Applicant Review

1. Abstract

The Applicant Review (AR) is a standardized, paper-and-pencil and computer-administered psychometric assessment developed by David J. Cherrington and J. Owen Cherrington (1983) to evaluate honesty, integrity, and aggressive behavioral tendencies in organizational contexts. Designed primarily as an overt pre-employment screening device, the AR addresses the pervasive challenges of employee theft, shrinkage, time abuse, and counterproductive workplace behavior (CWB). The full assessment architecture comprises 102 items categorized into four distinct behavioral and evaluative domains: social attitudes (42 items), personal behaviors (24 items), past behaviors (11 items), and future behavioral intentions (5 items), alongside specialized modules assessing interpersonal hostility and aggression. Across its historical revisions (1985, 1988, 1991, 1993, and 1996), the instrument has established normative baselines across an extensive national sample exceeding 33,330 respondents representing ten distinct industrial sectors, most notably retail chains, convenience stores, grocery outlets, specialty merchandising, and corporate management environments.

Psychometrically, the Applicant Review exhibits strong evidence of internal consistency and temporal stability. Factor-analytic investigations reveal an underlying seven-factor structure operationalizing an aggregate honesty score: personal honesty, honesty of others, blame for dishonesty, definition and standards of honesty, punitive severity, moral reasoning, and past admissions of deviance. Subscale internal consistency estimates (Cronbach’s alpha) range from 0.66 to 0.77, while test-retest reliability across college and vocational cohorts demonstrates coefficients between 0.80 and 0.89 over one-week intervals, with composite honesty stability reaching 0.83. The AR utilizes a multi-format response rubric incorporating four-point Likert agreement scales for social attributions alongside five-point behavioral frequency anchors. Criterion and construct validation strategies—leveraging the known-group technique, polygraph comparisons, shrinkage reduction audits, and disciplinary records—confirm its predictive utility in mitigating workplace delinquency without generating adverse impact against protected demographic classes.

2. Keywords

Applicant Review, integrity testing, pre-employment screening, employee theft, counterproductive workplace behavior, overt honesty tests, moral reasoning, organizational deviance, personnel selection, Cherrington, psychometrics, workplace aggression

3. Authors

The Applicant Review was developed by David J. Cherrington, D.B.A., and J. Owen Cherrington, Ph.D.

• David J. Cherrington, D.B.A., SPHR: Professor Emeritus of Organizational Leadership and Strategy at the Marriott School of Business, Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah, United States). A prominent scholar in organizational behavior, human resource management, business ethics, and work values, Dr. Cherrington has authored foundational textbooks and extensive empirical literature on employee motivation, theft deterrence, and character development in corporate hierarchies.
• J. Owen Cherrington, Ph.D., CPA: Professor of Accountancy at the Marriott School of Business, Brigham Young University. Specializing in forensic accounting, auditing controls, and the financial ramifications of white-collar crime, Dr. Cherrington provided the operational and fiscal audit frameworks necessary to validate how internal employee delinquency correlates with accounting discrepancies, register shortages, and organizational shrinkage.
• Publisher & Distribution: The assessment, technical documentation, and computerized scoring algorithms were published and distributed by CHC Forecast, Inc. (Stanfordville, NY), with continuous psychometric updates provided across the 1980s and 1990s.

4. Purpose

The primary operational objective of the Applicant Review is the systematic identification of candidates exhibiting high propensities toward dishonesty, internal shrinkage, rule noncompliance, and aggressive interpersonal conduct prior to their formal placement within work organizations. Employee theft represents an immense economic liability across global commerce; foundational investigations by Clark and Hollinger (1983) indicated that billions of dollars in organizational assets are systematically misappropriated annually not by external shoplifters, but by internal personnel. Traditional unstructured screening mechanisms—such as personal interviews, resume verifications, and unstandardized reference inquiries—routinely fail to detect counterproductive predispositions due to social desirability distortions, impression management, and legal constraints restricting previous employers from disclosing past disciplinary actions.

