Perform a random selection

For this example we're going to assume you're performing a standard DOT random, selecting 25% of employees for a drug test and 10% for an alcohol test. Follow these steps to perform the random selection.

Create a new random selection schedule configuration

Note: The first seven steps only need to be completed once when initially setting up a company's random configuration

1. Create a new random selection schedule

  1. Click "Schedule" from the main navigation.
  2. Click the "New" button, and select "Random Schedule."

2. Specify whether you want to choose from all employees or just a subset

  • Use the Location, Department, Shift, and Filter fields to specify which subset of employees you would like to select from. If you don't use any of these fields, the randoms will be drawn from the entire employee list.

3. Specify the number of alternates

  1. Enter the number of alternates as either an absolute number or percentage. For example, to select 25% of an eligible list of 20 people you can enter "25" in the "Num Alts" field and select "percent of people from the group" for "Num Alts Type." Alternatively, you could enter "5" in "Num Alts" and "people from the group" for "Num Alts Type."
  2. When performing a random selection on a consortium you can select the "people from each selected company" in the "Num Alts Type" field to make sure that alternates are chosen from the same companies as the donors.

4. Indicate what type of tests you want to perform

  1. Fill out the information for the drug test in the "Specimen 1" section: choose "Urine" for "Type", "5-Substances (DOT)" for "Panel", "25" for "Num Donors", "percent of people from the group" for "Num Donors Type", and "over the course of the selection period" for "selection method".
  2. Fill out the information for the alcohol test in the "Specimen 2" section: choose "Breath" for "Type", "Alcohol" for "Panel", "10" for "Num Donors", "percent of people from the group" for "Num Donors Type", and "over the course of the selection period" for "selection method".

5. Choose whether different test types should be pulled independently

  • Leave the box at the bottom of "Random Selection Details" blank if you want to ensure that donors from your random selection are tested for all specimen types chosen. For example, if you were performing a random selection where 3 people required breath alcohol tests and 5 people required a drug test, leaving this box unchecked would ensure that 3 donors are tested for both alcohol and drugs while 2 donors are only tested for drugs. Choosing this option will mean that TestVault will perform independent random selection for each specimen and test panel, so that in the above example donors for the alcohol test would not necessarily have to also take the drug test.

6. Configure when the random should repeat

  1. The "schedule details" section on the bottom left allows you to configure whether or not you want future random selections to run automatically on a scheduled basis.
  2. If you would like the random to repeat quarterly you can choose "X times per quarter" for the "Repeats" field.
  3. Choose "1" for the "Number of times" field to setup a quarterly schedule.
  4. You can setup the random to repeat on particular days during the 1st week of the quarter. (For monthly repeats, you can select the day of the month as well).
  5. If you want to edit the schedule for the repeated random selection go to "Schedule" from the main navigation, click on the specific repeated random selection, and click the "Details" tab.
  6. Click "Save" and then refresh the web browser to create the incident for the random selection
  7. Note: if you do not want the random selection to repeat automatically, you can set "Repeats" to "Don't Repeat". This will still create the configuration for the company's random schedule, but you will need to manually trigger random selections by following the instructions in step 9.

7. Configure the number of employees to be selected each time

  1. For Specimen 1 and Specimen 2, the "selection method" field controls how the number of donors is determined.
    1. If set to "each time a selection is made" then the same number of donors will be chosen each time.
    2. If set to "over the course of the selection period" then the system will divide that total number of donors over the number of selections per year (e.g., 4 if randoms are being run quarterly) and use that to determine how many donors to pull each selection period.
      • Note that if you specify a percentage for "num donors" (e.g., 25% of donors "over the course of the selection period") the system will pull extra people in latter quarters if you are running behind schedule for your year-to-date percentages.

Run a one-off random selection (optional)

8. Run a one-off random selection

  1. If you don't want randoms to be run automatically on a schedule, or if you just want to run an additional selection, you can do the following.
  2. Click "Schedule" from the main navigation.
  3. Click on the company you want to run a one-off random for.
  4. Click the "Actions" and "New Instance" button on the top right.
  5. Click on the "Run Date" field and choose "Now".
  6. Click "Save".
  7. A new pending random selection instance will show up and will run automatically momentarily.
  8. You can refresh the page in a moment to see a link to the completed random selection.

9. Issue: the random selection instance gets stuck with status "Running"

  1. This usually means that there are no eligible donors available for that particular selection. For example, the random is configured to only select FMCSA people, but no one in the company has the occupation "Driver".
  2. If this occurs, an email will be sent to your organization's primary contact. You can configure who this is by clicking "my account" on the top right of any page, then clicking details, taking note of the primary location, then clicking locations, clicking on your primary location, and changing the primary contact.
  3. To fix the issue, ensure that the employees of the company or consortium are properly configured to match the random selection's criteria (ie they have their locations, occupations, departments, and shifts set correctly). Once those are corrected you can delete the instance that is stuck "running" and create a new one with the current time and it will run properly.

10. Edit the results of individual drug tests for the random selection

  1. If you are using one of our Lab or MRO partners your results will be imported automatically, however you can still edit the results manually if necessary.
  2. To do so, click "Schedule" from the main navigation.
  3. Click "Selections" in the sub-menu.
  4. Click onto one of the tests in the list, you can search by donor name if necessary to find them.
  5. You can edit this like any other individual test.

11. Save and close the random selection

  • When the results of all of the tests are entered and saved, the status of the random selection will be marked complete and you will be asked whether you want to close the random selection. Click "Cancel" to keep the random selection in the open list, click "Yes" to move the random selection to the closed list.

Check out the video tutorial for performing a random selection.