Question

You are the vice-president of human resources for a high-tech company that is competing for a major government project. You believe that one of your key competitors is ahead of you in project development and you would like to recruit some of its engineers who are knowledgeable about the project. You receive an anonymous e-mail that includes the names and phone numbers of key people involved in your competitor’s project. If you use the information and can hire some of the competitor’s key people, your company has a chance to beat the competitor and you will become a hero. If you do not use the information, your company may lose a great deal of money. Reflect on what would you do and how you would handle this situation. What factor(s) in this ethics dilemma might influence a person to make a less than ethical decision?

Answer 1

This is the good chance for the vice president of human resources in high tech company. Once he got the anonymous mail ,he can try to contact one or two person from the given contact number and ensure these persons are from the competitor employees or not. Nothing wrong in contacting those person and schedule an interview for the organizational growth for the business success. if these competitors employee have the enough skills and knowledge they can be hired for the high tech company.

Right people from the competitor company need to be selected for the business development. These people work efficiency can be checked by using the linkedin social media site and also take feedback from others. Individual employee effectiveness and efficiency must be checked to compete with competition.

Ethical dilemma here we should hire the competitor employee for obtaining the trade secrets and non disclosure business agreements. Also we should not hire the competitor employee for collecting customer information and account related data. Above said practices are ethically not right.

Once you hire the competitor he or she must be terminated their employment from the previous company. This has to be checked clearly before recruiting and also need to check these employees skills, attitudes, Communication to fulfill the business requirements. We can recruit the competitor company employees without breaching any agreements and Law.