The Applicant Review was explicitly designed to overcome these diagnostic deficiencies by measuring an applicant’s cognitive attributions, ethical thresholds, moral rationalizations, and admitted historical misbehavior through an overt testing paradigm. Rather than attempting to disguise the intent of the questions (as seen in broad personality-based or covert integrity tests measuring generalized conscientiousness and emotional stability), the AR directly queries candidates regarding their beliefs about the ubiquity of theft, the acceptability of rationalizing dishonest behaviors, recommended punitive measures for infractions, and self-reported rule violations. The theoretical rationale rests on empirical findings that dishonest individuals exhibit distinct cognitive scripts: they systematically overestimate the prevalence of delinquency among their peers, propose lenient punishments for offenders, maintain flexible definitions of what constitutes property theft, and actively blame systemic corporate inequities for personal misbehavior.

Beyond fiscal theft, the instrument targets counterproductive workplace behaviors including unauthorized time usage, substance abuse, workplace sabotage, and verbal or physical aggression. Organizational applications encompass high-risk entry-level roles, retail cashiering, financial services, warehouse logistical positions, and supervisory appointments where monitoring is low and autonomy over tangible or monetary assets is high. In research settings, the AR provides a robust psychometric architecture for investigating the interactions between individual moral development (Kohlberg, 1984; Rest & Narvaez, 1994), organizational climate, and workplace deviance, assisting industrial-organizational psychologists in formulating predictive models of ethical decision-making under organizational pressure.

5. Psychological Construct

The Applicant Review assesses an overarching multidimensional construct of workplace integrity and behavioral restraint, decomposed into seven distinct psychometric subscales and four sequential behavioral domains. Each dimension measures specific cognitive, moral, or behavioral manifestations of honesty and compliance:

• Personal Honesty: Evaluates an individual’s explicit commitment to truthfulness, ethical rigor, and rejection of deceptive practices. High-scoring individuals demonstrate unyielding personal standards against fraud, misrepresentation, and deceit across varying social contexts (e.g., Item 32: “I am an honest person and would never steal or cheat”).
• Honesty of Others (Perceived Norms): Gauges the respondent’s baseline assumptions regarding the ethical integrity of the general population and coworkers. Grounded in psychological projection and the false consensus effect, individuals prone to delinquency consistently assume that “everyone steals” or that most employees falsify records (e.g., Item 12: “Nearly every worker has stolen something from his or her company at one time or another”; Item 24: “Everyone has a price and can be bribed if the conditions are right”). Endorsement of these beliefs normalizes deviant conduct.
• Blame for Dishonesty (Neutralization & Rationalization): Measures the extent to which an individual justifies dishonest acts by blaming external targets, corporate greed, perceived underpayment, or supervisory mistreatment. High scores on this negative dimension reflect cognitive neutralization techniques, such as denial of the victim or appeals to higher loyalties (e.g., Item 17: “This man is not a thief; the company is the thief and owes him back pay for cheating him”; Item 31: “Most sales clerks deserve to steal a little now and then because they are so badly underpaid”).
• Definition and Standards of Honesty: Explores the conceptual boundaries an applicant establishes between legitimate enterprise and theft. Individuals with impaired integrity maintain porous definitions of theft, categorizing the unauthorized appropriation of office supplies, discounts, or personal phone calls as harmless perks rather than actual property theft (e.g., Item 28: “When an employee takes pens, paper, and envelopes from the company for her own personal use, she is stealing”; Item 40: “There is nothing wrong with taking damaged goods from the company without permission if they are just going to be thrown away”).
• Punishment and Disciplinary Severity: Evaluates the stringency of disciplinary actions an applicant believes should be imposed on verified thieves. Research indicates that honest individuals advocate for stringent, punitive outcomes (termination, prosecution, restitution), whereas applicants with high delinquency potential consistently recommend lenient, rehabilitative, or dismissive approaches (e.g., Item 8: “If an employee is caught stealing $600 from a company but promptly pays it back, he should not be fired and nothing should happen to him”; Item 14: “This man should be arrested”).
• Moral Reasoning: Rooted in cognitive moral development, this dimension assesses how individuals weigh competing ethical claims, contractual obligations, and systemic laws when faced with moral dilemmas involving loyalties to friends versus duty to an employer (e.g., Item 34: “If one of my friends was really broke and needed help, I would feel good about letting this friend use my employee discount”; Item 43: “If a person took money from a company for a good cause and paid it back with interest six months later, he should tell his boss and take a chance of getting fired”).
• Past Behavior and Behavioral Admissions: Assesses self-reported historical participation in noncompliant, deceitful, or unlawful actions, drawing from the fundamental psychometric tenet that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Queries evaluate prior academic cheating, property damage, tax reporting accuracy, and minor unauthorized takings (e.g., Item 57: “When I was in school, I used to cheat on exams”; Item 49: “I have been completely honest in reporting my income taxes”).
• Aggressive Tendencies and Interpersonal Hostility: Embedded throughout Section 2, this complementary domain targets physical aggression, rage expression, and retaliatory behavioral urges toward supervisors and peers (e.g., Item 50: “Supervisors who hassle employees deserved to be slapped or hit”; Item 53: “When I am provoked, I get into fist fights”).

