The majority of bosses in a new study admit they knew who they wanted to promote before the formal process got underway.

Published by Georgetown University, the study by Jonathan Gardner, COO and senior managing director of Penn, Schoen, & Berland Associates, found 56 percent of large company (with more than 1,000 employees) executives with more than one candidate for a promotion already had a favorite. After going through the evaluation process, 96 percent of those managers with a favorite gave them the job. Twenty-nine percent of the managers had only one candidate.

No wonder, then, that 78 percent of managers said their promotion decision was easy. And no wonder, too, that 92 percent say favoritism exists in most large organizations.

Remarkably, though three-quarters of the survey participants say they have personally witnessed favoritism where they work, only 23 percent own up to playing favorites themselves.

What is this favoritism? Gardner, the study’s author, defines it as: “Preferential treatment of an employee for assignments, credit, opinion, influence, or advancement on the basis of factors that do not directly relate to a person’s ability to perform his or her job function, such as background, ideology, or gut instincts.”

Despite knowing about favoritism in their organization or having practiced it themselves, 83 percent of the senior executives in the survey said it leads to poorer promotion decisions.

If you find this all has an Alice in Wonderland feel to it, consider that by a large measure the executives said job performance, leadership potential, job skills, and similar work-related measures were among the most important factors influencing their promotion decision.

The study goes on to detail what the executives considered important traits in a leader. Being a good communicator and ethical came out on top.

This public trust is our Company’s most valuable asset: one earned every day through our scrupulous adherence to the principles of integrity and fair dealing… Each of us has the power to influence the way our Company is viewed, simply through the judgments and decisions we each make in the course of an ordinary day. — from News Corp’s code of conduct manual

The News Corp scandal has been an expensive one, tanking the stock valuation by $7 billion in a single four-day period. While it might not be obvious, the scandal will have many serious human resource implications not just for News Corp, but for all large organizations in general.

News Corp will need to replace many key leaders following permanent damage to its employer brand that influences its ability to recruit and retain top professionals (incidentally, Scotland Yard faces the same issues). In both organizations the primary causes of damage appear to be large numbers of employees and managers acting badly.

Undetected employee misbehavior is a common problem at almost all large organizations, so this example should serve as a wake-up call to all in HR that it needs to re-examine its capability for identifying damaging employee behaviors.

What Is HR Accountable for?

One of the fundamental tenants of modern business is accountability, but you would be hard pressed to find any part of the HR function at News Corp accepting responsibility for the recent events. When employees behave badly, you can blame the CEO, but in a massively large organization he/she often pushes oversight off to others (Murdoch has stated publicly that he can’t closely monitor the actions of 53,000 individual employees worldwide). You can also blame corporate culture, but if you do, you must identify who is accountable for maintaining the culture and what systemic actions sustain it.  A third possibility involves blaming whoever is responsible for monitoring and guiding employee behavior.

These last two possibilities bring to mind an important strategic question:

“Who within an organization is responsible for maintaining corporate culture and the processes of monitoring and guiding the behavior of employees? (I think they call that performance management).” While not all would agree, one possible answer is HR!

HR Systems Should Prevent Employees and Managers from Acting Badly?

In all organizations, a key component of governance is establishing responsibility and accountability for managing the people and systems that will produce the organization’s efforts. When the personnel function evolved into the human resource management profession, one of the arguments for the shift was the application of higher-level management to the many human resources that staff the organization.  In short, the human resource profession accepted in theory responsibility for developing systems and processes to govern the performance of humans executing work on the organization’s behalf.

The HR function of today clearly owns the design and execution of nearly every employee performance-management-related process, including: job design, talent recruiting/assessment, policy communication, employee training, performance appraisals, performance improvement planning, compensation, and employee mobility.  In recent years the rhetoric emerging from nearly all of these core HR activities has focused on behaviors, so is the HR function accountable?

HR Has a Dual Responsibility That Doesn’t End With Writing a Manual

Unfortunately, a majority of human resource functions have gone only halfway toward completing their strategic role, which should include:

• Creating processes and policies that direct employee and manager behavior, and
• Creating a real-time employee monitoring process to ensure that actual behaviors are within preset limits. (Because many bad employee behaviors may be caused by or encouraged by individual managers, the monitoring process must not rely solely on managers to identify and report bad employee behaviors.)

HR almost always fulfills the first half of its responsibilities by writing policies and designing people management processes. In this case, News Corp has a well-written, 49-page “code of business conduct” manual that covers company values, ethics, and standards of behavior. The expected behaviors are clearly delineated and are hard for any employee or manager to miss or misinterpret. Their manual includes the powerful phrase at the top of this post.

These are elegant words but obviously a well-written manual was insufficient. Enron had a 46-page ethics manual, but it didn’t work either.

Required Action — Develop a Process for Independently Monitoring Behaviors

Every major business process including quality control, customer service, and finance, write policies and develop processes but they go a step further and implement a monitoring process that doesn’t rely 100% on managers identifying and reporting violations/exceptions. In direct contrast, HR functions rarely use independent monitoring or auditing, relying solely on individual managers to honestly complete performance appraisals (citing bad behavior) and refer stronger issues for performance management. Many functions also naïvely expect employees to voluntarily come forward and report the bad behaviors of their colleagues.

I challenge you to consider your own organization. How would your HR leader know if a group of employees were acting in such a way that could damage the organization? If employees were taking kickbacks, if there were “ghost employees,” or if there was major employee theft or circumvention of safety guidelines? Would the situation have to blow up before HR would learn about it? Unfortunately there is a significant probability that your organization could share the same situation faced by News Corp, i.e. widespread violations of the firm’s policies, rules, and processes by both employees and managers, all of it undetected by HR.

HR Must Accept the Role of Risk Manager

If you had to classify what happened in these two British organizations, it would be that undetected employee and management actions created tremendous financial risk for their organization. Although most large organizations now have major risk management functions that identify and help mitigate upcoming financial, production, and safety risks, many HR leaders have been slow to accept their role in mitigating “people management risks.”

