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Most hiring discussions focus on whether a candidate can do the job. That is a reasonable place to start. But for employers in hospitality, manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, food production, and retail, it is only part of the risk picture.
A technically capable employee who steals, misuses substances, files fraudulent workers' compensation claims, or creates workplace conflict is not a good hire. And that kind of risk is largely invisible in a standard interview.
Integrity testing for high-volume hiring addresses that gap directly. It is not a character judgment. It is a risk screen — and the evidence behind it is more practical and more compelling than most employers realize.
The Hiring Risk Most Companies Underestimate
Workers' compensation claims, employee theft, absenteeism, workplace conflict, and safety incidents are not random events. At the group level, they cluster among employees with particular behavioral patterns — patterns that are measurable before the hire is made.
Research on counterproductive work behavior (CWB) — a category that includes theft, illegal activity, drug use, absenteeism, tardiness, and violence — consistently finds that these behaviors are connected. An employee who takes company property is more likely, statistically, to also have attendance problems. An employee who uses substances at work is more likely to be involved in a safety incident.
For employers with large hourly workforces, these patterns show up quickly and compound. A single workers' compensation claim can cost thousands of dollars. Repeated claims from a predictable subset of employees are a measurable, addressable business problem — not just bad luck.
The highest-cost employees are not always obvious in an interview. Applicants who create risk often know how to say the right things.
What IntegrityFirst Measures and Why It Works
IntegrityFirst is a current version of the Tescor Survey, an overt integrity test used in multiple published studies. The current format uses 54 questions — shorter than the original 73-to-74-question Tescor format — which matters in high-volume environments where candidate completion time and ease of use affect throughput.
As an overt integrity test, IntegrityFirst asks direct questions. It does not hide its purpose. It assesses risk tied to four main areas:
- Theft — applicant admissions, beliefs, and attitudes about taking property from employers
- Substance abuse — disclosures and risk indicators related to drug and alcohol use
- Hostility — attitudes linked to aggression, conflict, and unsafe behavior
- Faking — control items that identify applicants giving unrealistically positive answers
A common concern is that applicants will simply lie. Some will try. But research shows that many applicants are more candid than employers expect. Some believe that the conduct they engage in is common enough that admitting it is not disqualifying. Others recognize that denying everything looks implausible.
The Cornell Hospitality Report on the Tescor Survey found that 31% of applicants in a large hotel-chain sample were classified as high risk — and many had directly admitted to theft, drug use, or other risky conduct. That separation between applicants is what makes the test useful, even when some faking occurs. For a broader overview of how overt and personality-based formats compare, see our guide to the overt vs. personality-based honesty test.
The Evidence: What the Research Shows
The business case for integrity testing is not theoretical. It comes from real hiring data, real workers' compensation claims, and real cost comparisons between screened and unscreened employees.
The Cornell Hotel-Chain Study
A Cornell Hospitality Report by Michael Sturman and David Sherwyn reviewed Tescor Survey results across a large hotel chain over roughly one year. During that period, 29,043 applicants took the test and 6,079 were hired. Screened employees were compared against 27,265 unscreened incumbent employees.
| Measure | Unscreened Employees | Screened Employees |
|---|---|---|
| Claim frequency | 2.82% | 1.46% |
| Number of claims | 769 | 89 |
| Total claims cost | $2,665,712 | $188,589 |
| Average cost per claim | $3,466 | $2,119 |
| Average cost per employee | $97.77 | $31.02 |
Screened employees were approximately half as likely to file a workers' compensation claim. Average annual workers' comp cost per employee was $66.75 lower for screened hires. The authors estimated that testing cost $270,100 and produced $405,773 in workers' comp savings alone — a 50% return on investment, counting only that one outcome.
That ROI estimate does not count reduced theft, lower absenteeism, fewer conflicts, better performance, or lower turnover. The practical return is likely higher. For a deeper breakdown, see our full analysis of the ROI of integrity testing in hiring.