6. Theoretical Framework

The Applicant Review is situated at the intersection of three major behavioral and ethical paradigms: Cognitive Moral Development Theory, Techniques of Neutralization, and Social Projection / Expectancy Frameworks.

The primary cognitive foundation derives from Lawrence Kohlberg’s (1984) stage theory of moral development, later expanded by James Rest and Darcia Narvaez (1994). Kohlberg postulated that individuals progress through preconventional (hedonistic, punishment-avoidant), conventional (rule-following, social-order maintaining), and postconventional (principled, universal justice) stages of ethical reasoning. The Applicant Review adapts this framework to workplace environments. Candidates functioning at preconventional levels view rules purely through the lens of detection likelihood and immediate reward (manifested in items querying whether theft is acceptable if one does not get caught). In contrast, conventional and postconventional thinkers recognize the intrinsic necessity of contractual fidelity, organizational trust, and universal property rights.

Complementing moral development is the sociological theory of Techniques of Neutralization formulated by Gresham Sykes and David Matza (1957). Sykes and Matza observed that delinquent actors rarely repudiate conventional societal values entirely; instead, they construct specific cognitive rationalizations that neutralize internal moral sanctions prior to committing an offense. The Applicant Review operationalizes four distinct neutralization mechanisms:

• Denial of the Victim: Framing the employer as an unfair, exploitative entity that “deserves” to be defrauded (e.g., “Most sales clerks deserve to steal… because they are so badly underpaid”).
• Denial of Injury: Minimizing systemic harm by categorizing stolen merchandise as insignificant, damaged, or fully absorbable by corporate margins.
• Condemnation of the Condemners: Accusing corporate management, supervisors, or law enforcement of being hypocritical, corrupt, and equally dishonest.
• Appeal to Higher Loyalties: Subordinating legal and organizational standards to personal bonds, such as aiding an impoverished acquaintance or protecting a coworker caught stealing.

Finally, the instrument relies on the social-cognitive phenomenon of projective false consensus (Ross, Greene, & House, 1977). Individuals possessing weak ethical constraints subconsciously project their behavioral predilections onto the general populace. Because they would personally exploit an unmonitored monetary cash surplus or falsify an expense voucher, they infer that the “average worker” routinely does so. Consequently, candidates who systematically estimate high rates of peer theft or who express cynicism regarding human nature inadvertently unveil their personal behavioral norms.

7. Validity

The Applicant Review has undergone extensive psychometric validation adhering to the standards outlined in the Principles for the Validation and Use of Personnel Selection Procedures (Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology [SIOP], 1987). Evidence has been established across multiple operational and experimental validation strategies:

