Ensuring a safe and disciplined environment at workplace is an important responsibility of employers. Illicit drug and alcohol abuse, which is a common unhealthy habit among employees, is a major concern for employers today. In order to prevent the effects of drug abusing employees at workplace, pre-employment drug testing is conducted.
Pre-employment drug testing involves testing the candidates when hiring. Job applicants or candidates are tested for illicit drug and alcohol abuse before they join the organization. Any applicant who is tested positive is not hired. Hence, pre-employment drug testing helps to find better candidates. Better candidates can lead to better employees. Drug abusing individuals lack proper concentration and cannot perform well. So, this may badly affect the individual as well as organization’s productivity. Screening for drugs at the time of hiring itself helps the employers to avoid such situations which may arise later.
Furthermore, drug abusing employees may be responsible for accidents at job-site, and this incurs huge losses to the employers. Pre-employment drug screening helps to avoid these likely accidents. Workers addicted to illicit drugs and alcohol also are engaged in criminal and violent behavior at workplace. It affects the safety of co-workers and also the workplace environment. Drug screening, therefore, even avoids these issues and ensures safety. It also reduces attitude problems.
Employers should take care of the healthcare policies that are defined for employees. While the drug abusing employees often fall ill, most of these policies will be attributed to the drug users. Drug testing the employees at the time of hiring can reduce the healthcare policy costs. Pre-employment drug screening is, therefore, mainly intended to avoid burden of handling problematic employees addicted to drugs and alcohol, and is very much helpful for employers.