When it comes to excuses for poor employee behavior, small-business owners have heard it all — from bad hair days to faulty alarm clocks.
Sometimes the excuses are part of a chronic problem and it's best to identify these types of bad behavior right up front.
Discovering chronic absenteeism, sticky fingers or bursts of aggressive behavior after the fact is not only bad for business, it's stressful and expensive too.
Rarely does the hiring of a candidate with high-risk behaviors and attitude end well.
At best, these candidates turned employees are terminated without incident other than bad feelings and a lot of wasted resources and time.
But occasionally, employees behaving badly are top performers and management prolongs the inevitable, hoping for a personality transformation through counseling, coaching, training, mentoring and a host of other events designed for the employee to see the light.
While success is possible, most of these situations still end up in termination after a parade of victims surfaces, ranging from the customer who refuses to do business with you anymore to the co-workers who files a sexual harassment charge to the employee who gets caught stealing from the company.
The case to use pre-employment tests has never been stronger than it is today.
The margin of error when hiring or promoting employees in today's market has shrunk to a level of almost zero tolerance.
Even if it was possible to do the perfect interview and expose all the potential and past flaws of a candidate, the time required to do it would make it prohibitively expensive and time consuming.
While behavioral interviewing can be effective in the hiring process, effective behavioral interviewing is not fast.
That's why pre-employment testing is experiencing a meteoric rise in acceptance in small business.
Of particular importance is the renewed interest in honesty and integrity tests.
Unlike personality and behavioral-based tests which describe a candidate's potential job fit, honesty and integrity tests attempt to reveal a candidate's attitude toward work.
Typical attitudes that are measured are honesty, hostility and dependability.
In addition, several assessment include the option of evaluating a candidate's attitude toward substance abuse, sexual harassment and computer misuse.
The advantage to the employer is that instead of hearing the employee rationalize why they are behaving badly after they are on the payroll, the employer may get to the truth before a job is offered.
For instance, one of my clients recently used an honesty and integrity test in its hiring process.
One candidate agreed with the following statements: Sometimes a fight is necessary to clear the air.
I enjoy flirting and sometimes do it at work.
Job threatening emails at work are usually just jokes.
Most people feel that low wages entitle them to rip off employers.
Most people give an unauthorized discount to their family or friend.
The test flagged these questions with the recommendation for the hiring manager to focus on these areas during the interview and reference checks.
The employer hired the candidate anyway because of glowing references and a charismatic personality.
The client stopped using the testing because they found it was going against their gut instinct and face validity.
Unfortunately, multiple complaints of hostility and sexual harassment were filed against this employee within a few months.
The employee was dismissed in what turned out to be a very costly case of "I don't believe what the candidate said was true so I hired him anyway!" The lessons learned: 1.
Some employees have turned excuses for performing badly into an art.
2.
It's not nice to try and ignore Mother Nature.
When a candidate admits that it's okay to "smack" a co-worker if he deserves it and its okay to flirt, believe him! 3.
Honesty and integrity tests do work when applied and interpreted properly.
You'll be amazed what you can learn before you put a new employee on the payroll.
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