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May 13, 2016 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom
Many of the robberies that have been committed in recent years have been “inside” jobs. This means that persons working or associated with the victims have been involved either in plotting or participating in robberies.
Employers therefore have an additional burden. They have to worry about the honesty of their staff, because they may employ someone only to discover too late that that person would have been part of giving information to criminal elements about the business.
It is hard enough for employers to contend with having to find suitably qualified staff. The experience of employers in Guyana is that it is not easy as it seems. People are turning up for jobs with all manner of bogus certificates, made to look authentic. The photocopiers of today are making forgeries easy.
Employers therefore have an additional task of trying to verify the qualifications of the staff they propose to employ, because some persons are turning up and saying they have eight and nine subjects and yet cannot draft a simple letter or prepare a report.
Some businesses are adapting to this challenge by changing the format of the job interview. It is no longer about someone coming in and answering a few questions. Employers are not being duped by that anymore. They are asking applicants to simulate real day-to-day situations in the workplace and they are looking to see how these persons perform.
In the media this would involve, for example, giving an applicant for a job as a reporter some facts about a make-belief incident and asking the applicant to write a story. Employers do not have the resources to train people and allow them to learn on the job.
You can do all those things and yet employ a dishonest person; someone who will not only steal from you, but plot with others to rob you. It is a worrying development within all businesses, but equally so within the law enforcement arm of the State.
Over the past few days we have had incidents in which former members of the Guyana Police Force were allegedly involved in robberies. One has to ask how it is that these persons were employed in the first place within the Guyana Police Force. It is a disturbing trend that should force the authorities to look seriously at integrity testing of all new applicants.
Integrity testing must not be confused with lie detector tests. There should be no place for lie detector tests in employment. Lie detector tests are notoriously unreliable and cannot be trusted to establish the honesty or truthfulness of a job applicant.
Integrity testing is much broader than lie detector tests. It looks at things such as attitude, approach to work. It seeks to determine the character of the person. There are modern tools which are now available to employers to determine the character of applicants, rather than simply asking them to produce a character reference which anyone can produce.
In the old days, employers used to send around scouts to find out about the reputation of applicants. Depending on whether the scout liked you or not or whether he (it was always a he) was prejudiced against you, you could be denied a job.
The right person for a job is no longer just about the person who has the right qualifications and experience. All employers want to ensure that they are not employing persons with connections to the criminal underworld or who have criminal intentions. Such persons can harm you and your family.
You have to choose the right persons and the various tests that would have to be administered may be too costly for individual companies to undertake. But it is better to spend that money than end up being a victim of an ‘inside’ job.
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