Pre-Employment PAT: Four Key Questions Before Launch

If your company is considering pre-hire/post-offer Physical Abilities Testing as part of your job application process, you should be asking yourself four key questions:

1. Is it legally defensible?
2. Will my organization realize a return on investment?
3. How will it affect our hiring?
4. What are the steps for getting testing started?

Legal Compliance. There are a few things you need to know about compliance issues. First, physical ability tests should only be administered after a conditional offer of employment is made. According to Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) guidelines, an employer may only request examinations that are medical in nature after a conditional offer of employment has been extended to an employee.

The sequence of the test is important because the most thorough, effective physical abilities tests do have aspects that are considered to be medical testing under federal employment regulations.

Additionally, physical abilities testing must comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Making the decision hiring decision based on medical information or a diagnosis (like a previous injury) is not allowed under the ADA. To be in compliance, testing also cannot be comprised of general strength, agility, or endurance testing.

Using sit-ups, push-ups, step-tests, isokinetic strength testing machines, or cycle ergometer tests is not ADA-compliant. Rather, testing must directly correlate with the essential physical tasks required to perform the job for which a candidate has applied. In order to determine the essential physical requirements of the job, a thorough job analysis should be performed. If you test at multiple sites, the job analysis should be done at several locations – the exact number should be determined based on the number of your locations.

Testing must also be consistently applied. In other words, employers who implement post offer Physical Abilities Testing for a specific job cannot pick and choose which candidates to test; they must test all candidates to whom they have made a conditional offer of employment for that job.

These regulations are meant to ensure that applicants with disabilities and applicants who belong to any protected class of individuals are not screened out without an opportunity to prove themselves capable of meeting the requirements of the job in question. If a properly conducted EEOC and ADA-compliant physical abilities testing shows that a prospective employee is unable to meet the physical demands of the job, the conditional offer of employment can be rescinded.

Return on Investment. In short, there are five easy steps for calculating a potential return on investment for pre-employment Physical Abilities Testing.

1. Determine the annual costs of strains and sprains and slips, trips, and falls for the past 1-3 years. (direct costs)
2. Multiply the direct costs by 1.1 to determine the indirect costs of injury.
3. Add direct and indirect costs to determine the total costs.
4. Work with a credible provider of pre-hire Physical Abilities Tests to determine the costs for doing job analysis and test development and the per-test cost. (initial investment)
5. Determine the estimated number of new hires per year and multiply by per-test costs.
6. This vendor should also be able to give you an estimate of the expected savings in work comp costs that they typically achieve with their testing. (savings realized by testing). The percent varies greatly by vendor ranging from 30ish percent for some up to 70ish percent for others.
7. Determine your anticipated net annual savings (savings minus the cost of the testing program)
8. Dividing the net savings by the cost of the investment in the program and, multiply it by 100.

Effect on hiring. How Pre-Hire Physical Abilities Testing affects your hiring depends to some extent on your applicant pool and the physical difficulty of your jobs. The providers that you are partnering with to administer your Physical Abilities Testing program should be able to tell you their average fail rate. If they can’t, these “providers” may not have the necessary experience or expertise to do the work.

Fail rates vary widely according to the test you’re using. And in a tight labor market, any fail rate can seem like a lot–especially to your talent acquisition team. But if no one fails, then why are you doing testing? At ErgoScience, we find that the injury costs decrease by approximately 14% for every 1% fail rate. So, test failures are not a bad thing. These hires likely won’t last or will go on to sustain an injury.

The PAT provider should also be able to give you an average turn-around time from the moment you request the data to the time you receive a report. And they should be able to provide reports to support their claims.

You’ll also want to know how they protect your organization from being accused of making your hiring decision on medical information instead of functional performance related to the job. And you’ll want to make sure they are archiving test results in a secure HIPAA-compliant database.

Steps for implementation. Development of legally defensible pre-hire Physical Abilities Testing depends on performing a detailed job analysis that focuses on the essential physical requirements of the job for which you want to test. Test items and pass/fail points are selected that represent the most difficult aspects of the job. Once the test is developed, a nearby clinic is trained in test administration, and the testing begins. After implementation, it’s important to track pass/fail statistics and turn-around times to monitor the outcomes and quality of your testing program. After 12 months of testing, it will be time to collaborate with your provider to look at the injury statistics before and after initiating testing to make sure the program is effective in reducing injuries.

The Bottom Line? Organizations can use post-offer/pre-employment Physical Abilities Testing to significantly decrease workplace injuries. They just need to:

• Be sure that their testing programs are in line with federal regulations.
• Calculate a projected positive return on investment
• Understand and be willing to accept the potential fail rate
• Know the steps for creating a defensible testing program.

This process is most easily done by choosing a reputable, experienced pre-employment testing provider who offers programs customized to the specific needs, demands, and conditions present to your organization.

For questions regarding job analysis and test development and implementation, contact: Deborah Lechner: deborahlechner@ergoscience.com.