Employers Find ‘Bad Apples’ Early, Reduce Recruitment Costs With the QuikStaff Pre-Employment Survey From Insight Worldwide

Insight Worldwide, Inc., a pre-employment test company, today announced the release of QuikStaff, its new job-applicant survey that helps employers compress recruitment time lines and eliminate the need for late stage interviewee testing by initially flagging applicants who admit to counterproductive behavior such as stealing at past jobs.

Hiring managers that work in industries with high employee-turnover rates such as fast-food, staffing, trucking and healthcare must simply trust their instincts on candidates or, more often, prolong the hiring cycle and add layers of cost to the recruitment process by commissioning third parties to conduct interviewee background checks and drug tests. The process effectively requires employers to invest in what often prove to be undesirable candidates and doesn’t always reveal an interviewee’s past behavior, particularly in the workplace.

By comparison, integrity or honesty surveys such as QuikStaff pose straightforward questions to applicants in clear language that elicit honest answers or admissions of counterproductive work-related behavior. The multiple-choice QuikStaff survey helps employers reduce turnover and hire high-quality candidates by screening out applicants who have been undependable, abused drugs, committed workers' compensation fraud, acts of violence and theft.

“If you ask applicants what you need to know, a lot of them will tell you — they just don’t consider their past behavior to be unusual or unacceptable,” said Bill Johnston, Insight Worldwide’s founder and president who has worked in the pre-employment test industry for 20 years. “They really consider their behavior to be normal, and they figure if you’re asking at the beginning, you’ll probably find out anyway.”

Insight’s QuikStaff was designed to act as an efficient screening tool for busy hiring managers in fast-paced, high-turnover industries. The 44-question survey takes about 10 minutes to finish and can be administered and instantly tabulated on-site by an employer through Insight’s Website or a handheld Palm that’s pre-programmed by Insight. The survey also conforms to recruitment standards set by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, as well as state and federal hiring regulations.

Employers have administered some 800,000 integrity-style surveys from Insight since the company was founded in 1998, Johnston said. Over the years, about 25 percent of survey applicants have admitted to exhibiting counterproductive behaviors.

Johnston added that applicants who admit to counterproductive behavior on QuikStaff surveys essentially experience cognitive dissonance — or anxiety resulting from an inconsistency between one's beliefs and one's actions. For instance, cognitive dissonance moves applicants who stole money at previous jobs — and believe, deep down, that stealing is wrong — to admit to stealing to convince themselves their actions are socially normal and to re-align their actions with a newly stated belief system.

A diverse team of professionals who work in the human resources, staffing and insurance industries created QuikStaff’s questions to ensure that each one accomplishes a specific screening goal.

“We structure the questions and the answers, so there’s not really any room for interpretation,” Johnston said. “We don’t counsel employers on the results or analyze them — the admissions of guilt are right there in black and white.”

Applicants also tend to under report or mitigate their past indiscretions, Johnston said. An applicant, for instance, may admit to stealing $25 from a past employer when, in truth, the applicant stole $500.

About Insight Worldwide, Inc.

Insight Worldwide, Inc., a pre-employment test company based in Salem, Ore., helps employers cost-effectively and efficiently screen job applicants at the start of recruitment cycles with multiple-choice surveys that conform to state and federal hiring regulations. Insight’s surveys elicit admissions of counterproductive work-related behavior from applicants. The surveys help employers hire high-quality candidates, reduce recruitment costs, workers’ compensation costs and turnover. Employers can administer and instantly tabulate Insight’s surveys at any time through its Web-based portal or a handheld Palm. The company works closely with a 10-person advisory panel made up of various experts on employee selection, employment practices, human resource management, business management and labor law. The panel advises Insight on all of its survey products and overall business operations. Insight’s clients include JELD-WEN, McDonald’s, Corrections Corporation of America and Select/Remedy staffing. The company was founded in 1998 by Bill Johnston. http://www.insightww.com/