Enhancing Human Resource Department Effectiveness

“If only we had known,” is one of the saddest and most frequently repeated phrases by employers. A bad hire impacts employee morale, productivity, insurance premiums, and corporate reputation. The cost for hiring, training and repeating the entire process is only the tip of the iceberg. Financial and morale aftershocks ripple through any organization for months after a bad hiring decision becomes undone.

Hiring decisions can be a major source of stress, anxiety, and often frustration. A company’s future success relies almost solely on their hiring and workforce decisions. Simply put- many hiring decisions could have been better if potential on-the-job behavior had been reliably predicted.


Pieces of the Puzzle

Resumes, aptitude tests, interviews and background checks are all key pieces of the employment puzzle, but one vital piece of the puzzle is missing. To make a decision that sticks, an organization has to know how an individual will react or perform in relation to job expectations. Past employers are reluctant to share negative comments regarding ex-employees because of legal ramifications. Criminal background checks report only individuals who have been caught. No candidate is going to present anything but their best possible face and credentials. As a result, the mass of America’s workforce, with the greatest impact on our economy, remains an unknown risk for almost every employer. Is the job candidate using drugs recreationally? How might the remainder of the workforce be influenced by a new hire’s anti-social behavior? What is the candidate’s likelihood of reaching a breaking point? How much of what we see in an interview is a “real” reflection of the individual?

Until now, accurate behavioral tendency profiling has been considered an exclusive resource of large corporations that could afford costly processes in their searches for key executives. However today effective profiling is now affordably available for any size or type of company – irrespective of the position to be filled. All types of business can now realize the very real values of behavioral tendency profiling as part of their hiring process.

· According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) productivity annual losses for American businesses attributed to alcohol are measured in the $100’s of Billions. NIDA studies have shown that employee alcohol abuse contributes to verbal and physical aggressive behavior, acts of sexual harassment, and impacts the attitudes and morale of co-workers.
· Numerous studies have established that there is a direct relationship to the after effects of drinking (“hangovers”) on job performance. Increases in absenteeism, arriving late for work or leaving early, doing poor work, and co-worker conflicts are directly associated with the performance of employees who abuse alcohol.
· The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports more than 14 million Americans are current users of illicit drugs and nearly three-quarters of these users are employed in American businesses. The NIDA reports the abuse of drugs by employees negatively impacts the workplace in terms of decreased productivity and increased accidents, absenteeism, turnover, and medical costs.
· According to a national survey, drug using employees are more than two times more likely to request time off and have annual absences of eight days or more. These same employees are almost four times more likely to be involved in a workplace accident and five times more likely to file workers’ compensation claims.
· A survey of callers to the National Cocaine Help Line indicated that 75 percent reported using drugs at work, 64 percent admitted drugs adversely affected their job performance, and 44 percent said they sold or provided drugs to their co-workers.
· Sexual harassment creates a great deal of anxiety, confusion, and uncertainty for employers. It has also led to hundreds of millions of dollars in legal settlements and fees being paid by employers for the costly acts of managers, supervisors, or co-workers.
One of three businesses that go bankrupt each year does so as a result of employee theft.

The true value
The MindData Attitude Indexes goes well beyond the primary task of discovering ideal candidates. Not only do these profiling instruments identify whether a prospective employee has the “right stuff,” they also reveal details of desirable and undesirable traits. With MindData, before hiring, an employer can discover the potential for anti-social, unethical, erratic or detrimental behavior; receive a clear notice of attitude toward drugs, alcohol, and any violent tendencies; and even receive advance warning of the chances of a job candidate becoming involved in workplace theft.

Knowing to what degree a candidate is truthful, and what their character strengths and weaknesses are, can make all the difference to an insightful and productive interview process. Accurate human resource decisions, resulting from enlightened interviewing, make an invaluable contribution to upbeat workplaces, improved public image, positive client relationships, dynamic employee morale, and a superior corporate reputation for an improved bottom line.

Successful businesses, and management publications agree on this issue; the “right fit” is everything. By utilizing a reliable, accurate profiling instrument, you and the employers you represent can construct higher quality workplace communities that are more cohesive, productive and profitable.

By administering MindData’s Attitude Indexes, you don’t have to wait months to find out who your next new hire or promotion candidate really is – Prevention through Detection – it is a better way. For more information concerning how a PEO can assist you with addressing your employee administration exposures and needs, please contact  an LLRG PEO Consultant (toll free) at 877.878.6463. The LL Roberts proudly uses MindData Job Candidate Evaluation tools. For more info on MindaData, visit www.MindData.com.

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