Sunday, October 23, 2005

Family and Friends

I read an article about allegations of nepotism in City Hall, and it mentioned in passing the possibility of a blanket rule against hiring family or friends.

Now, family is reasonable. You can define family. You can write a list of family relationships, tag on "or anyone residing in the same household," and someone either is a family member or isn't.

But "friends" is a more nebulous concept. I know who my friends are, I could provide the conflict of interest office with a list of every friend I had if they wanted, but part of conflict of interest is perceived conflicts of interest, and different people have different definition of "friend". Therefore, it is quite possible for some member of the general public to perceive a conflict of interest because their definition of "friend" is different from mine. For example, I don't consider most of my acquaintances to be my friends. Classmates, co-workers, neighbours, people who lived in my res. in university, people I know in online communities - these people aren't my friends. Some of my friends fall into these categories, yes, but not everyone in these categories is my friend.

In most cases, I could avoid a perceived conflict of interest involving these people, but I couldn't necessarily do so in every case. For example, I would refuse to translate a text that could harm or benefit someone I went to high school with, even if I've never spoken with that person in my life. But what if that person went to the same high school as me at the same time, but I never knew them and didn't recognize their name? It's certainly a perceived conflict of interest, but I'd have no way of knowing that. I'm not involved in hiring in my job, but if I were I would ask to recuse myself if one of the candidates was someone with whom I'm acquainted. But what if it's like the sister of my roommate from res, or someone whom I unknowingly was in a class with? What if I couldn't recuse myself from the hiring process because there's no one else to do it?

The other problem with perceived conflicts of interest is that it might be perceived as a conflict of interest if a candidate is a friend of a current employee, even if that employee is not involved in hiring, and even if the alleged friend is only an acquaintance. This could be a real problem in small professions. When there are fewer than 100 graduates in your field nationwide each year, it's quite likely that one of the employees went to school with one of the candidates, even if they didn't know each other too well.

I'm all for measures to eliminate bias in hiring, but they have to be careful not to go to far and punish people whose paths happen to cross with someone they've met in the past.

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