• Content and Face Validity: Test items directly mirror real-world workplace scenarios, dilemmas, and administrative infractions. Expert panels composed of human resource executives, corporate loss prevention specialists, and forensic accountants evaluated the initial item pool to ensure exhaustive representation of property theft, time abuse, regulatory circumvention, and aggressive interpersonal behavior.
• Construct Validity: Construct validation is supported through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, demonstrating that the 102 items coalesce cleanly into seven distinct dimensions underpinning a centralized honesty metric. Furthermore, convergent validity studies indicate substantial correlations with related overt honesty batteries (e.g., London House Personnel Selection Inventory, Reid Report) ranging from $r = .55$ to $r = .72$, while discriminant validity is confirmed through negligible correlations ($r < .15$) with measures of general cognitive ability ($g$), confirming that the AR does not inadvertently evaluate general intelligence.
• Criterion-Related and Concurrent Validity (Known-Group Technique): Validation studies documented in the technical manual utilized known-group paradigms comparing verified offenders with exemplary, non-delinquent cohorts. Incarcerated individuals convicted of property theft and white-collar fraud scored significantly lower ($p < .001$) on the AR composite honesty scale compared to matched vocational employees with clean operational track records. Similarly, employees terminated for cause due to internal shrinkage exhibited significantly more permissive attitudes toward theft and lower punitive scores than non-delinquent peers.
• Predictive Validity and Organizational Shrinkage: Longitudinal investigations within multi-store retail organizations demonstrated that retail branches utilizing the Applicant Review as a hurdle in candidate selection experienced decreases in unaccounted inventory shrinkage ranging from 18% to 35% across a 12-month post-implementation timeframe, compared to control stores employing conventional hiring techniques (Jones, 1991).
• Adverse Impact Analyses: Consistent with broader industrial-organizational research on integrity testing, the AR exhibits negligible adverse impact across protected demographic classifications under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, demonstrating comparable distribution curves across ethnic, racial, and gender cohorts.

8. Reliability

The Applicant Review has demonstrated satisfactory reliability across both temporal stability and internal consistency metrics:

• Test-Retest Stability: In a test-retest study comprising 30 college undergraduates evaluated over a one-week interval, subscale temporal correlations ranged from $r = 0.80$ to $r = 0.89$. A subsequent stability investigation with a cohort of 44 students demonstrated an aggregate honesty test-retest reliability coefficient of $r = 0.83$, confirming that the underlying moral attitudes and rationalization mechanisms evaluated by the AR represent stable cognitive dispositions rather than transient affective states.
• Internal Consistency (Cronbach’s Alpha): Reliability analyses conducted across the original validation sample yielded the following subscale alpha coefficients:
  • Personal history and honesty of others: $\alpha = 0.73$
  • Blame for dishonesty (Neutralization): $\alpha = 0.66$
  • Definition/standards of honesty: $\alpha = 0.76$
  • Punishment (Severity of sanction): $\alpha = 0.77$
  • Moral reasoning: $\alpha = 0.71$
  • Past behavior (Self-reported delinquency): $\alpha = 0.69$
• Composite Reliability: When integrated into the full composite honesty score, the overall internal consistency consistently surpasses $\alpha = 0.88$, satisfying professional psychometric thresholds for individual decision-making in pre-employment contexts.

9. Factor Analysis

The dimensionality of the Applicant Review was established through comprehensive factor-analytic procedures during its initial construction and subsequent revisions (1983, 1988, 1996). Principal components analysis (PCA) followed by orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique (Promax) rotations were performed on responses gathered across the normative sample of over 33,330 industrial candidates.

The mathematical extraction yielded an optimal seven-factor solution accounting for the preponderance of variance across the 102 items. The primary factor, accounting for the largest percentage of common variance, centered on Punitive Severity and Rule Adherence, wherein items loading heavily ($> .50$) reflected the endorsement of legal prosecution, termination, and formal sanctions for infractions (e.g., Items 7, 8, 10, 14, 15, and 38). The second distinct factor encompassed Attitudinal Projection of Dishonesty, with salient loadings from items measuring assumptions of universal employee theft and police corruption (e.g., Items 9, 12, 20, 23, and 26).

