is the task of identifying those people.

Specialists who study theft and other illegal activity in the work place agree that some type of pre-employment screening is an important first preventive step. The challenge is to find a process that works effectively and at the same time helps to avert legal and ethical problems. To that end, three procedures have been used widely: the interview, the polygraph test and attitude measurement tests or surveys.

Interviews are the most commonly used pre-employment screening tool. However, anyone who has hired a "good interview" and later discovered that person stealing is well aware of the dangers of relying on the interview as the sole process for eliminating the proverbial "bad apple." While no one would argue against interviewing potential employees to determine job fit, research indicates that a carefully designed and administered "integrity test" is the most reliable and valid to determine who is likely to steal, abuse drugs or alcohol, or display hostile tendencies.

Today, polygraph tests are prohibited by federal law for use in pre-employment screening in all but a few professions, such as law enforcement. In addition, polygraphs do not indicate whether or not an individual is lying, but only measure the stress that typically occurs when an individual answers a question dishonestly. Unfortunately, there are people who show no physiological responses at all when lying (psychopaths routinely pass lie detector tests).

The psychology of theft and abusive and hostile behavior teaches us that the normally honest person engaged in theft is caught in a continual moral dilemma. The person who is inclined to steal, and to do so repeatedly, usually thinks like a thief, rationalizing their behavior as ordinary, as right. It is human nature to generalize from our world to the world at large, and if our corner of the universe is a bit crooked, we tend to view the rest of the universe in the same light. This may account for the rationalization, "It's all right to dip into the till at work because all my friends are doing it." For this reason, surprisingly enough, many of these applicants tend to admit to theft or even drug use even on an employment application.

Of course, screening out potential employees with a predisposition for theft is good business. In the retail industry, for example, unexplained inventory shortages constitute 2-5% of gross sales, and in some organizations the shortages are even greater. The significance of these numbers is made clear when we remember that net profit is about 2% of gross sales in a mass merchandising operation.

Substance abuse causes tremendous problems on the job. Twenty-five percent of all job applicants have a history of marijuana abuse and about 10% use other illegal drugs. The hazards posed by drug-impaired workers are significant enough. But these employees also frequently resort to theft to support their habit.

The hostile employee is easily provoked, and that makes him dangerous in several ways, particularly in a nursing home setting. That hostility creates the potential for conflict with co-workers, supervisors or persons entering the work environment, and those conflicts could lead to violence. The added peril in the nursing home is that the belligerent worker may vent his hostility on the most helpless of residents.

Pre-employment Integrity Testing 

Integrity tests provide the employer with insight into the prospective employee's attitudes about issues such as stealing, drug and alcohol use, and violence. The tests help to identify what the applicant views as ordinary, normal, acceptable behavior.

Surveys or tests, such as those provided by our firm, are a mix of discrete and overlapping questions designed to determine attitude toward theft and other undesirable behavior. The applicant is, in essence, given numerous opportunities to lie with questions involving relatively mild or minor transgressions, such as "Have you even been angry?," "Have you ever been embarrassed?", "Have you ever been tempted to cheat on your golf score?" -- even the classic, "What would you do if a pay phone erroneously returned your quarter?" Sooner or later, the honest applicant will admit to some sort of negative behavior. If not, this raises warning signs of a pattern of dishonesty.

There are built-in lines of progression to determine this pattern, as well. A line of questioning may begin with something as simple as, "Have you ever been angry at your boss?" and finish with the very obviously loaded "Would stealing company property be justifiable if you were treated unfairly?" In between are questions covering the entire scale of mistreatment, anger, and theft.

The tests eliminate "minor" theft from the equation -- a pen here, a box of paper clips there, copying personal documents on company equipment -- by instructing applicants to exclude minor office supplies from their responses. The person the test is intended to identify is the employee who is likely to walk out of the building with a fax machine under his arm. Scale -- the size of the deed -- is just as important as the underlying rationalization or intent behind it. Clearly, if I know you will steal if you become angry with the company or the boss, then I am not going to hire you. If you see no difference between taking a legal pad and grabbing that fax machine, you aren't the kind of employee I want.

In recent years, what was once a paper and pencil test has become an electronic process, with survey responses entered by the applicant on a data-recorder keypad and downloaded over phone lines to a central computer, where the results are compiled, analyzed on the basis of criteria developed from field testing, and promptly returned to the employer.

Within seconds, the employer is able to view a computer display of a scaled analysis of the applicant's propensity toward theft, substance abuse, hostility and lying, with an individualized risk factor ranked as "high," "moderate," or "low" in each category. All possibility of bias is eliminated by subjecting each question to the requirements of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's "protected classes" (non-whites, females, people over the age of 40); any adverse impact on these "protected classes" results in the question being eliminated from the test, no matter how scientifically valid it may be. Applicants, meanwhile, find this process to be less intimidating than dealing with a test that produces a paper that must be handed to a "real" person.

Conclusion

The pre-employment attitude-measurement survey is not a panacea. There will always be someone who can beat the system and pass through even the most reliable screening procedure. These surveys do, however, identify the vast majority of individuals with a tendency to be hostile, to steal or to abuse drugs or alcohol. A study by the American Psychological Association found these tests to be "effective in identifying high-risk applicants, and non-discriminatory." Additionally, some other benefits of pre-employment screening have emerged over the years. People who score well on these surveys also tend to be more productive, and companies that use the surveys have reduced their turnover--a benefit that should be particularly attractive to nursing homes.

Peter Bullard, PhD., is President of American Tescor, Inc. He has a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Washington, Seattle.