Question

Your company is in the process of hiring a benefits specialist. As a future peer of the person to be hired, you will be one of the interviewers and will talk to all candidates. The company you are working for is a small organization that was acquired. The job advertisement for the position talks about the high level of autonomy that will be available to the job incumbent. Moreover, your manager wants you to sell the position by highlighting the opportunities that come from being a part of a Fortune 500, such as career growth and the opportunity to gain global expertise. The problem is that you do not believe being part of a larger company is such a benefit. In fact, since the company has been acquired by the Fortune 500, the way business is being conducted has changed dramatically. Now there are many rules and regulations that prevent employees from making important decisions autonomously. Moreover, no one from this branch was ever considered for a position in the headquarters or for any global openings. In other words, the picture being painted by the hiring managers and the company’s HR department in the job advertisements is inflated and not realistic. Your manager feels you should sell the job and the company because your competitors are doing the same thing, and being honest might mean losing great candidates. You know that you and your manager will interview several candidates together.

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Is this unethical? Why or why not? What would you do before and during the interview to address this dilemma?

Answer 1

Let’s consider the situation with the pillars of ethical principles. They are justice, autonomy, non-maleficence and beneficence.

In this scenario, if we go to the interview and inform the candidates about the inflated promise about the company we may get good candidates. However this may also mean that the candidate will realize that what he/she was told is not exactly correct and be demotivated soon after. This will likely result in poor performance and hurt the company. This case we violate the principle of non-maleficence as both the company and the candidate will be harmed.

There is also the principle of justice that we need to consider. We as an organization (or the representative of it) need to be just in our dealings. This means we need to be honest and tell the candidate exactly what he/she can expect and not oversell the company. If we oversell, we violate the justice principle.

Considering these points, if we go ahead with the mentioned approach, then we are unethical.

The correct thing to do is to speak to my manager and explain to him that selecting right candidate is key for a good performance. This means that we should not hire someone overqualified and cause demotivation. At the same time we should not hire underqualified people. In order to do that we need to set the expectation right and not go with the idea of selling the company. Because this may eventually backfire. I will inform the manager about this before the interview and during the interview explain the exact job roles, the possibilities, and the work condition to the candidate.