1. Leadership and ethics are inevitably intertwined in the business world.

Describe a
situation in which you have dealt with these issues and how they have influenced
you. (250 words)

Situation: One of the incidents that I came across at my workplace was during the hiring
process in the team I worked for. The person I reported to was biased towards hiring
candidates from his previous organization.

Details:

In 2018-19, I was involved in hiring for “Fixed income analyst” roles for my then team. I was
responsible for taking the first round of interviews and screening candidates for the final
assessment round with my then manager. While going through the process, I realized that the
hiring manager (my then direct reporting manager) was biased towards people from his
previous organization. It was more evident because some highly qualified people who were
also a good fit for the work were rejected without a concrete reason.

Action:

It was then that I decided to raise this point first with my manager. He replied that he found
the people from his previous organization a better cultural fit for the team. However, seeing
that none of the candidates with good profiles who were not from his last organization made
it to the final list, I decided to raise the matter to the skip-level authority (My manager’s
immediate senior). He looked into the entire hiring process and the interview recordings and
concluded that there was an unconscious bias in the hiring process from my manager’s end.
We thus decided to reconduct the interviews of some of the rejected candidates with another
person in the team to keep the hiring process unbiased.

Risk:

Given the person was my direct manager, I didn’t want to spoil my work relationships with
him. Hence, questioning his hiring methods and taking the matter to his supervisor meant
risking the relationship I had with him. However, my conscience didn’t allow it, and I
decided to raise the issue to my superiors.

Learning:

Being an equal opportunity employer, It was our responsibility to keep the personal biases
away from the hiring process. It was important to judge a candidate based solely on their
skills, attitude, and the values they brought to the team. It was vital that we did not reject
people if they were rightly qualified for the job and brought the correct values to the team just
because they had no personal contacts in the group.