Employees are a business’s most valuable assets. But these same assets can quickly become very serious liabilities if they bring the wrong baggage with their employment. Many potential workers have issues in their background that they would prefer an employer did not discover. Others, with the best of intentions to offer their employers a hard and honest day’s work may simply not be physically qualified for the job’s work demands. Employment screening, as a broad branch of human resources management, is designed to ensure employers select the right candidate for the job.
Employment screening is designed to select applicants based on how well they meet the skills, knowledge, and abilities required for the job. Screening covers a broad range of selection criteria; from drug and alcohol testing, criminal background checks, skills testing, and psychological evaluations to matching the physical abilities of the candidates to the physical demands of their prospective jobs.
This information can help employers make good decisions when hiring new employees. In today’s business environment, screening is absolutely essential in order for a manager to make good hiring decisions. There is a near-endless list of employment screening vendors supplying information, testing, and evaluations. Screening your vendor partners is just as important as screening your employees. Seek those with a strong business reputation and solid references. Make sure you select a vendor that specializes in just one or maybe two areas of screening. No one vendor can be an expert in all areas, especially when it comes to physical abilities testing.
Physical abilities screening is especially important to company owners and managers, because if they hire an applicant who turns out to be physically unfit for the job and suffers an injury as a result, they risk facing a heavy lawsuit, or at the least, paying out large amounts of workers comp dollars.
Luckily, physical ability screening has much clearer requirements than that of either psychological or skills testing. The ADA clearly establishes the parameters for a strength and agility test. Isokinetic testing is the latest and most accurate form of physical ability employment screening, and has recently been reducing the number of injuries in labor-intensive jobs. Since 1992 when the ADA became law, the standards have met with just a few challenges, nearly all of which the ADA interpretation guides and the courts have found in favor of legitimate business practices.
Businesses that follow some very simple rules in establishing the minimum essential physical job demands of their labor-intensive job classifications and matching those demands to their objective physical abilities employment testing, will stay out of the EEOC’s focus. Legitimate, science-based, physical ability employment testing companies will fully assist their clients with the step-by-step process of setting up a valid, legally defensible, strength and agility screening program. If you follow this process and one of your employees still becomes injured at work, you’ve covered your bases and the law is on your side in the event of a lawsuit, which are, unfortunately, becoming continually more common in the business world.