Keep illicit drug users off the payroll through employment assessment

Oct 1, 1999 12:00 PM, ACCESS CONTROL & SECURITY SYSTEMS INTEGRATION STAFF

The Department of Labor estimates that 70 percent of illegal drug users - roughly 10 million people - are employed on a full- or part-time basis. Pre-employment assessment can keep such employees off the payroll.

"Many public and private sector companies are regulated under government agencies that require compliance with the Drug Free Workplace Act of 1988," says Rob Altmann, research psychologist for NCS, an information service company based in Minneapolis. "Other companies simply recognize that a drug-free workplace creates a safe, healthy and profitable environment. By identifying important signals of illicit substance use, companies can reduce absenteeism, accident and injury rates, employee turnover and theft."

The ProQuest psychological assessment tool from NCS is designed to help human resource professionals measure the attitudes and behaviors of job applicants regarding illicit substance abuse.

In many industries, such as transportation and manufacturing, physiological drug testing is a standard procedure. However, a psychological assessment can help identify people who have attributes consistent with a drug-free environment.

Physiologically based assessments have been shown to identify the presence of drugs (both legal and illegal) in a person's system when performed under a highly controlled testing procedure. But they only tell part of the story, says Altmann. Such tests may miss other important signals of drug use, such as a person's attitude toward recreational drugs and their willingness or propensity to engage in risky behaviors.

The ProQuest assessment helps measure several job-related attitudes, including:

* drug avoidance - the extent to which an applicant will not currently use, sell, or condone the use of illicit drugs on the job.

* risk prevention - tendencies to engage in high-risk, dangerous and thrill-seeking behavior.

* nonviolence - the likelihood that an applicant is not prone to abusive or hostile behavior in the workplace.

* validity/candidness - the extent to which the applicant responded to the inventory in a socially desirable manner.

Want to use this article? Click here for options!
© 2008 Penton Media Inc.

This month in Access Control

• Opening Up About Door Closers
• An Enterprise Approach
• The Framework For Open Systems
• On A Higher Plane
• More from April's issue