Question Are spousal hires unethical? Do companies have an obligation to consider job candidates on their merit as individuals alone? I would have thought that spousal hires were obviously unfair, and therefore objectionable. But I've talked to many people who think that they are often legitimate.

Accepted:
April 19, 2012

Comments

This is an interesting and difficult question. One might start with the presumption that a company's hiring may be conducted in whatever way its top officers deem most advantageous. Thus imagine a company that has two positions to fill and is considering four candidates. The hiring officers rank these candidates in the following order: Alice, Ben, Celia, David. So they would like to hire Alice and Ben. But unfortunately Alice is married to David, and she will decline unless David is also made an offer. So the hiring officers discuss whether the firm is better off with Alice and David or with Ben and Celia. They determine that the Alice-David combination is more advantageous, and so they promise Alice that, if she accepts, David will also be hired.

Does Ben have a complaint in this case? I don't think so. It is true that, other things equal, he would add more value to the firm than David would. But other things are not equal: if Ben is hired over David, then Alice will decline; whereas if David is hired over Ben, then Alice will accept. The firm prudently prefers Alice-David over Ben-Celia, and Ben has no good claim that the firm should reward some specific merit that is distinct from contribution to the firm's overall success. In the relevant sense, David does contribute more than Ben after all because he ensures Alice's services for the company.

Despite this presumption, spousal hiring might still be deemed unethical on two distinct grounds. First, participation in a hiring practice might be unethical because of its large-scale effects. Here is a clear-cut example. Firms have reason to hire people whom their customers will like. If most customers have some religious or racial prejudice, then the practice of preferring job candidates whom customers will like constitutes systematic discrimination against job candidates of the disliked religion or race. Firms ought not to participate in such a pattern of discrimination even if they are legally permitted to do so. Does this example have an analogue in spousal hiring? It might. There might be in some society a group of people held in low esteem -- short males, say -- who find it hard to find a spouse. The social disadvantage of this group would be compounded by a practice of spousal hiring: while short males are very rarely beneficiaries of spousal hires (nearly all of them are involuntary bachelors), they would much more often lose opportunities on account of spousal hires. If such a situation obtained, firms have a moral reason not to engage in spousal hires, at least in cases where the passed-over candidate would be a member of the disadvantaged group.

The second ground for judging spousal hiring unethical despite the presumption is connected to the fact that those insiders who can influence the hiring process do not always act in the best interest of the firm. Imagine a case where three candidates have applied for a job opening. In terms of qualifications, it seems rather clear that the candidates should be ranked in the order Frank, Gina, Henry. But Henry's wife Edith is already working for the firm, and she lets it be known that she would leave if someone other than Henry were hired. Now Edith is actually less qualified than Gina; if Frank were hired and Edith left, the firm would -- with Frank and Gina -- be better off than it would be with Edith and Henry. So the firm would be well advised to ignore Edith's threat. But Edith lobbies the people she knows in the firm and pressures them to help her get Henry hired. If the relevant people succumb to this lobbying and damage the firm by offering the job to Henry rather than to Frank, then their conduct would normally be unethical by violating their fiduciary duty to the firm in a way that also unreasonably deprives Frank of a job offer he merits.

I have sketched reasons of two kinds that, if present, might make a spousal hire unethical. I don't think such reasons are decisive -- there might always be further morally significant reasons in play on the other side (e.g., Henry needs the job to survive because his daily medicine is unaffordable without the company's health insurance policy). But I do think that these reasons typically support the conclusion that a spousal hire is unethical -- and that most cases of unethical spousal hiring involve self-dealing by insiders (reasons of the second kind).