Besides helping a company realize improvements in various business outcomes, pre-employment testing can help enhance the objectivity, equitability, and legal defensibility of an organization’s hiring process. All organizations should strive to ensure that all of their employee selection methods are equitable and legally compliant. As long as the tests are assessing skills and traits that are job-related, using tests will make hiring decisions more defensible by adding an extra layer of objectivity to the hiring process. Organizations that implement testing programs in accordance with legal guidelines are therefore better prepared to defend these procedures should a legal challenge to their hiring practices ever arise.
One common misconception with pre-employment testing is that utilizing tests as part of the hiring process increases a company’s legal exposure or somehow leads to additional legal risk. For companies that use professionally-developed, well-validated tests, the opposite is in fact true.
Pre-employment tests, like other selection methodologies used by an employer, are governed by the same federal guidelines intended to ensure equitable and non-discriminatory hiring practices. This means that the same laws that apply to the use of pre-employment tests also apply to all other selection methods, which may include screening candidates by experience and education, conducting interviews, checking references, and more. Using relevant employment tests exposes companies to no greater risk than using any other hiring criteria.
Pre-employment tests also help minimize liability risk by enabling companies to more closely follow the guidelines of the EEOC, which stipulate that companies use reasonable efforts to remove biases from their hiring processes. Using validated tests that do not discriminate according to age, sex, race, or other factors can reduce subjective biases and insert an objective, reliable data point into each hiring decision.
Additionally, tests may help minimize the risk of hiring employees who may expose the company to even greater liability – some pre-employment tests can measure how likely it is that an applicant might engage in unsafe or unethical behavior on the job. Using pre-employment tests to assess and minimize these types of liability risks generally far outweigh the minimal risk associated with administering the tests.
We present to you, “Top 10 Pre Employment Screening Services Companies – 2022.”
