The hiring process for some organizations includes pre-employment personality testing. The testing screens for desirable personality traits and are designed to meet a business need for cultural fit when filling a specific job. Creating algorithms that filter for certain traits may create new forms of bias. The changing demographics in the United States present the need for a more culturally representative leadership team that is less homogenous. There are legal implications for the use of pre-employment personality trait testing. Understanding whether diversity and inclusion is in alignment with pre-employment personality trait testing hinges on interpretation and validation.
Sometimes, pre-employment screening can feel like you have hit “the wall” over the course of a marathon instead of feeling the elation of crossing the finish line. There are plenty of problems that can present themselves as obstacles to a smooth pre-employment screening process.
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.
Pre-employment tests can only reduce a company’s legal exposure if the tests measure skills and traits that are related to performance for that particular position. This concept is known as the rule of “job-relatedness.” In this instance, the EEOC’s guidelines surrounding the use of tests are the same as their rules for any selection procedures: the tests must measure job-related skills and abilities. As a result, test selection is critical to legal defensibility. No matter how valid a test is, it won’t be legally defensible if it is used in an invalid way.
We present to you, “Top 10 Emerging Pre Employment Screening Services Companies – 2022.”