A third factor, External Neutralization and Culpability Shifting, aggregated items characterizing retail organizations as unfair, exploitative, and responsible for employee theft via low wages or poor security (e.g., Items 17, 27, 31, and 35). The fourth factor isolated Conceptual Boundaries of Theft, loading items involving ambiguous or “minor” property misappropriation, such as unauthorized long-distance phone calls, office stationery removal, and damaged goods retention (e.g., Items 28, 39, 40, and 41). The fifth and sixth factors mapped onto Moral Dilemma Resolution and Admitted Past Delinquency, respectively, separating hypothetical ethical reasoning from concrete historical transgressions. The seventh factor cleanly isolated Hostile and Aggressive Impulses, capturing verbal outbursts and physical combativeness (e.g., Items 50, 53, 56, and 62). Fit indices from subsequent confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) cross-validating the model in management and alternative educational cohorts confirmed adequate goodness-of-fit, with Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) and Comparative Fit Index (CFI) values exceeding .90, and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) values remaining below .06.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Applicant Review (AR)
• Authors: David J. Cherrington, D.B.A., and J. Owen Cherrington, Ph.D.
• Target Population: Job applicants, prospective employees, and current personnel evaluated for promotions or assignments in high-trust positions. Normed on adult populations, alternative high school students, vocational trainees, and retail/store management personnel.
• Administration Format: Available in standardized paper-and-pencil self-report questionnaires and specialized computerized administration and scoring platforms.
• Total Item Count: 102 items in the comprehensive version, structured across four distinct conceptual sections: Section 1 (Social Attitudes, 42 items), Section 2 (Personal Behaviors, 24 items), Section 3 (Past Behaviors, 11 items), and Section 4 (Future Intentions, 5 items), complemented by aggression screening indices.
• Response Scale Structure:
  • Section 1 (Social Attitudes & Dilemma Evaluations): Four-point Likert scale:
    • 1 = Strongly Disagree
    • 2 = Disagree
    • 3 = Agree
    • 4 = Strongly Agree
  • Section 2 (Personal Behaviors & Behavioral Frequency): Five-point frequency scale:
    • 1 = Always
    • 2 = Frequently
    • 3 = Occasionally
    • 4 = Seldom
    • 5 = Never
• Scoring and Normative Interpretation:
  • Scoring utilizes algorithmic keying wherein items indicating low integrity, rationalization of theft, high projection of deviance, or interpersonal hostility are appropriately reversed and weighted.
  • The aggregate Honesty Score yields a standardized continuous scale ranging from 0 to 99, conceptually scaled and interpreted directly as a percentile score against the normative enterprise baseline ($N = 33,332$).
  • Cutoff benchmarks typically categorize applicants into decision bands: High Risk (0–29th percentile), Moderate Risk / Marginal (30–69th percentile), and Low Risk / Recommended (70–99th percentile), subject to localized organizational utility and legal guidelines.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Original Year of Publication: 1983.
• Revision History: Subsequent technical revisions and norm updates were published in 1985, 1988, 1991, 1993, and 1996 to expand cross-industry baselines and enhance scoring precision.
• Publishing Entity: CHC Forecast (Stanfordville, NY).
• Copyright & Intellectual Property: The Applicant Review is a proprietary psychometric screening instrument protected under international copyright law. All test materials, technical manuals, scoring keys, and computerized algorithms are the intellectual property of the authors and CHC Forecast.
• Commercial Licensing & Academic Usage: Commercial utilization for organizational pre-employment screening requires the purchase of assessment forms, scoring licenses, or computerized usage credits through designated commercial vendors. Bona fide academic researchers seeking to utilize the AR for non-commercial psychometric or moral development research must obtain written authorization and licensing permissions from the copyright holders or authorized representatives.

12. References

Cherrington, D. J., & Cherrington, J. O. (1983). Applicant Review. CHC Forecast.

Clark, J. P., & Hollinger, R. C. (1983). Theft by employees in work organizations: Executive summary. National Institute of Justice, U.S. Government Printing Office. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/theft-employees-work-organizations

Jones, J. W. (1991). Preemployment honesty testing: Current research and future directions. Quorum Books.

Kohlberg, L. (1984). The psychology of moral development: The nature and validity of moral stages (Essays on moral development, Vol. 2). Harper & Row.

Rest, J. R., & Narvaez, D. (Eds.). (1994). Moral development in the professions: Psychology and applied ethics. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410601162

Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The “false consensus effect”: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13(3), 279–301. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(77)90049-X

Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. (1987). Principles for the validation and use of personnel selection procedures (3rd ed.). Department of Psychology, University of Maryland.

Sykes, G. M., & Matza, D. (1957). Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency. American Sociological Review, 22(6), 664–670. https://doi.org/10.2307/2089195

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)