TESTING YOUR DRUG-SCREENING COMPANIES MAKES SENSE TOO

One lesson many businesses learned during the recent economic boom was that
finding good workers was troublesome at best and impossible at worst.

And now that the economy has turned tepid, the unemployed may have to work
a little harder to find jobs but they have plenty of help.

Manufactured resumes are easier to get than a newspaper. Books and classes
abound to help even the most incompetent candidates march confidently
through interviews. The threat of litigation has rendered references pretty
much useless.

Now drug users looking for work have a small industry on their side that
sells detoxifying products and vials of "clean" urine to help them avoid
detection. Comedian Tommy Chong has given his name for a product users can
add to urine to detoxify it called Tommy Chong's Urine Luck Urine Additive.

Even if prospective employees aren't drug users, they can be sinister.
Achievement Tec, a prescreening firm in Dallas, found in a study of 1
million job applicants that 30 percent misrepresented employment records,
more than 20 percent had a previous workers' compensation claim and nearly
10 percent had a criminal record in the last seven years.

Another Achievement Tec study found that drug-using employees are absent
four to five times more often, have 3.5 times more accidents and have 3.8
times higher hospital costs.

"Employees on drugs can cost a company a lot of money through absenteeism,
turnover, safety and productivity," Bill Dausey, vice president of sales
for Psychemedics Corp., a drug-screening company in Cambridge, Mass. "It
scares me as a father, as a citizen and as someone who works in this
industry because drugs are so much more powerful now and easier to take."

So how can a company find a good drug-testing and employment-screening
company? And what questions should be asked to ensure a good fit?

Dausey said companies should ask three questions of drug screening
companies: "Does the company have good technology that can prevent
false-positive results?"; "Can the company give results within 24 hours?";
and "Does the company have experience defending its results in court?"

"If they can answer 'yes' to these questions, you're on your way to having
a good company," Dausey said.

Psychemedics has been testing hair samples for 12 years, said Dausey.

"It's a good test because it looks back at what drugs a person may have
used in the last 90 days," Dausey said. "Urine can only go back about two
days, and saliva is even less than that."

Dausey said most drug-screening companies test for illegal Class 1
substances such as amphetamines, cocaine, opiates, PCP and marijuana. He
said some companies test for prescription drugs that people may be using
improperly, but those tests "are not very reliable."

Another key element of an applicant is his or her personality. Does it fit
the job?

A good company should be able to customize its behavioral tests to fit
several kinds of employment needs, said Ken Kunda, managing director of the
Spherion Assessment Group, a Florida-based employment screening company
that uses interactive voice, Web-based and PC-based response systems to
conduct prescreening and behavioral assessments.

Kunda said that between 20 percent and 35 percent of job candidates
Spherion screens "aren't the best match" for any given job. A good company
should be able to screen quickly, he said.

"The average cycle after initial contact with an applicant is 15 to 17
days," Kunda said. "A lot can happen in that time, so ideally you want a
company that can beat that average time. If you want the applicants, you
have to act quickly because chances are good the applicant will find work
somewhere else pretty fast."