Merchants Pre-Employment Integrity Test™ Management Perspectives

Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, President

One of the primary concerns of CEO’s is how to build and maintain long-term competitive advantage. Building a competitive advantage can take shape many different ways. Sometimes it’s gained by growing larger, in order to obtain economies of scale, while other times it may mean securing a prominent customer to build a reliable base of future revenue growth. Conversely, it may mean to develop innovative products or services not yet seen before in the marketplace. Inevitably, attention must be brought to the subject of how an organization controls its costs during any discussion of competitive advantage.

CEO’s at many of our most significant customers have come to discover one of the best ways to build and maintain a competitive advantage, is to have superior management of its controllable costs. The Merchants Pre-Employment Integrity Test™ can reap very substantial gains once the benefits are well-understood and the screening is applied consistently. Seeing the connection between screening all new job candidates with integrity testing and significant savings in turnover, unemployment insurance, long and short-term disability, and workers compensation loss rates may not be immediately obvious. However, once this connection is demonstrated, the CEO is often an eager champion for adoption and deployment across the organization.

The aggregate cost savings of using the Merchants Pre-Employment Integrity Test™ to screen candidates for employment are most often several multiples of the cost of the program. The cost savings from turnover reduction alone will often cost-validate the program, even though that is not necessarily the greatest benefit. The cost savings from unemployment insurance and disability insurance can also cost-validate the program, but are not the principle benefit. The greatest cost benefit is most often and most reliably from the savings in workers compensation insurance claims.

Some of our long-term clients regard our Merchants Pre-Employment Integrity Test™ to be so important to their cost advantage that they hope their competitors never discover the benefits they have been missing. They understand the need for Merchants to advertise its services and grow its customer base, but hope that all new customers will come from new industries or market segments. They have, in some cases, exclusive or near exclusive use of integrity testing in their industry and would like nothing better than to keep it that way.

If you are a Chief Executive, or have similar responsibilities, take a close look at how using the Merchants Pre-Employment Integrity Test™ in pre-employment screening can make significant reductions in your organization’s employment-related expenses. Building a strategic alliance with Merchants Information Solutions can be an important component in your overall strategy of superior cost management.