Screening (was OTHER test)

["Alex Silbajoris" <alsilba -at- hotmail -dot- com>]

Last year I got a job offer with a major communications company.  I had 
already worked as a contractor for them, in another department, and passed a 
drug screen for that assignment.  I also witnessed some amazing departmental 
infighting during that time.

The offer came in the form of a packet with various papers, etc., including 
a packet that MUST be presented at a specific drug screening lab location 
within 24 hours of the issuance of the offer.  I thought this was a bit 
extreme, and as it turned out, I refused their offer because of this - they 
failed to deliver the packet to me on the correct day, and by the time I had 
it in hand I had about an hour and a half to report.

I was offended at what I perceived to be a presumption of guilt, and I was 
greatly troubled by the prospect of such a suspicious employer (or should I 
say HR office) who was also apperently not compotent to administer their own 
policies correctly.

Adding to this was a credit record check.  In my refusal letter, I said I 
did not trust that information, because a few months earlier I sat at a 
banker's desk and discovered that my record said I was still working at an 
employer I had left two years earlier, and - I loved this - I owned a house 
worth $103,000.  I have absolutely no idea where that came from.  (I joked 
with the banker - Ohmygosh, I have to go cut the grass!  What's the 
address?)

When I refused their offer, I had been out of work for several months, and 
my family thought I was absolutely insane.  A month later I accepted another 
offer from a far smaller company, at exactly the same salary.  No drug test, 
no presumption of guilt until proven otherwise.  Since then I've watched the 
business news headlines report the cutting of hundreds of jobs at that major 
company, and in retrospect I can clearly see that would have been a false 
quest for me to pursue.

For me, the screening was a warning of what lay ahead for me as a writer in 
their organization.  The administrators wouldn't trust their writers to 
write competently any more than they would trust them to walk in the door 
clean and sober.   The atmosphere at my current employer is entirely 
different; instead of asking "what are you doing wrong" they ask "what can 
we do together" and it's up to me to succeed or fail on my own merits.

A side note on criminal background checks - you may have heard of the Ohio 
chapter of the American Cancer Society recently suffering approximately $8 
million in embezzlement from one of their major executives.  They performed 
some background checks before hiring him, but after the crime some news 
organizations dug deeper into his background and discovered he had a record 
of swindling under other names.

- A



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