Instead of looking ahead, HR has primarily been a reactive function that fights fires as they pop up. HR needs to become more proactive. HR leaders must identify major people risks, calculate the potential financial impact, and respond in a prioritized fashion. Next, the function must develop real-time monitoring and sampling processes to identify high-priority risks as they are brewing. Rather than starting from scratch, HR should borrow effective monitoring processes from other business functions like finance, supply chain, and risk management.

Some of the monitoring approaches to consider include the use of mystery shoppers, random sampling of employee actions, periodic audits, exit interviews to identify bad behaviors, anonymous whistleblowing processes, and random employee and customer investigator interviews. Technology solutions should also be added including real-time performance metrics, phone and computer monitoring, and anomaly identification software. In addition, HR cannot automatically assume that the corporate culture is effectively directing desired behavior. Instead, HR must proactively define, monitor, and manage the culture to ensure that it does its job in effectively directing employee behavior.

HR Has a History of Avoiding Responsibility

When things are going well, HR thought leaders and SHRM are more than willing to brag about the importance of HR’s role in managing the corporate culture, social responsibility efforts, and the ethical and value-driven behaviors of employees. However, when the crap hits the fan, there is often a deafening silence from HR professionals and thought leaders concerning HR’s accountability in managing employee behavior.

If you conduct even a quick Google search on the News Corp scandal, you won’t easily find a single HR leader, either inside or outside of the firm, stepping up and calling for HR to admit even partial responsibility for what occurred. This shouldn’t surprise you: in past disasters including Enron, Bear Stearns, Toyota and BP, HR has been at the bottom of the list of those willing to accept responsibility.

Final Thoughts

Every organization needs to reevaluate their current role and processes for the early identification and mitigation of widespread damaging behavior. If you run a training class on business ethics or social responsibility, you must ensure that those who pass the class actually act responsibly for years to come. If you design processes and policies for performance appraisal, performance management, metrics, or rewards, you must develop an effective monitoring process to ensure that in “real time” such policies, rules, and behavioral expectations are adhered to. If you espouse your role in creating or managing corporate social responsibility, then you must continually monitor and measure to make sure that the policies produce the expected behaviors and results.

I urge you to examine the HR processes at your organization to see if they would have successfully identified or better yet prevented problems similar to those at News Corp. Unfortunately, the answer will probably be no; just as at News Corp, the most likely way HR leaders would learn about bad behaviors among employees … would be in the news!

Recruitment, at times, can seem a lot like a poker game. The client is the dealer, and every candidate is a player. At prescribed stages in the game, all cards are hidden, and bit by bit, each individual reveals his or her hand. Each show of cards is a risk. Sometimes the dealer wins, which is good because that means the game can remain solvent for other players to enjoy. At other times the players win, which is also positive, since a losing game draws no players. As long as the odds are relatively even and everyone abides by the rules, the game can go on. But what happens when a player steps up who doesn’t play by the rules?

A contract recruiter friend of mine — let’s call her Susan — has a reputation for respecting the rules of the game, and she expects her clients and candidates to follow suit. Because of this, a situation about two years ago shook her up, one in which a candidate seemingly decided to make his own rules.

At the time, Susan was recruiting sales candidates for a prominent organization, one with many customers as well as many aggressive competitors. With her flair for nailing her clients’ needs, Susan brought this company a candidate, Kevin, who seemed to be a perfect match for the job and the organization. He worked for the client’s primary competitor, so had an in-depth understanding of the business. He had a solid reputation with both his peers and his customers. In addition, his reasons for wanting to change organizations seemed deeply personal, not at all tinged with bitterness.

As part of the last interview round, the hiring manager spoke with Kevin in depth about the largest customer that he would support if he were hired in order to be certain of two things: first, that Kevin would understand fully the expectations of this specific role, and second, that she, the hiring manager, could be confident of Kevin’s ability to support the customer appropriately. This last interview round led to a job offer.

Kevin, Susan, and Susan’s client did the usual offer negotiation dance which resulted in an acceptance and the selection of a start date. Kevin seemed eager to wrap things up with his current employer and start his new job. However, at the eleventh hour, Kevin rescinded his acceptance citing vague reasons for his change of heart. Susan’s client was disappointed, of course, but Susan quickly found her a new, equally exceptional candidate who joined the client’s team. All seemed to turn out well in the end, with the company, final candidate and Susan all feeling as if they’d won.

Then came the game-changer. Around this same time, a new division within the client’s customer organization, the one Kevin had learned about during his interviews, opened its doors. About two weeks after Kevin reneged on his acceptance of the job, Susan’s client — the hiring manager — had to participate in a sales pitch to win this new segment of her customer’s business. As she and her team walked into the client’s office building to give their sales presentation, they passed the pitch team for her primary competitor, Kevin’s employer. The hiring manager stared at them in disbelief as she realized that Kevin was a member of this competitor’s sales team bidding on her customer’s new division. Needless to say, both the hiring manager and Susan felt that their confidence had been betrayed.

Unfortunately, to this day, Susan doesn’t know how this turn of events occurred. Was it deliberate or coincidence? Did Kevin share the information he learned during his interview with his employer, leading to Kevin’s assignment to the pitch team? Was this just an unfortunate twist of fate, one that Kevin possibly couldn’t reveal to his employer out of fear of showing too many of his own cards and revealing who tried to hire him away?

Susan’s client took a gamble, or rather an educated risk, in sharing confidential customer information with Kevin during the interview process. She showed her cards, as it were, to ensure that her next bet — hiring him onto her team — would likely pay off. Unfortunately, in this case she took a risk that not only didn’t pay off, it put her in a precarious position because the rules as she understood them — that information shared in confidence during an interview should remain in confidence — possibly were not followed.

