One of the most important assets of an organization is its personnel.
The purpose of applicant screening is to find the most appropriate person for a particular job. Several methods are available for screening applicants, such as interviewing and testing.
The culmination of the applicant screening process results in hiring an applicant. At this stage, an organization already has invested considerable personnel, money, and time in making the best possible choice. The next step is to develop a productive employee. Tbis can be accomplished through adequate socialization, which is a learning process that, it is hoped, produces an employee who will benefit the organization. Two primary methods of socialization are employee training and example setting by superiors .
. Both applicant screening and employee socialization are primary loss prevention strategies. If an organization can select honest, stable, and pro- ductive people, less has to be done to protect the organization from employ- ees and protect employees from employees. If employees can be socialized to act safely and protect company assets, security and loss prevention strate- gies are enhanced further.
Griggs v. Duke Power (1971). In 1968, several employees of the Duke
Power Company in North Carolina were given a pencil-and-paper aptitude test for manual labor. Willie Griggs and twelve other black workers sued their employer with the charge of job discrimination under the Civil Rights
Act of 1964. Their contention was that the pencil-and-paper aptitude test had little to do with their ability to perform manual labor. The Supreme
Court decided that a test is inherently discriminatory if it is not job related and differentiates on the basis of race, sex, or religion. Furthermore, employers are required to prove that their screening methods are job related.
Bakke v. University of California (1978). Reverse discrimination was the main issue. of this case. Allan Bakke, a white man, sued the Davis Medi- cal School under the "equal protection" clause of the Fourteenth Amend- ment because it set aside 16 of 100 openings for minorities, who were evaluated according to different standards. The Court concluded that the racial quota system was unacceptable because it disregarded Bakke's right to equal protection of the law, and that affirmative action programs are permis- sible as long as applicants are considered on an individual basis and a rigid number of places has not been set aside. Race can be a key factor in the selection process; however,