44.312 Security Management

home page > Unit 5: Recruitment & selection

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Employment Tests (cont.)

• Physical Ability Testing. 3 types:
  • job simulation: physical agility or stamina tests simulating required on-the-job behaviors (justified because it's based on job relatedness: legal test is that it must be related to essential tasks of the position. For example, if the job required fire-fighting preparedness, might be appropriate to see if person could carry hose up and down stairs while wearing appropriate fire gear and breathing apparatus.
  • physical ability/stamina: these don't measure direct simulations of behaviors required on job, but the individual's general condition. Often challenged in court, because employer may not be able to determine exact score that constitutes effective performance in context of physical activity.
  • physical fitness: performance standards based on vast number of people who have been tested before.
  • Drug and alcohol tests: many now require them.

Or, they may be "banded": divided into groups based on their scores. Candidates then selected from a particular band until all individuals in it are depleted.

• Sliding band system establishing a new band ever time an individual is hired or eliminated from applicant pool.
• Random-within band selection: selected candidates from within band, with or without minority preference.
  
  Banding reduces adverse impact, which could occur if there are small differences in test sores. Also eliminated unreliability of the test as a whole and the adverse impact that the testing instruments may have caused.

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Legal Issues in Recruitment & Selection

In addition to problems with laws and regulations governing recruiting and selecting employees, there are also potential problems with hiring "wrong" individual -- a person who is unfit for hiring or retention. Under theory of negligent hiring, employer has "the duty to exercise reasonable care in view of all the circumstances in hiring individuals who, because of the employment, may pose a threat of injury to members of the public."

This differs from the "doctrine of respondent superior," in which employer can be held liable for its employee's actions they they operate under scope of their employment and employee causes injury to 3rd party to whom employer owes a duty of care.

Reason is that negligent hiring has broader impact: employer can be held liable through foreseeable actions of employee, even if these acts exceed sore of their authority or authorized duties.

Negligent-hiring claims usually rest on 3 types of situations:

• lack of required knowledge, skills or ability, physical harm or injury, and intentional employee misconduct.

"...when one considers that the security field has a higher degree of expectation by the public and clients that the employee has received the appropriate and necessary pre-employment inquiry, a greater degree of caution and care should be exercised by the employer. When coupled with the fact that in many security sectors, supervision may be impractical or decreased and contact with third parties is more likely, a thorough pre-employment injury is even more important."

Negligent-hiring claims may "arise when an organization fails to conduct or gather adequate information during its selection procedures, particularly the background investigation.

"Five conditions must be present for an employer to be held liable for negligent hiring:

• The employee, acting under the auspices of employment, must have caused some type of injury
• The employee must be shown to be unfit
• The employer should have known about the unfitness
• The injury must be shown to be a foreseeable consequence of hiring the unfit employee
• The hiring of the unfit employee must be shown to be the proximate cause of the injury."

Can be confusing process to prove person is unfit and employer should have know about the fitness and that the act was foreseeable.

"Of all the selection processes, one defense against negligent-hiring lawsuits is to have documented reference checks.

Please read pgs. 168-178 of Principles of Security Management.

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