Have you ever been on either side of a similar situation? What would you do if you were Susan or the hiring manager? What would you do if you were Kevin?

The hand came up about halfway down the rows of seated SourceCon attendees after the Sourcing Movie was shown. Here’s the beginning of the show.

“At corporate we prefer to have someone in-between us and the name sourced. We prefer to hire sourcers like you to do the really proactive stuff.”

I think he meant phone sourcing, as that was the demonstration on the movie he had just seen.

Unsaid in that confession is the simple truth that many corporate staffing departments believe that the act of “sourcing,” especially phone sourcing, is best left to third party vendors — that it’s kind of a rogue activity.

That’s all yippee-skippee and profitable to us phone sourcers out here, but moving beyond that is the internal, mistaken, and dangerous belief that there is something not-so-sacrosanct about phone sourcing.

Okay, I’m going to say it. I hate to bring it up because it’s a politically unarguable debate that’s been beaten to death on the boards and that is the subject of ethics.

It’s a fact that many people don’t want to call another on the telephone and ask for information much beyond what it takes to order a pizza. Because this is a basic truth about much of human nature there’s a repugnance that’s developed around the subject of phone sourcing. It’s intimated over and over again among individuals that it’s a borderline honest activity.

Bolstering that repugnance are the lofty ministrations that usually emerge over the subject of calling another company’s employees and offering them another opportunity.

All of the high-handed discussions about the right to poach from other companies are just a screen for fear.

I’m willing to insist here that the loudest criers about “ethics” are those who don’t like to cold-call or, more maliciously, those that don’t want anyone else cold-calling because it breeches their own territories.

Let me ask you another question:

Is it right not to?

The United States Justice Department doesn’t seem to think so.

We who are adamant practitioners of the craft don’t think so.

In fact, some of us who phone source have long since believed, in adherence with what the Justice Department has said on the subject, that “poaching” employees from other companies is the best way to keep a competitive landscape level.

Maybe a best solution is one in which companies (and individuals) think beyond the discomfort and faulty judgments they’ve allowed themselves to tolerate in the past over the subject of phone sourcing.

Maybe it’s time C-levels that are and will be held accountable for their failures to encourage cold-calling within their own organizations get (and give) buy-ins.

The best way to understand something is to practice it.

Maybe it’s time to go rogue.

We all get so caught up in our own success and survival that we forget to act in the best interests of the candidates, ourselves, and our organization. Almost everyone involved with talent acquisition is squirming under pressure from hiring managers to find qualified candidates and, therefore, are quick to grasp at any solution that offers hope of giving them access to better people. Hence the rapid rise of referral and networking tools and great interest in Internet search, as well as in “poaching” candidates.

Recruiters face pressure to source in ways that may be legal, but not ethical. Discussions about sourcing on ERE, in magazines, and on various blogs over the past months have not been encouraging. I do not believe in or advocate many of the practices that are being suggested. Poaching candidates, stretching the truth, using the Internet in deceitful ways, and “tricking” people to provide information they would otherwise not have given you are unethical. All is NOT fair in war. That is why we have a Geneva Convention and the International War Crimes Tribunal.

While recruiting is far less serious than war, that is no excuse to use patently dishonest and deceitful practices.

Many times it is clear that a practice is illegal or just dishonest, but the real test comes in the “gray” areas. These are where it is possible to make an argument on either side of an issue, and where the best answer is not simple. An example might be discrediting a competitor’s company to make a candidate more likely to accept your offer. Or, it might be in telling a candidate that you have filled a position when you haven’t, to avoid controversy and argument.

Recruiters who use methods they know are deceitful or dishonest do no one a favor. They harm their employer’s reputation and sully their own. Recruiters who are not sure if a practice is wrong or not might do well to put themselves in the shoes of the candidate or the manager on the other side. They might also look at all the options they have and ask which of them does more good than harm. Good ethical practices treat all the parties concerned with dignity and respect and advance the values of the organization. In the long run, it is not important whether you “win” the candidate but whether you have done so with integrity and fairness.

The test of an ethical recruiter comes in part from what candidates say about you and the organization. Do they feel that they were respected, given full information, provided both sides of issues, and their experience was fair? Everyone knows when recruiters are being deceitful or “stealing” employees from competitors by aggressive recruiting methods and high pressure sales. While there may be short-term gains, what are the long-term consequences to your own reputation and that of your organization?

Can you refrain from going after passive candidates with aggressive tactics? Is it possible to avoid using deceit in your conversations with candidates and still be successful? Can you act more as a trusted partner with your candidates and hiring managers?

There are many alternatives to unethical recruiting and to filling talent shortages.

Create a Strong Brand

Rather than go after people with desperation and resort to unethical practices, create a website that is exciting and that compels interest in your organization. No matter what your organization does or how big or small it may be, your organization has unique characteristics that are attractive. The key is to define your target audience very clearly and go after it with messages and promotions that are specific. I see most organizations promoting generic criteria and using generic messages that are not aimed at any particular group. This means that many ignore you, and others (mostly the unqualified) apply in droves. Using tools such as Twitter and the emerging social networking tools encourage transparency as well as relationship-building. Provide information; develop an internal set of practices to guide you and your fellow recruiters and give you ethical guidelines.

Look Inside

Larger organizations have many talented, culturally aligned, and productive employees who would welcome an opportunity to do something different. Leading-edge firms have developed internal systems that allow recruiters to locate people with specific skills within the organization. The systems capture employees’ skills, performance history, education, and interests. These employees are usually passive — not looking for an internal move and not aware of the opportunity. Yet, they are often eager to take a look at that opportunity once they are approached. These systems also allow actively looking employees to add personal information or apply directly for posted positions. When there is a need to fill very highly specialized positions, internal people are frequently the best qualified to do so with the least amount of training.

