Research Ethics

The Second Incident

There was an urgent need for a research associate in our group and there were two prospective candidates that were called in for interviews. A panel was set up to evaluate the candidates and I was a member of the panel. The other members of the panel were my boss, the director of our group (my boss’s supervisor) and two other co-workers at my boss’s level. Jim was the candidate who did not impress me during his interview. He was not able to answer a couple of the most fundamental questions that I asked him and even on prompting in the right direction, he was not able to catch the clues. At the assessment meeting after the interview, three people including my boss and the director were in favor of hiring Jim, whereas a couple of us thought that he was not the best candidate for our team. In my company, the norm was that usually only those people that got thumbs up from the entire panel got hired.

The next day, the director came to my office with the “assessment report” that I had filled out the previous day. He chatted for a few minutes and then asked me about my assessment of the candidate. On my telling him about my impressions, he proceeded to make excuses for Jim, saying that the interview situations are usually stressful; people get very anxious and make silly mistakes. He then asked me to change my assessment to a favorable one. I agreed with him and nodded to him, saying something like, “Yes, maybe you’re right and he was stressed out” and changed my assessment. The following week, an employment offer was made to Jim.