Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer is looking for a global director of ethics and handing over the search to Martha Montag Brown & Associates.
Job Description: the person needs to be "discreet and able to protect confidential information", be "politically savvy; able to advocate for and influence others; be "able and willing to take a difficult or unpopular decision if necessary" and be ready to "accept significant challenges; not be daunted by setbacks and defeats."
More and more companies are recruiting ethics officers and more ethics cops are now on the beat, according to a BusinessWeek report earlier this year.
The message coming through is that they need to be given lots of freedom, kept on a long leash and accept that they will easily make enemies. Not a job for the fainthearted.
Finding the right person for his kind of job is hard, according to one report.
Many ethics officer positions are geared too heavily towards compliance. In other words, they are kept on too short a leash. Or as Alice Peterson, founder and president of ethics and compliance services firm Syrus Global says in this report: "This is an emerging position for which we don't have a well-developed, specific slate of candidates with obvious credentials as ethics officers. After all, no-one started out in business school in the 1970s saying they were going to be an ethics officer."
Which can only mean that the growing army of ethics officers are going to have a real job on their hands. And for the very little result, at least for the time being.
The Wal-Mart job description, which you can download from the head hunter’s site, is remarkably loose and poorly phrased. Sure, the point is well made that this is a new kind of role, but insisting that a global role requires “knowledge of all relevant laws” is just plain silly. I doubt that this requirement is humanly possible to fulfil by an individual; or, if it is, such a person would be worth a lot more than even Wal-mart can afford.