Short-term Training and Coaching

Many times employees can be given skills more quickly than we think. Cisco, IBM, and countless other organizations have put together short-term, intensive training programs that enabled employees to gain new skills and become productive in a matter of weeks. This is often no longer than it takes to source, screen, interview, and hire a candidate from outside who, after being hired, still needs time to become productive and to learn the new culture.

E-learning, mentoring, and coaching are all ways that employees can be given skills they need quickly while being productive.

Educating Hiring Managers

Times are changing, and with this comes the need for managers to better understand the talent marketplace. It will be harder and harder to find qualified people over the next decade. For some jobs, including certain finance positions, nursing and pharmacy jobs, as well as management position, there will be a crisis. Even aggressive stealing and blatantly unethical practices will probably not meet the needs.

Managers must have a better understanding of these issues and you as a recruiter need to have a sterling reputation for honestly, transparency, and ethical practices. Those qualities will get you far more candidates than deceit and other unethical practices.

Mehler, daughter of Mark Mehler, a founder and principal of the well-known recruiting consultancy CareerXroads, joined hundreds of her fellow Harvard MBA students in signing an oath vowing to “seek a course that enhances the value my enterprise can create for society over the long term.”

Although other schools have tried oaths or pledges for their business school students, this one was the brainchild of a few of Mehler’s student colleagues. “Business schools have been demonized,” she told us recently, as she was preparing to leave home for her job in Minneapolis. Whether rightly or wrongly, they have been blamed for failing to instill a moral compass in the MBAs they turn out, who, in turn, have been blamed for the current recession as well as most of the excesses of Wall Street and the banking community at large.

“We had a lot of discussion about the recession and the conditions that lead up to it,” she told us. “The ethical situations were discussed in every class I had.”

Some of the students, however, believed they needed something more.

As Mehler points out, “Most professions have some ethics or licensing group.” Nothing equivalent exists for business, which is what lead a group of students to come up with a declaration of principles they hoped would eventually be signed by 100 members of the Harvard Business School class of 2009. On graduation day, more than 400 took the oath at a student-organized ceremony before the official exercises.

Articles in The Economist, The New York Times and elsewhere make much about the oath being a renunciation of greed. But the eight promises in the oath include no vow of poverty. Instead, they talk about considering the interests of society as a whole and taking personal responsibility for decisions and actions.

“If this is a way to stop an individual from a making a decision that will harm others, great,” says Mehler, who who observes that the oath creates a moral contract with oneself and the other students. “When you swear an oath,” she explains, “it makes you pause; think about the stakeholders.”

When a difficult decision with an ethical component arises, Mehler says the oath will serve as a reminder to weigh all the consequences. “You sort of sit and tell yourself: This is a gray area.”

Since starting at Harvard, students at other schools have signed on to it. Today, more than 1,300 MBAs have publicly declared thier commitment to its principles.

Whether the oath and its eight promises will survive the rough and tumble of the business world outside of Harvard Yard remains to be seen. The Economist article talks about the oath being “part of a larger effort to turn management from a trade into a profession.” The author of the article notes the difficulty in achieving that goal, especially in light of the regard business schools give to Nobel economist Milton Friedman who wrote in his book Capitalism and Freedom, “There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

Monster is distributing donation cards in denominations from $25 to $10,000 that conference-goers then decide which of 23 charities gets it. One charity can get it all or the amount can be divied up.

“We’re really psyched about it,” company spokesman Steve Sylven told us, speaking from the busy show floor at McCormick Place. The usual assortment of pens, glow balls and other tsotchkes “have their place,” says Sylven, to whom we confessed we have a draw full of pens from a dozen shows. The “trumps are very popular,” he adds, referring to Monster’s Trumpasauraus mascot, which we also had until the puppy got at it.

This show, “We decided to do something different.”

The charities fall into several different categories include literacy and education, health, military support, environmental and others. The organizations include Doctors Without Borders, Children’s Defense Fund, the USO and Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

Monster calls the initiative “Doing Well By Doing Good: Put Our Money Where Your Heart is” and pledges to give away all $1 million by the end of the conference Wednesday. Should all the donation cards not be distributed the company will contribute the remainder. Unlikely Sylven thought. At the rate the cards are going, “They’ll all be gone.”

Habit and tradition are useful in many ways. They make it much easier to know what to do and they subconsciously steer us along paths that have worked in the past but may not work so well anymore.

Recruiters, perhaps more than some other professionals, seem to be married to traditional practices. Most recruiters still require resumes, still feel they must have a face-to-face meeting with every candidate, and feel that traditional interviewing is still the best way to determine a candidate’s skills and organizational fit. They feel these things even when objective data shows them wrong because they are what everyone else does and because they are comfortable and expected practices.

Almost everyone involved with talent acquisition is facing pressure from hiring managers to find more qualified candidates. Recruiters are quick to grasp at any solution that offers hope of giving them access to better people. Hence, the rapid rise of niche job boards and referral and networking tools and greatly renewed interest in Internet searching and in “poaching” candidates.

At the same time, recruiters face pressure to source in ways that may be legal but not exactly ethical. Unclear situations are called ethical dilemmas because there is no obvious “right” answer. It tests ethical thinking when it is not clear whether a practice is wrong, such as willfully discrediting a company to make an employee feel that it would be best to move on.

Recruiters who use methods they know are deceitful or dishonest do no one a favor. They harm their employer’s reputation and sully their own. Recruiters who are not sure whether a practice is wrong might do well to put themselves in the shoes of the candidate or the manager on the other side. They might also look at all the options they have and ask which of them does more good than harm.

Good ethical practices treat all the parties concerned with dignity and respect and advance the values of the organization. In the long run, it is not important whether you “win” the candidate but whether you have done so with integrity and fairness.

Assuming you want to practice ethical recruiting, how can your organization meet its needs for talent? There are many practices that are ethical and that work. It is focusing on those, even if they take a bit longer or are more complex, that makes the difference.

