No employer wants to hire somebody who tested positive for illicit drugs. But what you do in your own time – shouldn’t it be your own business? Unfortunately, big companies can afford to choose its employees, and for a person looking for a job, the choices of where to work might not be as great as the company’s choice of who to hire.
When you apply for a job first you have an interview and if they are interested in hiring you, you’ll be sent to take a drug test, usually within a short period of time following the interview.
Most common pre-employment tests are urine tests – they are cheap and give as good results as any other tests. When you submit a urine sample to a lab technician, it is placed in a special tube and marked in front of you and initialed by you, so there is no confusion who’s sample which. Later on approximately half a sample is tested in initial screening. Normally, a positive test results in a person not getting a job, and when they inform you that you weren’t picked for a position, they are not required to let you know why: it might be the drug test results, or it just might be they picked somebody else over you. In case you already have a job and tested positive in initial screening, the company is required to do a second, confirmatory test on the same sample. They do not perform another test, but simply retract the remains of the first sample that is kept in the lab and execute a more advanced test to confirm or disprove the results of the screening.