Pre-Employment Integrity Testing in Pre-Employment Screening

Merchants Pre-Employment Integrity Test™

One of the primary goals of pre-employment screening is to reduce the risk of making a bad hire. Bad hires come in many flavors. Some are criminals who would prey upon your company’s assets, customers, vendors, employees, and ultimately reputation. Other bad hires are liars. They lie about status, completion, expenses, profitability, and their role in failure. Some bad hires are temperamental, angry, and violent. They need only a spark to become explosive and damage not only themselves but those around them. Still others are those who endanger themselves, their coworkers, clients, and your company’s profitability by abusing drugs and alcohol in the workplace. The list goes on.

The good news, there is something that can be done. The traditional approach to some of these problems has been to use background checks to identify the problem candidates and screen then out of the applicant pool. There are several background screening techniques that have found favor and widespread adoption. They include: criminal history, education verification, verification of previous employment, validating professional credentials, and review of credit histories. More recently companies have added drug screening to the collection of tools used in identifying the potential bad hire. Even with the significant success that has been achieved with this set of pre-employment screening tools, there are still too many bad hires progressing through the system and becoming employees.

This is not a new topic and employers have dealt with these issues for hundreds of years. Industrial/Organizational Psychologists have been working on these and related problems for some time and have added the weight of their research and science to the growing body of knowledge on the subject. Over 30 years ago, our own Dr. Peter Bullard launched a tool whose goal was to more effectively identify some of these bad hires that were slipping through the net of traditional background screening. The tool has come to be known as the Merchants Pre-Employment Integrity Test™. The survey targets specific negative behaviors that have caused much grief, all of which revolve around impulse control, or the lack thereof. Those negative behaviors are:

• The abuse of Drugs or Alcohol in the Workplace
• Hostility and Violence in the Workplace
• Lying and Deception in the Workplace
• Employee Theft

The Merchants Pre-Employment Integrity Test™, when applied consistently and in conjunction with the traditional background screening tools, can be highly effective at identifying those job candidates who should be removed from further consideration in the applicant pool. Traditional tools are good, important, and should continue to be used, however they are not always effective at answering the questions that matter. For example criminal history might tell you about a job candidate’s DUI conviction some years ago, but it says nothing about the candidate’s current propensity to abuse drugs or alcohol on the job. Another example might be to report a shoplifting conviction some years ago, but again say nothing about current propensity to steal from their employer. For answers to these and related questions, turn instead to the Merchants Pre-Employment Integrity Test™.

Want more information? Call 1.800.505.1664 or click the button below to request more information about the Merchants Pre-Employment Integrity Test™.