Many of these practices do not require new search skills or more sophisticated online “hunting” methods, nor do they involve deceitful selling to candidates. There are many alternatives to unethical recruiting and to filling talent shortages.

Look Inside

Larger organizations have many talented, culturally aligned, and productive employees who would welcome an opportunity to do something different. Leading-edge firms such as Dell and Schlumberger have developed internal systems that allow recruiters to locate people with specific skills within the organization. The systems capture employees’ skills, performance history, education, and interests.

These employees are usually passive, not looking for an internal move, and not aware of the opportunity. Yet they are often eager to look at that opportunity once they are approached.

These systems also allow actively looking employees to add personal information or apply directly for posted positions. When there is a need to fill very highly specialized positions, internal people are frequently the best-qualified to do so with the least amount of training.

Short-Term Training and Coaching

Employees can be given skills more quickly than we think. Cisco, IBM, and countless other organizations have put together short-term, intensive training programs that enabled employees to gain new skills and become productive in a matter of weeks.

This is often no longer than it takes to source, screen, interview, and hire a candidate from outside who, after being hired, still needs time to become productive and to learn the new culture.

e-Learning, mentoring, and coaching are all ways that employees can be given skills they need quickly while being productive.

Rotations

Sometimes it is a good practice to let people rotate through several jobs so that they acquire at least some skills in many areas. This way they can be moved to fill gaps very quickly and with a minimum of additional education.

Rotations can be done frequently but on a short-term basis so that the impact on the employee’s current position is minimal. It just takes some creative thinking to make this work without much bother. Often they can be squeezed into slower times or offered when work tends to be less than normal.

Formal Development

Corporate universities are being established at a record pace to provide more formal education to current employees either to meet future anticipated needs or to strengthen employee skills to better meet current needs.

There are organizations with internal corporate training functions designed to provide employees for highly skilled or specialized jobs or for management and leadership positions. General Electric, IBM, HP, and Intel are leaders in making this a cornerstone of their people strategy.

Educating Hiring Managers

Times are changing, and managers need to understand the talent marketplace. It will be harder and harder to find qualified people over the next decade. For some jobs, including certain finance positions, nursing, and pharmacy jobs, as well as management positions, there will be a crisis. Even aggressive stealing and blatantly unethical practices will probably not meet the needs.

Managers must have a better understanding of these issues, and you as recruiters need to make the business case for managers approaching talent acquisition from a variety of ways, rather than to simply go outside to meet every need. Talent acquisition is getting more complicated and requires recruiters who are strategic talent advisors more than just order takers. The best recruiters do not need to use unethical practices because they have learned more options and have sold those internally.

It is far too easy to get caught up in our own perspectives, careers, and day-to-day activities that we don’t see alternatives to the problems we face. Instead, we continue to follow traditional approaches, even when they are obviously inadequate.

Almost everyone involved with talent acquisition is squirming under pressure from hiring managers to find more qualified candidates. Recruiters are quick to grasp at any solution that offers hope of giving them access to better people.

Hence, the rapid rise of niche job boards, referral and networking tools, and greatly renewed interest in Internet searching and in “poaching” candidates.

At the same time, recruiters face pressure to source in ways that may be legal but not exactly ethical. Discussions about ethics on ERE and on various blogs over the past year have not been encouraging.

I do not believe in or advocate many of the practices that are being offered. All is NOT fair in war, as the Geneva Convention, the Nuremburg trials, and the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague demonstrate.

It is easy to mark patently dishonest and deceitful practices as unethical; the real test comes in the gray areas. These are where it is not clear if a practice is wrong, such as willfully discrediting a company to make an employee feel that it would be best to move on, that test ethical thinking.

Recruiters who use methods they know are deceitful or dishonest do no one a favor. They harm their employers’ reputations and sully their own. Recruiters who are not sure whether a practice is wrong might do well to put themselves in the shoes of the candidate or the manager on the other side.

They might also look at all the options they have and ask which does more good than harm. Good ethical practices treat all the parties concerned with dignity and respect and advance the values of the organization. In the long run, it is not important whether you “win” the candidate, but whether you have done so with integrity and fairness.

Assuming you practice ethical recruiting, how can your organization meet its needs for talent? Conventional thinking about careers and a lack of imagination on the part of HR and recruiters is probably contributing to the perception that there is a growing lack of skilled talent available in the workforce. There are many alternatives to unethical recruiting and to filling talent shortages.

Create a Strong Brand

Rather than go after people with desperation and resort to unethical practices, create a website that is exciting and that compels interest in your organization. No matter what your organization does or how big or small it may be, your organization has unique characteristics that are attractive. The key is to define your target audience very clearly and go after it with specific messages and promotions.

I see most organizations promoting generic criteria and using generic messages that are not aimed at any particular group. This means that many ignore you and others, mostly the unqualified, apply in droves.

Use emerging tools such as MySpace to let potential candidates know about you. The U.S. Marine Corps has recently done this and has enjoyed great success. Creating a MySpace profile is simple and brings your organization to hundreds of people through referrals. Sign up for Jobster, a service that makes referrals more effective.

Hire a Recruitment Process Outsourcing Firm

If you are really struggling to attract good people, it may make sense to contract with a recruitment process outsourcing company that can help promote your organization and that has access to a wide community of potential talent.

For smaller organizations, or for those with a highly specialized talent base, using RPO can offer lots of advantages. These firms are staffed with seasoned pros who know their markets and offer service agreements that make it a low-risk proposition. This is better than becoming frustrated to the point that common sense and good ethics get compromised.

Look Inside

Larger organizations have many talented, culturally aligned, and productive employees who would welcome an opportunity to do something different. Leading-edge firms, such as Dell and Schlumberger, have developed internal systems that allow recruiters to locate people with specific skills within the organization.

