Hiring

• Hiring process
• Integrity assessment
• Integrity and sales performance
• Interviewing
• Legal issues
• Sales success characteristics

Selling

• Marketing plans
• Sales skills

Managing/Coaching

• Action plans
• Coaching skills
• Common coaching myths
• Common production mistakes
• Manager success characteristics
• Sales culture

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What Are the Legal Issues Associated with Integrity Testing?

Recent research conducted by Gallup and the Better Business Bureau on the dramatic loss of consumer trust in business underscores an important truth: Customers value integrity in companies and their salespeople more than ever.

Integrity testing is one effective method managers can use to help ensure that the sales candidates they hire have high levels of integrity. While integrity testing has been used in workplace environments for years, some managers have legal concerns associated with the use of these types of pre-employment assessments.

For decades, the polygraph was the primary screening method companies used to determine which candidates possessed high integrity. In 1988, the Employee Polygraph Protection Act prohibited employers from using a pre-employment polygraph to screen applicants. Companies then turned to written integrity tests as a means to screen applicants.

Although integrity testing is not federally regulated, a few states have restricted the use of integrity testing under anti-polygraph statutes. For example, Rhode Island does not ban integrity tests, but enacted a statute that such tests may not constitute the "primary basis" of an employment decision. Massachusetts forbids the use of any written technique that provides a diagnostic opinion of honesty, a statute that effectively prohibits integrity tests.

Research conducted by Terpstra, Mohamed, and Bryan (1999) supports the legality of integrity testing if it is used as one component in a structured interview process and not the sole determinant of whether to hire an applicant. The study reviewed 158 US federal court cases involving hiring discrimination and reported that the "unstructured interview"
was the most frequently challenged selection methodology. The structured interview method survived 100% of the legal challenges against it, while the unstructured interview method withstood only 59% of challenges.