The Multi-Industry Study
A study published in the Journal of Business and Psychology by Oliver, Shafiro, Bullard, and Thomas tested the same connection across four industries, covering 33,418 total employees. The findings were consistent across every setting.
| Industry | Screened Claim Rate | Unscreened Claim Rate | Unscreened employees were... |
|---|---|---|---|
| Auto club | 1.6% | 7.0% | 4.77x more likely to file |
| Nursing home | 2.2% | 10.0% | 3.72x more likely to file |
| Food processor | 3.2% | 6.6% | 2.51x more likely to file |
| Multimedia company | 3.6% | 5.7% | 3.78x more likely to file |
Average workers' comp cost per employee also dropped in every sample: from $323 to $50 at the auto club, $212 to $27 at the nursing home, $206 to $77 at the food processor, and $309 to $56 at the multimedia company.
Screened employees were between 2.5x and 4.8x less likely to file a workers' compensation claim — across four different industries and over 33,000 employees.
The Broader Validity Evidence
The research base extends beyond these two studies. Sackett and Wanek's review in Personnel Psychology covered decades of integrity testing literature, including a major meta-analysis of more than 180 studies and 665 validity coefficients. Integrity tests predicted counterproductive work behavior with a corrected correlation of approximately .39 for overt formats, and supervisory job performance ratings with corrected validity of .30.
Schmidt and Hunter's landmark 85-year review of personnel selection methods found that combining a cognitive ability test with an integrity test produces a composite validity of .65 — one of the highest two-predictor combinations in the selection research literature.
Why INTEGRITY TESTING FOR HIGH-VOLUME HIRING Matters for Your Industry
The evidence above covers hospitality, auto club operations, nursing homes, food processing, and multimedia manufacturing. The pattern is not industry-specific — it reflects a consistent relationship between behavioral risk indicators and costly workplace outcomes.
For employers in environments where the following conditions apply, integrity testing is particularly worth evaluating:
- High turnover means frequent hiring and repeated exposure to unscreened applicants
- Workers' compensation costs are material and tracked closely
- Safety compliance matters — and safety violations carry significant financial and regulatory exposure
- Cash, inventory, controlled substances, or physical assets are accessible to hourly employees
- Absenteeism and scheduling reliability directly affect operations
Integrity testing is not the right tool for every role or every organization. But for employers where even a modest reduction in claim frequency or theft-related terminations translates into significant dollar savings, the ROI case is straightforward.
How to Use Integrity Testing Without Overusing It
The research is clear about one thing: integrity testing works best as one part of a broader pre-employment screening process, not as a standalone disqualifier.
The Cornell report explicitly recommends combining integrity test results with structured interviews, references, skill checks, and role-specific screens. Slaughter, Cooper, and Gilliland's 2020 research adds a useful point: the benefits of hiring for conscientiousness are strongest when the employer also enforces clear workplace standards. The test helps select people more likely to follow rules — but only if those rules are actually enforced.
A practical deployment sequence for high-volume environments:
- Confirm basic job fit and minimum qualifications first
- Administer IntegrityFirst before final interview or offer
- Review results consistently using defined, pre-set decision rules
- Combine with structured interviews, reference checks, and role-specific screens
- Track outcomes after hire — workers' comp claims, attendance, turnover, safety incidents
- Audit results by job, location, and demographic group to confirm fair use
Legal note: IntegrityFirst should be positioned as a job-related risk screen — not a medical exam, clinical diagnosis, or moral label. The Cornell study found no violation of the 80% adverse impact rule across sex, race, or age groups in the hotel-chain sample. EEOC guidance requires consistent administration and periodic adverse impact monitoring regardless of expected outcomes. For a full overview of requirements, see our guide to legal compliance for integrity testing in hiring.
The Bottom Line
Employers do not need perfect prediction to benefit from integrity testing. They need better odds. A tool that reduces workers' compensation claim frequency by half — consistently, across multiple industries and tens of thousands of employees — is not a theory. It is a practical hiring advantage.
IntegrityFirst gives high-volume hiring teams a faster, cleaner, research-backed way to reduce exposure to costly workplace behavior before the hire is made. For organizations where safety, trust, attendance, and workers' compensation costs matter, that belongs in the selection process.
The data in this article comes from a longer body of research. If you are evaluating integrity testing for your organization — or building the business case internally — the full IntegrityFirst white paper covers the Cornell study, the multi-industry findings, the legal framework, and a practical implementation guide in one document. Download it below and keep the evidence where you need it.