The systems capture employees’ skills, performance history, education, and interests. These employees are usually passive, or not looking for an internal move and not aware of the opportunity.

Yet, they are often eager to take a look at that opportunity once they are approached. These systems also allow actively looking employees to add personal information or apply directly for posted positions. When there is a need to fill very highly specialized positions, internal people are frequently the best qualified to do so with the least amount of training.

Short-Term Training and Coaching

Many times employees can be given skills more quickly than we think. Cisco, IBM, and countless other organizations have put together short-term, intensive training programs that enabled employees to gain new skills and become productive in a matter of weeks. This is often no longer than it takes to source, screen, interview, and hire a candidate from outside who, after being hired, still needs time to become productive and to learn the new culture.

With e-learning, mentoring, and coaching, employees can be given skills they need quickly while being productive.

Rotations

Sometimes it is a good practice to let people rotate through several jobs so that they acquire at least some skills in many areas. This way they can be moved to fill gaps very quickly and with a minimum of additional education.

Rotations can be done frequently but on a short-term basis so that the impact on the employee’s current position is minimal. It just takes some creative thinking to make this work without much bother. Do this in slower times, when work tends to be less than normal.

Educating Hiring Managers

Times are changing and with this comes the need for managers to better understand the talent marketplace. It will be harder and harder to find qualified people over the next decade.

For some jobs, including certain finance positions, nursing, and pharmacy jobs, as well as management positions, there will be a crisis. Even aggressive stealing and blatantly unethical practices will probably not meet the needs.

Managers must have a better understanding of these issues and you as recruiters need to make the business case for managers approaching talent acquisition from a variety of ways, rather than to simply go outside to meet every need.

Talent acquisition is getting more complicated and requires recruiters who are strategic talent advisors more than just “order takers.” The best recruiters do not need to use unethical practices because they have learned more options and have sold those internally.

One of my earliest childhood memories comes from when I was about three years old. My parents took my brothers and me to visit the grave site of my grandmother, who I never met.

I recall being in the massive cemetery just outside of Cleveland, Ohio; the same final resting place of not only my father’s mother, but also both President Garfield and John D. Rockefeller. Nevertheless, at the ripe age of three, respecting and remembering the dead was just not on my mind at the time. What was on my mind was all of these fabulous headstones and the thought of climbing all over them; like most three-year-old boys, I was more chimpanzee and less human when it came to climbing.

Upon being unleashed, away I went, under the not-so-close supervision of two older brothers, both of whom were younger than 10 at the time. We had a heck of a time. That is until our parents sat us down and explained the whole thing about dead people being just two yards beneath our feet and that by climbing all over these headstones, we were showing disrespect to both the dead and the families who buried them there.

At some point, I remember putting together the notion in my head that if these tombs are their last remaining shrines on Earth, and dead people go to Heaven, and in Heaven we can also find God, and God has supreme command over right and wrong, then I’m probably not sitting too high on God’s list of good kids for that given day. Behold, the dawn of morality had risen over the mind of a young Todd Rogers!

As of late, I have been involved in and sit sideline to several discussions on ethics here on ERE. It’s been a topic of much consideration and I thought it might be a good idea to give this notion a front-row seat, if at least for only one day.

Without question, there are some people reading these words right now and are ready to declare, “Todd Rogers has no business writing an article on ethics, he’s admitted to posting bogus resumes on a job board just to see what’s going on in the market!”

But it’s things such as this that make me unquestionably qualified to write on just such a subject. Practices such as that fall in to that gray-area, and if you go through life staying either black or white on your ethical considerations, then you never get to flex the cognitive muscles which control such deliberations.

If you click on my bio, you’ll discover that while in college, I majored in philosophy. That pretty much means in terms of job qualifications, I’m trained at just about nothing, with a few exceptions. If it involves critically reading, delicately writing, publicly presenting, or sitting around and discussing while not getting paid, then I’m your number one draft pick.

Otherwise, I have to go to law school, get a PhD, or become a recruiter. I took five classes on ethics. Not only did I do the reading, write the papers, and get high marks, but I also found something that truly has meaning to me. I kept most of the books, and much to the dismay of my wife, I still read them and ask her tough and yet silly questions on matter of ethics.

Let’s be clear on this topic: most of the best-known ethicists in history (Socrates, Kant, Mills, Rawls) never made it on to the Forbes list. They mostly did ok in today’s dollars, but cash was not high on the list of priorities.

Walking the Line

So, what’s my prescription for walking the line while not straying off too far in either direction? Before I get in to that, let me say that ethics, like favorite foods, favorite colors, favorite anything, has a component of subjectivity. You’re never going to satisfy 100% of the people impacted by decisions on these matters, so don’t bother trying.

Look at any given topic of political debate for instance. Take the hottest scorcher of them all: abortion. Both sides agree on exactly one thing: the other side is wrong. Beyond that, you’re never going to reconcile the dichotomy.

Sure, you’ll get some middle-of-the-road types. They travel by all sorts of labels, some right and some wrong: fence sitters, eclectics, those in suspense of judgment, moderates. Yet if you try to come up with a system that is all-encompassing and makes 100% of the people 100% happy 100% of the time, then you better move to Hollywood because it only happens in the movies.

Now, it’s pretty common that in articles like this one you’ll get something that reads: “18 ways to become a better recruiter,” or “The top-10 checklist of the hotshot million-dollar biller.” I believe the best way to list steps for success is to keep them at or below three. Anything beyond that and you’re forced to print it out and pin it up next to your PC along side all the other positive-thinking strategies for living well.

