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Originally Posted by ssandra  Thisis very interesting. I often think about these situations and discuss them with whomever wants to listen to my ramblings... |
Thanks for the complex reply. I want to listen to anyone's ramblings about this.
About lying - the way I see it, when you tell a lie because you believe it is the best thing to do in a specific situation - then you are perpetuating the need for lying. If everyone would tell the truth, then things would need to arrange themselves in such a way that telling the truth would be acceptable. If people believe that in a certain situation lying is the only intelligent choice, they perpetuate the system that requires them to lie.
For example, I worked in one of the best headhunting firms, in the Romanian office, and we had to call candidates for various management-level positions and offer them a similar job in another company, or offer them a superior position. That was a good thing for the candidates, cause this is how they could advance their career. When a very important company like Phillips or Renault wants to select a CEO or a country manager, they don't put ads on e-jobs. They hire a headhunting company to select the best possible candidates from wherever they know best.
But the thing is, in order to get to actually talk to those people, we had to get past their secretaries, and it was imperative that NOBODY else except the candidates themselves knew why we were calling. So we had to invent all kinds of excuses, such as to say that we worked for a magazine and we were making a poll or that we were a very old friend of the manager or a high school buddy and we just got back from abroad and we lost their phone number, etc. 80% of the times, the secretaries would refuse to give us any information, and my colleagues needed to resort to all kinds of subterfuges in order to get to find out the phone numbers of those candidates, and only then, they could tell the truth to those candidates. They were actually very curious how we found them out, and we always told them only that "we have our methods"
Now, I would not be able to do this kind of job. I would not accept to lie, and therefore, I would not be able to be in that job, no matter how important it was for me. I realize that there is a reason for the secrecy, but this is only because there is envy among people in a firm, and that's we couldn't tell anybody why we wanted to talk to the manager, when we actually wanted to offer them a career opportunity. If we couldn't find out his cell number or at least, get him on the horn, we usually gave up on that candidate, as long as we had sufficient others to select a worthy one and invite him to the interview. If everybody in the headhunting industry refused to lie, then maybe the managers would instruct their secretaries to always give their number to a headhunter. Or they could instruct their secretaries to always tell them who called. Then we could just tell the secretaries our name and the manager would call us back.