Hiring Decisions

Ethical Issues in Hiring The author of this report is asked to answer to a nursing hiring dilemma. The question, as presented, could and does happen all of the time in all types of jobs, industries and hiring situations. However, nursing and the medical profession in general is a little different given that there are literally lives at risk and this means the best and the brightest should always be hired.

The ethical issue in play here is how to deal with personal knowledge of someone that is sketchy and very much based on rumor, innuendo and the credibility of the person offering the information. While it may be tempting to put him lower than this, John is clearly the most qualified of the three candidates and should absolutely be number given the glut of good experience and references the man has and the absence of any hard evidence that anything untoward happens in his personal life.

Analysis As was started to be said in the introduction, there is some personal knowledge about John that might sway the charge nurse against picking him. However, there are two bits of information in question and both are based on perception and conjecture rather than hard facts. First, the friend of the charge nurse says that John did or does have a drinking problem.

However, if that were true (and there is no proof that it is), then John's career would almost certainly suffer in the form of irritability, absences and sloppy performance. Since his work experience and references seem to be very strong, that would seem to be very unlikely. The other point of contention is that the hiring mananger personally recalls that the person had a stormy relationship with the friend. While that may be true, there are several issues with that.

First, the "stormy" thing is a matter of opinion and perception while there are multiple sources and points of data that directly contradict the idea that John is a bad person or an unethical person. Second, the friend may have been the genesis of the problems and not John. For example, the accusation about drinking may have been that friend deflecting and perhaps it is the friend, and not John, that was drinking too much.

Lastly, using that information against John with hard evidence may not be the fodder of a Title VII lawsuit, but it is a bad idea and could lead to a lawsuit against the nursing facility and/or the friend with the latter stemming from defamation (about the drinking).

It would be a lawsuit that the friend would probably lose because John would clearly be able to show injury due to the rumor and the charge nurse would be in a perilous place due to allowing it to become an issue when there was a clearly superior candidate amongst the three and it was John.

The charge nurse, while not the final call, would have to justify why John was not the top-ranked person without using the almost certainly vindictive friend and her rumors as a major source (if not the only source) of the problems (Cornell, 2015; University of Oregon, 2015). Conclusion In.