We need compliance oversight of employee relations

– A sound corporate culture can be strengthened if compliance extends it’s oversight to employee relations.
– That includes oversight of the hiring process.

Here’s the intro from this article by Mary Shipley entitled, “The Price of Nice: What Happens When Customer Service and Employee Relations Lack Compliance & Ethics Oversight?”:

Is there any discipline that keeps you more on your toes than Compliance? It has been gripping to observe the compliance function as it has evolved from administering regulatory risk and compliance to now include serving as the ethical and moral guardians of a company. There are, however, still decisions that sit outside of the Compliance function that have the ability to influence how a company is perceived — and the potential to impact its reputation or bottom line.

Take the hiring process, for example. This is an area oft-criticized by job seekers for a lack of common courtesy and respect extended to candidates. It is common for job candidates to progress significantly in a hiring process and then never hear back about whether or not they were ultimately successful in obtaining an offer. If this happens to you, sooner or later you simply come to the conclusion yourself that they have passed on you.

Or perhaps you’re told by an excited interviewer that you’re going through to the next round and they request your availability for the next meeting on the spot. But the confirmation of the meeting never comes, and despite all of the promise the role had one minute, you conclude you’ve been ghosted the next. It takes little time to send a pro forma “thanks, but no thanks” message to candidates; the task can even be delegated to a junior person if the hiring manager thinks it’s beneath them.

I personally like to engage with those who have expressed an interest in working with me and who have given their time in an interview. And yet some companies don’t consider engaging with a rejected candidate to be a worthy investment of time. This of course leads to the obvious point that we should also treat existing staff with due respect and courtesy, including outgoing staff.