Staffing specialists either use a private company's staffing policies or the standardized rules of a public or nonprofit organization. It's challenging to work in staffing and always select the best candidate. You must follow employment laws and internal staffing policies, which could leave top candidates ineligible. Say, for example, a candidate gets disqualified due to a criminal record or scoring poorly on a written exam. Don't use your influence to advance him in the hiring process and violate the ethical standards of staffing. There will be many more ethical dilemmas to consider as you seek top candidates for job openings.

Considering Diversity

Many organizations establish the ethical responsibility of incorporating diversity in the entire staffing process. As a staffing specialist, you can advertise a new vacancy in different media outlets and obtain a more diverse pool of candidates. You can also create a search committee, including people from diverse backgrounds who work in various departments or functions related to the job opening.

Screening With Purpose

Organizations often want hiring practices to be transparent, so candidates feel like they get full consideration. You could see it as your ethical responsibility to follow search and screen guidelines to the letter. Many organizations have rules such as having an applicant pool certified as sufficiently diverse by HR and eliminating candidates who do not meet minimum job qualifications. If you were doing the latter, ethically you wouldn't keep someone in the final list of candidates who looked promising but did not meet the minimum qualifications.

Treating Candidates Fairly

It is also a staffing specialist's ethical obligation to treat everyone with respect. This requires leaving your personal prejudices and likes and dislikes about people at home. Give the same level of service to everyone who contacts you about an opening. Treat every candidate's information as confidential and expect the same from people involved in staffing. Help everyone gain the same access to an open job regardless of their protected status, such as race, color, religion, national origin, sex, disability, age, marital status or another quality.

Avoiding Ethical Breaches

It's possible for staffing experts to misuse their position to get results. The Notre Dame Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership recommends that you don't glorify or exaggerate the duties of a job or misrepresent the potential for growth a candidate might find in a new company. The center also recommends not using visits to other organizations as opportunities to recruit their best talent away and not misrepresenting the advantages of working for an employer, what the job duties would be or how much growth potential is available. Be honest about what kind of salary, job duties, advancement potential and schedule a person can expect. If you make a job seem better or worse than it really is, the candidate will eventually figure it out and question your motivation for misrepresenting that job.