Substance Abuse Testing As An Employee Screening Tool

By Author: Naman Vohra
Total Articles: 133
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The case of increasing number of people taking to substance or drug abuse is one of the greatest issues being faced by employers all across the world. For an employer, the mistake of hiring a person who is a drug abuser can be a very risky and costly affair. In more elaborate words, a drug abusing employee can be a negative influence on the other employees and any undesirable incident can make the employee pay heavy charges in various forms including litigation expenses and hefty medical expenses. Due to this, many companies have adopted substance abuse testing as part of their pre-employment screening as they want to do away with the risks of such activity at the very initial stage.

So when companies get it conducted on all ideal job candidates, they are doing away with plausible consequences like high absenteeism, high employee turnover, low productivity, negative influence on the workplace, and so on. This is particularly true in the case of those people who are drug addicts.

Companies generally go for a substance abuse test which can be conducted with just a blood sample or a urine sample. Substance abuse tests ...
... are typically in the form of five to twelve panelled package, wherein each panel referring to a particular test within that package.

Furthermore, even if an employer has done away with the risks at pre employment level, the buck doesn't stop there. This is because no one can say for sure that the employee who did not use to do drugs at the time of on-boarding would not start taking drugs any time after that. Hence, a random drug test on all the employees becomes pertinent.
In addition, a random substance abuse test is better than a pre-scheduled substance abuse test as this would not leave any time for an employee to curtails certain number of drug fixes in order to come out clean in the report. During a typical pre-scheduled drug abuse test, an employee might just get enough time to make sure that his blood sample or urine sample does not reflect the drug level by curbing the fixes for certain amount of days or hours.

Just like western counterparts, substance abuse testing in India, fortunately, is getting accepted as a practise by more and more companies. And with that, an increased number of players are coming to the fore to give specialized background verification services with implicit substance abuse tests.

~Naman is associated with a leading background screening company that specializes in Background Check