Assessing job candidates for honesty and integrity is nothing new in hiring and HR. Employers have been concerned about who exactly is 
working for them — their moral fiber, if you will — long before the Bernie Madoff and Enron scandals rocked corporate America. A quick rundown of a search on HREOnline™ for “honesty” proves the topic has been around for quite some time.
But this release about a new tool that can help employers in the financial sector and their hiring managers predict whether a prospective hire might compromise a company’s reputation by engaging in fraud, deceit or some other type of errant behavior seemed new and different enough to catch my eye.
Veris Benchmarks created the tool and claims in its release that, by applying it to all job candidates, a company can “improve its hiring process in 15 minutes and help to protect its image and reputation.”
To develop the test, Veris sent its chief scientist, George Paajanen, an expert in the area of psychometrics, into the American prison system to build a tool that identifies the character traits manifested in currently incarcerated white-collar felons. David Shulman, Veris’ CEO and founder, and a Wall Street veteran who’s spent more than 30 years in the institutional-financial-services industry, describes his motivation behind creating the tool:
“Veris Benchmarks was really inspired by the Madoff scandal. After family members and friends were directly impacted by the corrupt scheme, I became consumed with trying to determine precisely what firms were doing to better understand those being hired to act in a fiduciary capacity.
“Executives now have the responsibility to take advantage of new methods to help protect their companies, their shareholders and, even more importantly, their customers. What are companies doing to better understand how their employee would respond when faced with situations of moral gray?”
Of course, fraud and theft are not isolated to the financial industry. Cheating and moral breakdowns happen everywhere. As the release states, “from embezzlement at the dentist’s office, to the PTA, to the retail space and beyond, employee theft amounts to billions of dollars of losses annually.”
As Shulman muses:
“Issues of impropriety have burdened industries and businesses for centuries. What if companies could detect potential malice and the likelihood of theft before the key players were ever hired?”
“What if,” indeed.
Of course, this is but one tool out there. My hunch is there will be more like this to come — tools specific to predicting bad behavior before it ever enters your doors.