With three or fewer, you can usually read it, retain it, recall it, and apply it all without ever walking over to the printer. So, here are my three:

1. Adopt a Principle. If you’re getting the feeling that you might be straying in to the fray of evil, ask yourself a few questions. Is there a principle that is underpinning what I am doing? If the answer is yes, which typically it is, then ask yourself whether you would will it upon anyone else in your situation, or whether you would feel comfortable enacting a law that everyone else would have to follow. (This is from Immanuel Kant. It’s called the categorical imperative). If the answer is yes, then you’re probably doing OK.
2. Ideal Form. With any given activity, think of it in its ideal form. What I mean by that is imagine yourself executing any activity or decision. In doing so, try to critically evaluate your thought process and reasoning. Then, imagine that same activity or decision in comparison to its perfect form. A good tool is to ask whether you would brag about it at a high-school reunion, or would you hide it at a reunion? If you’re proud of it, chances are that the activity is closely matching the ideal, and thus, it’s probably on its way to being ethical. This is a very rough version of Plato. He was not too clear on his ethics. But it works for me. I think of the ideal of anything, and then I try to aspire to be like it, knowing in advance that I can never achieve it, but in doing so, I will at least come pretty close to it.
3. Divine Command. When all else fails, use what is called divine command. It asks one simple question. Even if you’re an atheist, you can use it. Would God like or dislike what I am doing? It’s a personal matter, to be sure. Of all the ethical theories, this is the one that gets poked at the most. It has all sorts of problems, the list of which is too long to print here. I’m one of those holidays, funerals, and weddings type of church attendee. I prefer the Sunday political talk shows for perspective, I guess. But if I’m really plagued by an issue, when all else fails, I think about whether God would approve. Say what you want about it, but it seems to work for me and a lot of other people. Of course, this is not without its problems. We see evidence of this every night on the news.

Whenever I encounter an exchange and someone invokes the “that’s not ethical” objection, you can be sure I’m the first one to ask why that something isn’t ethical. All too often, when I do that, I’m quickly met with an accusation that by even asking suggests that I too am ethically corrupt.

I implore to the ERE readers that if someone plays the ethical card on you, it is your duty to ask that person why. To not do so will cause atrophy in your ethical reasoning capabilities. Typically, I have found that it is the person who tries to plant the ethical stake in the ground is most often the one who has not a clue what ethics are or how to properly apply them. People in this group most often simply say something such as, “It’s unethical simply because it is, and that is that.”

It’s the classic stone-wall tactic that essentially disengages that person from the dialogue. Too often you will hear something such as, “Well, I don’t know about this or that, but what I do know is that it is wrong.”

When I was three years old, my feeble mind didn’t have the capacity to know that climbing on people’s grave stones was not a good thing to do. After my folks explained it to me, I logically reasoned my way through an argument which for years, for nearly a decade, convinced me that I might be going south in the afterlife.

The key piece of that concluding statement is I logically reasoned my way. You should try that one too. And do yourself the favor of not trying to rely on people who would have you do otherwise. I’m 32 years older now and two things are for sure: I’m always asking myself challenging questions when confronted with difficult situations, and I don’t climb on headstones.

• David Gebler, a noted and respected ethics expert and president of Working Values.
• Heather Hamilton, staffing programs manager at Microsoft, and a former staffing firm recruiter. As you may recall, Heather put out a very well-written opinion piece about the topic.
• Michael Homula, director of talent acquisition at Quicken Loans and a former staffing-firm recruiter who was cited in recent articles on aggressive recruiting tactics — and the only staffing director I know who reports to the CEO.
• Jeff Hunter, an industry veteran and current director of talent technology at Electronic Arts, who has also published strong and well-articulated opinions on the subject of ethics.
• …and me, Dave Lefkow, a former staffing-firm recruiter, recruiting manager, industry consultant (the genius who forgot his wallet in Seattle but somehow made it to San Diego with no ID). In the past, I’ve vehemently defended ERE’s right to publish materials on inflammatory ethics-related topics.

Even though it was the last topic on the agenda, the room was packed with roughly 200 people. And despite some opinions to the contrary, I believe we had a diversity of backgrounds — three former staffing-firm recruiters, industry veterans, a current staffing director, a staffing programs manager, and a technology director. Notably missing ó and I’m sure ERE learned from this experience, being the first panel on this topic — was a current third-party recruiter. Audience participation in the discussion was highly encouraged, although I would estimate that 80 to 90 percent of the audience consisted of in-house recruiters. It’s also worth noting that we did not position ourselves as ethics experts, but just participants in the community discussion around this topic.

Launching the Panel

David Gebler opened by discussing what ethics are and are not. Ethics are not to be confused with morals. Instead, they are a set of standards that guide our behavior. To illustrate this point, he gave the example of the mafia as an organization with structured ethics but few morals. In the mafia, there are very clearly defined standards and guidelines for behavior related to stakeholders (although there are few when dealing with people outside of this circle). Simply because they have ethics does not make them moral, however — quite the contrary. David also warned of the danger of not defining where boundaries are, as demonstrated by Enron and WorldCom. Contrary to what you may assume, ethical lapses are not always examples of bad people doing bad things. Very often, environments are created that allow and sometimes encourage good people to behave badly. That’s how small problems can multiply into big ones. The steroids scandal in baseball also shows that not defining or operationalizing ethical guidelines to reduce gray areas can have negative consequences.

