Good stuff, Katie. Keep that bar raised high. As a former 1.0 BSG “fan” what attracted me to BSG was the caliber of professionals that worked there. Culture should find its way onto the balance sheet as a company’s greatest asset.

Katie-

We’ve been hashing this out for years over on ERE. If you or your readers haven’t done so, head over to www.ere.net (sign up for free) and search all categories for “ethics” and be prepared for a very long session of reading.

Just out of curiosity, where does performance come into play in your model? There are plenty of nice people in recruiting who embody many of the attributes you highlighted in your “good” paragraph but who don’t achieve higher levels of performance or greater responsibility in the profession.

Then we turn to the “bad” recruiters… I’ve been using this line for years and it still has yet to be answered - how many bad recruiters are out “there?” Are you sure there’s really a problem or is it all apocryphal, like an urban legend. Keep in mind that when an active candidate is in a job search, they are very sensitive to the circumstances. I am not at all saying “it’s their fault” but think about a time when you were in a job search and didn’t receive the welcome or result you believe you deserved; how did you feel about the recruiter handling the search?

By “us”, I suppose you mean the “good” recruiters. Yet herein lies the problem… I know I’m a great recruiter; I’ll ask the manager of the restaurant with the business card bowl for the cards at the end of the week and s/he happily obliges. I’ll go to trade shows before they start with a box of donuts to gain the interest of people doing setup work. Ad infinitum. Which techniques are good and which are bad?

What concerns me is how easy some categorize good or bad based upon techniques versus focusing on performance for the company or the client. Not only is ethics a gray area but it is replete with thousands of shades of gray.

Pointing fingers doesn’t change the colors.

Nice overview Katie, on a very complicated and emotionally raucous subject!

Maureen Sharib
Telephone Names Sourcer

[…] The Ethics of Sourcing 2. And where is Karen M.? 3. Big Daddy Cheez buys up the pot of jobs 4. Ten things done […]

Steve,

Valid points - I did not account for performance in my good versus bad argument. Obviously, if I am the nicest gal in the universe, and do absolutely everything right, if I can’t fill the jobs at the end of the day, then I’m a pretty “bad” recruiter.

What I have seen as a candidate is pretty atrocious. I had a very desirable skill set back in the day (I was a consultant for a very high-profile software company), and I was contacted frequently by headhunters. Most of the time, I politely declined, but in 1999, when my husband and I were trying to start a family, I took a headhunter up on an interview request. He knew my salary requirements, and assured me that the client could pay them. I went through the interview process, and when I got the offer, it was more than 20% below what I was making. For various reasons, mostly due to my state of mind after having recently lost my first baby, I decided to take the offer, because the “job” was described by the headhunter as one I would enjoy. When I actually got there, I found out that I had accepted a position as a tester. I lasted less than 3 weeks. The headhunter would not return my calls, and I went on to bigger and better things (including 4 beautiful, healthy children). So, there’s one concrete example of a recruiter who lied about salary ranges, misled the candidate about the position, and misled the hiring manager as to the candidate’s willingness to take on less responsibility. It is not mythical. It happens. A LOT.

As for where to draw the line… I don’t see any problems with the two things you mention:

If I put my business card in a fishbowl to win a “free” dinner, I should completely understand that the information may be used. By opening my card carrier, picking up a card, and sliding it in the bowl, I am implicitly agreeing to allow the restaurant to use my information in whatever way they so choose.

Likewise, bringing donuts to a tradeshow and pressing the flesh with the setup folks isn’t unethical, unless, of course, you’re lying about who you are. It’s actually a very intriguing way to get referrals. (And, on a related note, I used the donuts trick when they were building our house - we would bring donuts once a week to the construction workers, and I think we got a better house in the end).

If someone lies, cheats, or steals to get a candidate, I still maintain that it is unethical, and it puts a bad light on the profession. So, to summarize:

Lying is bad. Don’t lie.

Thanks for the comments.
-Katie

K-

My examples were not offered as a paean for the ethical recruiting God to assess - some I’ve spoken with believe both are unethical.

“It is not mythical. It happens. A LOT.”

I too have experienced a bait and switch when I took a job as head of recruiting for a big red dog company. Two days in, the “personality” of my manager changed, something that never appeared during the recruiting - “yesterday we were recruiting you, today you’re staff.”

Taught me lesson but it didn’t engender in my a belief that our profession was in a state of moral decline.

Give me numbers relative to the total number of recruiting transactions over a period of time. Is the percentage of badness 5%, 10%, 20%? Something better than a guess. Look, we may all know a horse’s ass when we see it but that doesn’t mean horse’s asses are running rampant (puns notwithstanding).

This isn’t meant to be a argument of ethics in recruiting: You do what you need to do to look at yourself in the mirror and over time the free-market system and a little bit of information will do a fine job of taking care of the horse poo.

Thx for the thoughts Katie.

Steve - good point, again. I didn’t offer numbers, because I don’t have them. What I have is anecdotal evidence from the years I spent as a techie, and from the experiences of my friends and colleagues.

Maybe I’ll do some searching to see what I can come up with…

Thanks, again, for the visit.

-Katie