Personality Testing and Assessment Legality Issues

There are legal trends that strongly support the use of pre-employment testing. Employers have been forced to defend an ever increasing number of negligent hiring lawsuits that seek redress for crimes committed by their own employees. Those crimes range from rape of a customer in her home by a pizza delivery driver to assaults, homicides, and theft against co-workers and customers alike.

The lawsuits contend that the employer negligently placed an applicant with dangerous propensities, which should have been easily discovered by reasonably diligent investigation, into an employment situation where it was foreseeable that the subject employee posed a threat of injury to others. While employers cannot safely ask questions like, "How often do you have fits of uncontrolled homicidal rage?", they can still minimize their legal exposure through the use of pre-employment assessments.

Pre-employment testing does provide another way to...more...