Is it Ethical to Consider Job Immobility in Hiring Decisions?

A Machiavellian view of hiring interview candidates with low job mobility

Both the hiring managers and the candidates wear masks during the recruitment process. What’s under yours? Photo by Sander Sammy on Unsplash

In last week’s post about the Halo Effect Bias and its effect on hiring decisions, we only gave a single reason for hiring a candidate who looked like an ex-convict. Our main point: if someone didn’t look the part, but still managed to build a successful, multi-decade career on par with someone who does look the part, then the first person has some kind of “secret sauce” that allowed them to keep pace with better-looking peers.

A second argument in favor of hiring a candidate who doesn’t look the part: that person would have a harder time getting hired elsewhere. Readers of Adventures in Leadership Land can avoid being hoodwinked by superficial appearances, but non-readers will still be susceptible to uncritically hiring the best-looking candidates. That means a candidate who looks the part will have an easier time job-hopping, and makes an attractive target for professional temptresses recruiters.

If you take the road less traveled and hire the candidate who is equally capable but doesn’t look the part, that employee would be easier to retain…but just as easy to fire! It’s the best of both worlds.

For you, at least.

Job Mobility: A Mixed Bag of Incentives

Quick geography lesson: there’s a hazardous place at the fringes of Leadership Land called the Straits of Conflicting Interests. Located on the opposite end of Leadership Land from the Desert of Good Intentions, the Straits of Conflicting Interests are notoriously difficult to navigate. The Straits’ flows are turbulent, frequently change directions, and have sunk many leader-ships.

When there’s a strong conflict of interest, the resulting maelstrom can render the Strait unnavigable.

The topic of job mobility is one of the many sea monsters dwelling in the Straits of Competing Interests:

• An employee benefits from maximum job mobility. Wouldn’t you like the option to chase a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?

• The boss benefits when an underling has minimal job mobility. An absent employee produces no work, vacancies take time and energy to fill, onboarding a new employee is laborious, and (for knowledge workers) a departure means a substantial loss of institutional memory.

  • A boss who is also an employee would benefit from maximum job mobility for themselves, but not their subordinates. This does not apply to owner-founders who risked everything to start up a business; there is no divergence of incentives there.

• The organization as a whole benefits when both the boss and the subordinate have moderate mobility within the org – enough to correct inefficiencies and groom the high-performers for promotion, but not enough for internal switching (frictional) costs to dominate. On the flip side, the organization wants to minimize brain drain by limiting movement outside the organization.

This is a general rule, contingent on bosses being able to fire employees at will¹.

Is it Legal to Discriminate on the Basis on Job Mobility?

Let’s avoid sugarcoating the term: hiring someone because they seem to be more/less mobile in their careers is a form of discrimination. Anti-discrimination laws in the English-speaking world usually cover “protected categories” like age, sex, race, religion, and sexual orientation (non-exhaustive list).

We’re not aware of any laws that prohibit you from favoring candidates because they look like no one else would hire them. Analogously, we’re unaware of any laws that prohibit you from dating an ugly person because they’re less likely to leave you for someone better. So yes, it’s probably legal.

Disclaimer: Adventures in Leadership Land is a lawyer-free publication, so none of this should be taken as legal advice.

Legal ≠ Ethical

Just because it’s legal to do something doesn’t make it ethical. We’ll occasionally put on our Machiavellian hats and concoct evil schemes like a James Bond villain, but we’re not devoid of a moral compass. We dislike hiring someone on the basis of job immobility because it puts us on the slippery slope of keeping their job mobility low. We wouldn’t tolerate being treated this way, and it would cause us severe cognitive dissonance to inflict this treatment on our employees.

Even if it were moral to trap an employee in the career doldrums, the strategy tends to be self-defeating in the long-term. To suppress an employee's job mobility, you'd have to sabotage their work or deny them growth opportunities. When they become bored with their dead-end job, or disgruntled with your manipulations, they may leave whether or not they have another career prospect lined up².

Our Preferred Strategy

In our careers, we follow a motto that’s often attributed to Richard Branson:

Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.

This works well with most employees that are not the type mentioned in footnote #2. When we proactively nurture an employee’s development, it increases their job mobility and their ability to leave…but it also benefits us in the long run. Most humans are hardwired to reciprocate favors; this mental mechanism is so powerful that it was the first of six “weapons of influence” in Dr. Robert Cialdini’s Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion.

Here are some of the benefits to training an employee so well that they can leave you:

1. It builds their loyalty to you. Like the second half of the Branson quote above, they may be capable of leaving you but they might not want to.

2. If they decide to leave, they are more likely to help you later when you are trying to exercise your own job mobility by serving as a professional reference, or putting in a good word for you with the hiring manager.

3. You spend less time in the Straits of Conflicting Interests when you align your interests with that of your employees.

In our experience, the social currency that we accumulated by supporting an employee is usually worth the elevated risk of them leaving.

---

If we take the idea of job immobility to an extreme, we arrive at the topic of slavery. Sure, it’s no longer legal to own another person, but is your employee truly free if they’re paying off their student loans, credit card debt, a mortgage, and a fancy new car? Are H-1B visa holders that much different from modern-day indentured servants?

Intriguing topics…but they’ll have to wait for another post. Subscribe below so you don’t miss them!

1. A boss/organization will have slightly different incentives if the employees cannot be jettisoned easily. This is common in the enclaves of Leadership Land where employees are tenured or protected by unions. Those bosses/organizations follow a modified rule, best described by the following chiasmus: high mobility for low performers, and low mobility for high performers. Managers have a distorted incentive to foist the low performers on a competitor (could be another manager competing for a spot on Executive Mountain, or a competing organization), and simultaneously build a high perimeter wall crested with barbed wire to keep the high performers from leaving. In some cases, the leadership team might corral the low performers into a separate division/detachment/Siberian gulag where they can do the least damage.

2. Occasionally, you’ll get an employee who:

1. Only works for a paycheck

2. Has no interest in improving the status quo, only maintaining it

3. Will retire in a few years

4. Is perfectly content to avoid personal growth and novelty.

Keeping this employee around like a domestic animal is the ideal for both sides. You get a steady (if mediocre) stream of productivity without needing to worry about an unexpected departure. Your employee gets to enjoy the confines of a low-uncertainty, low-volatility cage with regular feedings until either A) they reach retirement, or B) there’s a management shakeup, the organization goes through a mass lay-off, or they’re replaced by a robot. But most domesticated workers don’t think too much about scenario B) any more than a dog wonders if his owner is going to abandon him at the local animal control shelter.