Excellent! You’ve made it to this point. Well done.
Now is the time for the agency to give you a Conditional Offer of Employment. A Conditional Offer of Employment (COE) means that now that you have passed everything else, they will hire you once you pass the psychological and medical examinations. Before the COE, they could not legally ask you any mental or physical health questions, including about addictions. Once you accept the COE, they can now do that and send you to the psychologist or psychiatrist for evaluation, commonly referred to as the psych, and the medical evaluation, usually done by a medical service expressly set up for employment exams.
Some agencies will now do an additional polygraph on the questions they couldn’t legally ask before. Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department is one of those agencies.
Federal law regulates that an employer cannot ask specific questions before their background is completely finished or have the candidate submit to the psych and medical exams.
As an aside, this federal regulation is not geared to law enforcement. An example: An applicant has a heart condition in which any stress could cause their demise. They cannot be asked about it until the agency spends the money, resources, and time to complete the background, only to find out they can’t do the job because of their medical condition. Yes, it has happened plenty of times. It costs around $3,000 to $5,000, give or take, for a complete background.
Some agencies cheat on the COE. Stockton Police Department is one of them. While they don’t break the law, they mislead candidates by giving them a COE after reviewing their PHS and have not even started their backgrounds. I don’t know if they still do it, but it has screwed over many an applicant. They tell the applicant that if they pass the background, polygraph or CVSA, psych and medical, they will hire them. No shit. That’s what all agencies will do; otherwise, they wouldn’t spend the resources on that candidate. But that is not what the candidate thinks. So, I have seen many candidates withdraw from other agency processes because they believe they got a “Condition Offer of Employment” only not to get hired and burning their bridges with the other agencies they applied to. Those cheating agencies do that, so they don’t waste their resources. While it is not illegal the way they do it, I believe it is unethical.
Remember I said most applicants do not get hired?
Agencies like Stockton Police Department get away with it because they do not ask the not-allowed questions before the background is complete, thereby not breaking Federal Law. Clever bastards. Now, in all fairness, I don’t know if they still do that.
The next post is on the psych and medical.
Scattered Thought 