Using employment interviews to get—and give—ethics information
I n some companies, hiring interviews include a compliance and ethics component. How should this be done? One fairly common approach is to have interviewees describe a compliance and ethics challenge they’ve faced in a prior job and how they addressed it. (However, interviewers should make it clear that they are not seeking confidential information about any other company or individual.) Another approach is to present the interviewee with a hypothetical ethics quandary and ask how they would deal with it. The benefits of the right questions These approaches do a few things: Help determine whether ethics is a strength or weakness for the candidate, which could impact the hiring decision. Send a message to employment candidates that compliance and ethics are important to the company, which hopefully they will remember if they get the job. Send a message within the company generally—particularly to those who conduct interviews (human resources and others)—that compliance and ethics are es...