The Discussion

All of the panelists were in agreement that the conversation we are having on ethics in recruiting is long overdue. Publicly, there was very little disagreement among all of the participants in the discussion (audience or panel). There seemed to be universal agreement that lying to get information was not ethical, potentially illegal in some cases, and not behavior that was encouraged ó although there were participants that admitted doing this in the past. In retrospect, I realize that not everyone really agrees on these topics, in principle or in practice. For various reasons, I don’t think that anyone in the audience or on the panel felt comfortable publicly admitting to things like ruse tactics. It’s quite possible that some of their private opinions and activities might tell a different story. After the panel, one attendee said he was emailing his team during the discussion ó and they responded that employing some of the disputed tactics were what they did every day. So here’s a possible suggestion for the next panel to broaden the discussion: Invite an individual or two to the panel who will go on record advocating controversial tactics, or have people anonymously and privately record their feelings to discuss with the panel. While David Gebler was responsible for moderating the panel, there was very active audience discussion. Some of the highlights from the discussion:

• Heather Hamilton and Michael Homula agreeing on something!
• Michael Homula defending his record but admitting mistakes.
• Steve Fogarty at Waggener Edstrom Worldwide on a third-party recruiter working for a competing PR firm, who told the receptionist that he needed to speak with the biopharma PR team about a potential RFP, and when connected, immediately discussed job opportunities. We didn’t hear the end of that story; hopefully, Steve can comment at the end of this article on the actions taken by the employees and the net result for that recruiter.
• Where ethics stop and bad taste begins.
• Whether an industry-wide set of ethical guidelines would help or hurt the industry.
• Recruiting from partners, or even just asking them if they know people.
• Nancy Gray-Starkebaum of NGS Talent brought up a very interesting point: Is it disingenuous for us to slap non-competes on our own employees, but recruit directly from competitors who don’t have non-competes?
• CEOs who call third-party recruiters or name-gatherers to “do their dirty work” ó the work that they see as unethical for their own recruiters to do.
• Much talk about the effect of deceptive tactics on a company’s employer brand and a recruiter’s reputation.

I sincerely hope that we on the panel gave people different and interesting perspectives on these important issues. I could give you the actual opinions we had on each of the topics above, but I won’t for a simple reason: I don’t think it should be up to others to tell you the difference between right and wrong or good and bad behavior in your recruiting efforts or your organization. As David Gebler aptly pointed out, ethics involve making value decisions between positive and negative outcomes as they relate to your unique situation.

My Final Takeaways

As we speed towards an innovation-driven economy where attracting and maximizing the return on human capital is a business imperative, recruiting is assuming a much more visible and important position in most organizations. As such, this is an ideal time to rethink the core values that guide our recruiting teams’ behaviors. I applaud ERE for bringing the ethics issue to the fore, and hope that more people begin the exercise of defining their boundaries as a result. As a point of reference, I asked how many people in the 200-person audience had defined a clear set of ethical guidelines for their recruiting staff: I counted three people who raised their hands. The conversation on ethics in recruiting has clearly just begun.

The recent discussions about ethics on ERE and on other various blogs are not encouraging. I do not believe in or advocate many of the practices that are being offered. All is not fair in war, as the Geneva Convention, the Nuremburg trails, and the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague demonstrate. It is easy to mark patently dishonest and deceitful practices as unethical; the real test comes in the “gray” areas. These are the areas where it is not clear if certain practices — such as willfully discrediting a company to make an employee feel that it would be best to move on — are wrong, and where our ethical thinking is tested.

Recruiters who use methods they know are deceitful or dishonest do no one a favor. They harm their employer’s reputation and sully their own. Recruiters who are not sure if a practice is wrong or not might do well to put themselves in the shoes of the candidate or the manager on the other side. They might also look at all the options they have and ask which of them does more good than harm. Good ethical practices treat all the parties concerned with dignity and respect and advance the values of the organization. In the long run, it is not important whether you “win” the candidate but whether you have done so with integrity and fairness.

So assuming you practice ethical recruiting, how can your organization meet its needs for talent? Conventional thinking about careers and a lack of imagination on the part of HR and recruiters is probably contributing to the perception that there is a growing lack of skilled talent available in the workforce. There are many alternatives to unethical recruiting and to filling talent shortages.

Look Inside

Larger organizations have many talented, culturally aligned, and productive employees who would welcome an opportunity to do something different. Leading-edge firms, such as Dell and Schlumberger, have developed internal systems that allow recruiters to locate people with specific skills within the organization. The systems capture employees’ skills, performance history, educational background, and interests. These employees are usually passive; they’re not looking for an internal move and not aware of the opportunity. Yet they are often eager to take a look at that opportunity once they are approached. These systems also allow actively looking employees to add personal information or to apply directly for posted positions. When there is a need to fill very highly specialized positions, internal people are frequently the best qualified to do so with the least amount of training.

Short-term Training and Coaching

Many times employees can be given skills more quickly than we think. Cisco, IBM, and countless other organizations have put together short-term, intensive training programs that enable employees to gain new skills and become productive in a matter of weeks. This is often no longer than it takes to source, screen, interview, and hire a candidate from outside who, after being hired, still needs time to become productive and learn the new culture. E-learning, mentoring, and coaching are all ways that employees can be given skills they need quickly while being productive.

Rotations

Sometimes it is a good practice to let people rotate through several jobs so that they acquire at least some skills in many areas. This way they can be moved to fill gaps very quickly and with a minimum of additional education. Rotations can be done frequently but on a short-term basis so that the impact on the employee’s current position is minimal. It just takes some creative thinking to make this work without much bother. Often they can be squeezed into slower times or offered when work tends to be less than normal.

Formal Development

Corporate universities are being established at a record pace to provide more formal education to current employees either to meet future anticipated needs or to strengthen employee skills to better meet current needs. There are organizations with internal corporate training functions designed to provide employees for highly skilled or specialized jobs or for management and leadership positions. General Electric, IBM, HP, and Intel are leaders in making this a cornerstone of their people strategy.

Educating Hiring Managers

Times are changing, and with this comes the need for managers to better understand the talent marketplace. It will be harder and harder to find qualified people over the next decade. For some jobs — including certain finance positions, nursing, and pharmacy jobs, as well as management positions — there will be a crisis. Even aggressive stealing and blatantly unethical practices will probably not meet the needs. Managers must have a better understanding of these issues, and you as recruiters need to make the business case for managers approaching talent acquisition from a variety of ways, rather than simply going outside to meet every need. Talent acquisition is getting more complicated and requires recruiters, as I wrote last week, who are strategic talent advisors more than just “order takers.” The best recruiters do not need to use unethical practices because they have learned more options and have sold those internally.