Recruiting with Purpose: Think Like an Engineer, Act Like a Doctor
I’ve often thought that recruiters, like engineers, doctors, and other professionals entrusted with people’s well-being, would benefit from having a clear code of conduct. The advice we give (or fail to give) can significantly impact people's careers, financial stability, and even their sense of self-worth.
Recruiting at Meta taught me to think like an engineer. Be pragmatic. Don’t pitch every candidate as the one. Track conversion rates at each hiring stage, identify bottlenecks, and address them swiftly. If there’s a potential misalignment, flag it and discuss it. No smoke and mirrors.
“First, do no harm” often linked to the Hippocratic Oath, is a paraphrase of an ancient medical principle. In medicine, diagnosing without consultation is malpractice, and the same should apply to recruiting. It’s not about gut instinct or salesmanship, but thoughtful, informed decision-making. Many professional groups for engineers (like ACM and IEEE) have codes of conduct/ethics expected of their membership too.
Recruiting is often seen as transactional: filling jobs, hitting quotas, closing deals. But it should be a profession rooted in responsibility, ethical practice, and care for people’s lives. That’s why, when founding a specialist design recruitment agency like Good Maven, we felt a deep need to pay attention to ethics as well as aesthetics.
A Double Bottom Line: Doing Well and Doing Good
At Good Maven, we created our mission and values around design hiring that incorporates a double bottom line: success is measured not just in profit; but in positive social impact. I first studied this model while earning my Master of Science in Arts Administration at Drexel University (essentially an MBA, but with a focus on social impact alongside financial performance).
Before moving into recruiting, I developed audiences, funding, and lagniappe* for the New Orleans Ballet and Philadelphia Museum of Art. In the nonprofit sector, accountability to social good is clearer, your entire existence is justified by it. But when you run a private company, there is no inherent obligation to “do good.” Capitalism, at its core, is built around profit.
I’ve thought a lot about how private businesses—especially in recruiting—can create more responsibility around social impact. One avenue I explored was B Corp certification, with help from specialist partners at Better Not Stop. B Corp provides frameworks for accountability. However, when looking at recruiting companies that had gone through the process, we saw a troubling trend: Most took the environmental impact route—not social impact.
Firms that had never spoken about sustainability suddenly positioned themselves as green businesses, possibly because remote companies inherently have a smaller carbon footprint. Many used B Corp as a PR prop rather than a real commitment to change.
That’s the easy route. And I’ve never been one to take the easy route.
I’ve studied B Corp certification through the lens of social impact—focusing on ethical hiring, diversity, candidate advocacy, and fair labor practices. That said, there are countless ways to build an ethical business without a certification, such as:
Intentionally hiring design talent from and for diverse backgrounds in order to systematically change who has access to opportunities, capital, and hiring support.
Creating our mission and values with equity, diversity and inclusion in mind – thanks for help from Rubie Clarke and Hannah Naima McCloskey at Fearless Futures
Diversifying vendors to support underrepresented founders. Some great partners we’ve worked with:
Strangebirds for content strategy + marketing
Vicky Yang for site design
Ben Sandhu for wordmark, typography + theme
Zoë Robinson at Caxton for marketing strategy and webmastery
Kate Pincott for coaching, brand strategy + identity
Prioritizing equitable hiring practices for those looking for design jobs and pushing for fair compensation.
Offering strong benefits and flexible work arrangements for employees - we chose health insurance through WPA over others because of their non-profit status and commitment to reinvest profits to enhance services rather than distributing them to shareholders.
Measuring and reflecting upon these efforts to understand real impact.
Final Thoughts
Recruiting, when done well, is not a sales job—it’s a service profession. It’s about people’s livelihoods, dreams, and futures. We should treat it with the same level of responsibility, ethics, and care as any other profession that directly impacts lives.
I’d love to hear how others are measuring positive social impact in the work they do.
How do you define ethics in hiring?
What principles guide your hiring decisions?
How do you measure the social impact (good and bad) of your work?
Good hiring doesn’t just grow businesses—it creates opportunities for people to build fulfilling and stable lives.
* A Cajun-French word meaning: a small gift given to a customer by a merchant at the time of a purchase, or something given or obtained gratuitously or by way of good measure.
