Predicting ‘safe’ candidates when recruiting

The pressure to provide a safe working environment and reduce safety incidents is well known to the electrical industry. However, few organisations in the recruitment process seek to identify the individuals who are most likely to cause safety incidents, preferring to focus on managing the work environment.

The traditional approach to facilitating employee safety involves providing information and training programs, comprehensive safety policies and procedures and regular monitoring of safety-related data. While these elements play critical roles in any safety strategy, it’s important to realise that some individuals are inherently more likely to pay attention to these strategies than others. This means that, despite an employer’s best efforts to address workplace safety, employing individuals who are less likely to follow safety strategies will expose an organisation to higher safety risk.

Human error

It’s widely acknowledged that most workplace accidents are precipitated by some form of human error and that some individuals are more likely than others to be involved in accidents or sustain injuries. To the extent that these differences can be measured, organisations can reduce the risk of workplace accidents by making more informed hiring decisions.

An assessment that identifies risk factors in individuals affords the opportunity to screen out high-risk people when recruiting, while also actively addressing risky attitudinal elements in successful applicants. This, in turn, complements existing safety strategies in reducing workplace incidents.

Risk assessments

Psychometric assessments provide insight into the broad range of qualities and traits of candidates that are important to their suitability for a position. They can accurately assess candidates’ safety awareness on numerous factors linked to safety-related workplace behaviours. Together, these factors (outlined below) can provide a comprehensive understanding of overall potential safety risk.

Safety control

The ‘safety-control’ scale predominantly measures the construct ‘locus-of-control’, which reflects individual differences in beliefs regarding personal control over life events. Individuals with an external locus-of-control are likely to view life events as determined by factors beyond their control, eg, luck or fate. Those with an internal locus-of-control are more likely to consider personal attributes as determining factors in those same outcomes.

Used in a safety context, locus-of-control can be referred directly to the occurrence of workplace accidents. Individuals with an external safety control believe they have limited control over workplace accidents and don’t feel personally responsible when they occur. They are seen to present a safety risk to themselves and others as they may expend limited energy in adhering to safety precautions. Conversely, individuals with an internal safety-control tend to feel greater personal responsibility for their safety and are more likely to take preventative steps to avoid accidents and injuries.

Risk aversion

The ‘risk-aversion’ scale addresses the Zuckerman concept of sensation seeking, referring to individuals’ need for excitement and their willingness to take risks to experience it. High sensation seekers are drawn to risky and potentially dangerous activities in search of thrills, often coupled with a lack of inhibition and susceptibility to boredom.

Those low in sensation seeking (or high in risk aversion) tend to adopt more cautious and conservative approaches to risky activities and seek greater structure in their environment. Given this preference for structure, they’re more likely to follow established safety protocols, while also being less susceptible to boredom. They, therefore, prove to be a lower safety risk when performing work-related tasks compared to those with greater sensation-seeking tendencies.

Stress management

The ‘stress-management’ scale provides an indication of the degree to which individuals are able to control their own emotional responses to stressors in their environment. Although stress is experienced by all workers, there are distinct differences in the way individuals react to it. Some have the capacity for controlled responses (both cognitively and emotionally), while others may react in ways more prone to subsequent mistakes and errors.

The researchers Jones, DuBois and Wuebker state that stress is a major source of human error and can lead to negative reactions that are psychological, emotional and/or physical. Individuals that are low in stress tolerance are more likely to become flustered during times of stress. This may inhibit their ability to focus and attend to tasks and avoid potential safety risks. Alternately, those with the capacity for greater stress tolerance are more likely to remain focused and attentive during times of stress, while also recovering more rapidly once stress has subsided.

Drug aversion

The ‘drug-aversion’ scale assesses individuals’ attitudes toward legal and illegal drugs in and outside the workplace. The use of pre-employment scales to measure job applicants’ attitudes, values and perceptions towards drug use has found strong research support. For example, Jones and Rafilson showed that chronic illicit-drug users had more tolerant attitudes towards workplace drug use than non-drug using employees. Furthermore, ‘typical’ drug users have been shown to more frequently engage in common rationalisations for drug use, attribute more drug use to others and propose less severe punishment to drug users and dealers.

Attitude towards violence

The ‘attitude-towards-violence’ scale measures the likelihood of individuals exhibiting violent behaviour within the workplace. This encompasses commonplace acts of violence or aggression, including volatile arguments with customers or coworkers and the damage of company property.

Individuals who view aggressive behaviour as acceptable or justifiable have been shown to be more likely engage in aggressive acts compared to those with less-lenient views. Empirical evidence supports the notion that those with low self-control (thus, inability to manage their emotions), are less likely to experience the inhibition necessary to appropriately control aggressive behaviours. Similar conclusions are drawn with respect to those high in trait anger (disposition to experience anger frequently over time and context) compared to those low in trait anger. Gauging individuals’ acceptance of, and predisposition to engage in violent behaviour, and their capacity to appropriately control strong emotions such as anger, offers insight into their likelihood of exhibiting such behaviour in workplaces.

Faking

Resistance to faking is achieved by assessing respondents’ attitudes and beliefs about the behaviour of others along with their own behaviour. Whereas individuals may be guarded about fully disclosing information about their own beliefs, they’re more likely to provide information about their perceptions of others. This provides insight into the way respondents view the world; typically, those who perceive themselves as ‘average’ in a dishonest and dangerous world are more likely to be a safety risk.

By assessing respondents’ attitudes to items focusing on their attitudes and beliefs about the behaviour of others, this allows for validity checks such as ‘positive self presentation’ and consistency to be calculated, which identify those who attempt to manipulate or fake the assessment results.

Workplace adoption

Online pre-employment safety testing is a reliable and efficient way to reduce safety incidents, particularly when combined with traditional OHS strategies.

Given the demonstrable improvements in safety metrics that online safety assessments can deliver, it is concerning that their adoption isn’t more widespread among Australian businesses. Broadly speaking, such low-level adoption can be attributed to:

• Relatively recent introduction to the marketplace;
• Low awareness of pre-employment safety assessments;
• Poor understanding/scepticism of effectiveness of pre-employment safety assessments; and
• Corporate politics (eg, the HR department seen as a cost centre, or it doesn’t communicate effectively with executive management).

Organisations committed to improving workplace safety should consider adopting the following practices as part of their standard recruitment process:

• Assessing all recruits and subcontractors working for them for safety risk;
• Refusing to hire ‘high-risk’ people or subcontractors (eg, bottom 20%);
• Educating management to understand that ‘high-risk’ people will potentially hurt themselves and their workmates; and
• Adhering to hiring policies, even when under hiring pressure.