When families have relatives or loved ones with serious medical conditions or illnesses that are beyond their control, they will typically place them in the care of a trusted, trained professional at a long-term care facility or nursing home. To keep residents safe and avoid potential employer liabilities against the employer, it is the responsibility of the community to carefully and thoughtfully hire caregivers who do not pose any harm or threat to frail residents.
To avoid hiring unfit caregivers, it’s crucial that long-term care and nursing communities implement a “best practices” hiring policy to eliminate high-risk job applicants from being further considered in the hiring process. Behavioral interviewing and integrity testing are two good methods that can be administered pre-interview by employers so that they don’t waste time further vetting candidates who have engaged in high-risk behaviors, such as theft, drug and alcohol abuse, lying and hostility.
Behavioral interviewing uses key questions that assess an individual’s approach to work problems and how they deal with feeling and emotions. For example, how they dealt with a stressful work situation or a difficult resident at a nursing community.
Integrity Testing
Unlike behavioral interviewing, an integrity test can be the most reliable and is able to obtain a high level of honest disclosures from applicants by using a proven psychological principle known as cognitive dissonance. Simply put, cognitive dissonance is the human behavior when individuals who are involved in ongoing, “risky” behaviors (like theft and/or illegal drug use) will over time begin to rationalize their behavior as normal. As a result, they have no issue with answering direct questions about their current or recent abnormal “risky” behavior.
Integrity tests allow employers to identify many of the key characteristics they want from a candidate, including initiative, honesty, empathy and pride in work. It’s highly unlikely that a candidate will tell an employer on an interview that they showed aggression toward a resident in their past, or they weren’t compliant with an employer’s work safety protocols. For example they didn’t use a mechanical lift to transfer and instead physically transferred the resident, putting the resident at risk of injury, as well as the worker.
In the absence of testing, it’s possible that many high-risk caregiver applicants can pass through the hiring process even though they may have had these previous histories of behaviors that made them unqualified for the job.
Pros of Integrity Testing
Conducting integrity tests not only helps employers identify “at risk” job applicants, but it also protects the employer. In many instances, employment practices liability insurance (EPL) claims have dropped with the use of integrity testing. In addition, workers compensation loss rates are reduced, turnover is decreased and overall productivity is increased.
Employers that care for sick and frail individuals can’t rely solely on background checks anymore in today’s environment, a comprehensive hiring strategy needs to be part of the company policy in order to sift out job applicants that are a threat to the residents.
Philadelphia, PA, 19102
