Ethics in the field of hiring, staffing and recruitment is based on a combination of things and depends on who is actually involved in the hiring process.

Certainly the job searcher, hiring manager and recruiter are just three possible people involved in a hiring decision.

As a recruiter, I try my best to gauge the truthfulness of comments by both job searchers and hiring managers and they presumably are gauging my truthfulness as well.

Commonly, job searchers often lie about various aspects of their resume ie. their salary, why they left their last job, their job responsibilities, their educational achievements, etc.

Hiring managers might lie about why they are looking to hire a new person ie. they might lie about why the previous person left the job they are trying to fill (if the last person who held the job was fired for something embarrassing like having an office affair or something like that, do you think the hiring manager will tell you the truth about why the person was fired? Me neither). Similarly a hiring manager probably won’t tell you that the previous person quit the job because they were bored or because they thought their manager was a jerk either.

A recruiter needs to find the truth and often needs to read between the lines of comments that are made to them by either the job searcher or the hiring manger.

Similarly some recruiters aren’t always capable of telling the truth 100% of the time either. Recruiters often have a reputation not much better than a used car salesman – no offense to used car salesmen – and sometimes it’s not difficult to see why.

Whether you’re a job searcher looking for a job, a hiring manager looking to fill a job, or a recruiter looking for a job searcher to fill a job, the truth tends to come out one way or the other.

As a recruiter, I have a hard time working with people I can’t trust and I’m usually a pretty good judge of character. I tell the truth when working with job searchers and hiring managers alike and I expect them to do the same.

There are plenty of honest job searchers, hiring managers and recruiters out there and life is just too short to waste time with people who aren’t trustworthy.

During your career you’re going to run into a wide variety of people and some of those people will be ones who are unethical.

Back in December I spoke about not letting a recruiter embellish your resume or your background so that’s one example.

Mind you, hiring managers can do the same thing. Although I never experienced it personally (to the best of my knowledge anyways) one classic hiring manager scam is to work with a recruiter but then go behind the recruiter’s back and suggest to the job searcher (ie. you) that they’ll hire you behind the back of the recruiter to avoid paying the recruitment fee.

Again, I never experienced it personally but many long time recruiters will probably give you an example of when it happened to them or someone they know.

Why someone would ever want to work for a hiring manager with ethics like that, I don’t know but I have heard of stories from recruiters who find out months after sending a person’s resume to a company that the company secretly hired the person behind the recruiter’s back. Typically, the recruiter then sends an invoice to the company and if they don’t get it paid, the next letter is from the recruitment firm’s lawyer.

Whether or not you’d want to be the person who knowingly accepts a job and realizes a recruiter who was trying to help you is getting ripped off is another question.

Ethics are something that you’ll probably find tested from time to time not only in a work setting but perhaps in the job interview as well. I recall an interview question I was told about back in business school that went something like this:

You’re a sales executive and you have the opportunity to make a very large sale, one that would propel your career and enhance your standing in your company. The problem is that the customer you’re dealing with essentially demands and expects some sort of kickback, an under the table payment to them for making the sale. Do you pay the kickback and possibly get caught or do you refuse to play along and possibly lose the sale?

I recall our business class debating this question for probably 20 minutes and while there were many colleagues who were willing to lose the sale and not pay the kickback, many in my class suggested that it was easy for people to say this since we were talking hypothetically and that in real life, they’d probably pay the bribe as that’s how things sometimes happen in business, according to them.

Our business professor was a bit of a hard case – a tough-talking and authoritative but very cool guy – and I was 99.9% certain which side of the fence he was going to be on. I knew he wasn’t going to suggest that paying the kickback was the suggested route but he didn’t suggest refusing to pay it was the preferred answer either.

His response was that you keep negotiating with the client until everything under the table was above the table.

In other words, you kept talking until everything was above board, fair and legal.

Easier said than done perhaps but in business you’ll probably run into people who try to get a quick payoff or take shortcuts but once you politely but firmly let them know you’re not playing that game, they come back to the table and start thinking with a conscience.

How would you answer this question in an interview setting? How would you handle another ethical dilemma that is posed to you during an interview if it arose, a dilemma that perhaps isn’t as cut and dry as the one I mentioned above?