HR professionals occupy a uniquely difficult position in any organization. You are simultaneously a strategic advisor to leadership, a resource for employees, an investigator of complaints, and a guardian of confidential employee information. When those roles pull in different directions — and they often do — the ethical path forward is rarely obvious.
At a recent DRM HR Café session, attorneys Beth Rattigan and Sarah Butson walked through some of the hardest ethical dilemmas HR professionals face, and how the frameworks from SHRM and HRCI can help navigate them.
When Management and Employees Have Competing Interests
The session opened with a question that underlies almost every ethical challenge in HR: How can HR maintain trust when it is both advising management and ensuring fair processes for employees?
There is no formula that eliminates the tension completely. But SHRM and HRCI have both adopted Codes of Ethics that give HR professionals a principled foundation to stand on. Both codes contain five core principles:
- Professional Development
- Ethical Leadership
- Fairness and Justice
- Handling Conflicts of interest, and
- Careful Use of Information.
When competing pressures mount, returning to those principles can clarify what the right path actually looks like.
Three Scenarios That Test Your Ethics
When an investigation inconveniences leadership. This is where the principle of fairness and justice is most directly tested. An HR professional’s obligation to conduct an impartial investigation does not diminish because the subject of the investigation has a particular role in the organization. Allowing organizational pressure to shape an investigation outcome — or suppress one — exposes the company to significant legal liability and corrodes the trust employees place in HR. This is where following established process and procedure, informed by the Code, can assist HR.
When you are aware of confidential information that cannot be disclosed. HR must abide by obligations to treat certain information confidentiality. The principle of ethical leadership requires that HR professionals maintain integrity even when they cannot speak fully — and that they advocate internally for humane processes and transparent communication to employees wherever possible.
When information about protected characteristics arrives uninvited. An HR manager is screening finalists for a senior role. A colleague informally shares that they located the finalist’s personal social media profile, which reveals she has a protected characteristic that the candidate never disclosed during the interview process. The HR manager now has the information, regardless of how it arrived. The principle governing use of information is clear here: information about a candidate’s protected status is irrelevant to the hiring decision, and acting on it — consciously or not — creates both ethical and legal problems. The right move is to set the information aside entirely and document legitimate business reasons for proceeding on the merits.
AI Raises the Stakes
AI is already reshaping how HR professionals work and it is raising new ethical stakes. Ethical leadership in HR increasingly means asking hard questions about artificial intelligence. Practically, that means educating yourself about the limits and pitfalls of AI and understanding enough to use it responsibly. HR will want to ensure that a policy exists for your organization that includes the requirement for human override protocols so that a human is reviewing AI recommendations, verifying information, and making final decisions, not rubber-stamping outputs. And it means recognizing that confidentiality obligations extend to the data you feed into AI systems. What employees share in performance reviews, what candidates submit in applications — that information doesn’t lose its sensitivity because an algorithm is processing it.
Building an Ethical Organization
Ethics in HR is not just about individual decisions. It is also about the systems and culture that make good decisions more likely. Pay equity analysis, anti-harassment training effectiveness, and third-party vendor data-sharing practices all deserve attention as well.
The Bottom Line
HR professionals are not just policy administrators. You are ethical actors in your organization, and the decisions you make — sometimes under pressure, with incomplete information, and competing loyalties — have real consequences for the people in your organization. The SHRM and HRCI Codes of Ethics can provide a useful reminder about the framework HR should be using to address hard scenarios when they arise.
For questions about the topics addressed in this article, please feel free to reach out to Beth Rattigan or Sarah Butson, or visit our Labor & Employment practice page.
The Labor and Employment Lawyers at Downs Rachlin Martin host a monthly HR Café on the first Wednesday of the month at 8:30am. The excerpt above is from the June 2026 HR Café. If you want to receive invitations for future DRM HR Cafés and are not currently on the list, please click here.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Legal advice requires a new engagement with Downs Rachlin Martin PLLC.
