Whoa! A hiring strategy we really do NOT want to see happen!

Originally published by Rita Handrich.

A recent symposium for IT executives included a presentation that pitched the idea of genetic screening of job applicants for traits like “honesty, leadership, being a team player, and having a high level of emotional intelligence”. While we think you may want to hang onto your checkbook if offered this sort of service, it is a disturbing outgrowth of the burgeoning research into genetic testing for almost everything. Here is a quote from the Seeker website which brought this possibility to our attention:

Although federal and states laws prohibit employers from requesting or using an employee’s genetic information, genetic testing is mainstream. Millions of people voluntarily pay to have their genomes analyzed thanks to inexpensive DNA kits available from companies like Ancestry DNA , Genome , 23andMe, Family Tree, to name a few. And research is moving forward in fields such as psychiatric genetics, trying to find correlations between genes and behavior.

“We fully appreciated the lack of legality and some of the issues with the science,” Furlonger told Seeker by email. “Nonetheless, it seems clear that work is being undertaken and therefore the current state should not be ignored.”

We are glad they appreciate the “lack of legality”. (Some researchers do not acknowledge the legal concerns—like this group on how to hire the “good psychopath” by testing them pre-hire.) The actual best answer to this question is that there is no gene for leadership (or honesty, or being a team player, or having high emotional intelligence) and there is no way testing of this sort would be useful to a company trying to figure out who to hire.

Neurolaw researchers (like Hank Greeley) are speaking up against this strategy:

“Why would an employer rely on imperfect, and generally weak, associations between genes and test scores instead of relying directly on the test scores?” said Henry Greely, director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University and the chair of steering committee of the Center for Biomedical Ethics. It’s like running, he said. Rather than look for genetic variations that indicate whether someone is a good sprinter or not, just watch a person sprint. That ought to tell you all you need to know.

We agree and are glad to have voices of reason speaking out against the desire to “push the hiring envelope” into areas that make no sense and violate medical privacy (as well as statistical integrity). Because while the genetic testing can’t tell you anything about the purported target traits, they can tell you things about the person that should not be a factor in hiring (including gender, possibly ethnicity, and medical issues). Will genetic testing results be a tool to worsen the problems of women and non-Asian minorities in breaking into STEM fields? Here’s what we wrote in August 2016 when we came across the “good psychopath” workplace fit test. We think it works for this idea too.

From a law office management perspective, we really would urge rejecting this sort of strategy. What they seem to intimate is that you want to find the 10% of the psychopathic population who have moderate psychopathic tendencies and then, divide them into primary and secondary psychopaths and then, figure out which of the primary psychopaths have really good social skills so their behaviors will not wreak havoc in your workplace.

Putting on our duly licensed Psychologist hats for a moment, the distinction seems to be a very slippery slope. Secondary psychopaths are trouble from the beginning. Primary psychopaths have better social skills so they can manage the day-to-day more successfully, but under stress they are going to create havoc, too. And we have never seen a trial team that isn’t under terrific stress. It is the nature of litigation, and stress tolerances need to be higher than average, not a potential area of weakness.

The authors put a troubling amount of faith in a psychological trait scale, when you can assess the same things by looking at work history, length of relationships, and having your own warning signs on high alert during the interview process. Use your intuition about whether someone will be a good fit. It is also risky to assume you can “get around” the Americans with Disabilities Act by using the PPI-R scale with job applicants when what you are measuring is psychopathy and resulting goodness of fit in your workplace.

And a high-functioning psychopathic attorney is just the kind of person to drag you through a lawsuit by claiming that you rejected him or her based on an ADA protected factor.

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Related posts:

1. Listen up, HR folks! There are ‘good’ psychopaths for you to hire!
2. Stereotypes happen all the time if you are neither pale nor male
3. Psychopaths brains work differently—at least when  they are criminal psychopaths

Curated by Texas Bar Today. Follow us on Twitter @texasbartoday.

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