How much professional advice is it ethical to ask job applicants to supply?

"Success is the ability
to go from one failure to another
with no loss of enthusiasm."
Sir Winston Churchill

If you've filled out an application recently, you may have spent hours, even days on a new type of barbarism known as the "supplemental question."

These may involve proposing solutions to difficult problems, suggestions for development of the organization or even full-on business plans.

Several years ago, The Resource Exchange, a Colorado Springs non-profit put out a request for proposal that included asking interested public relations companies to provide a one-year communications strategy.

That could be viewed as getting a comprehensive example of how a firm would function, or it could be perceived as asking for the company's work, free of charge. The Job Slog Blog attempted to reach the Resource Exchange CEO and its human resources director, to ask about this, but was unable to connect.

Application requirements like these are even more ethically dicey when someone has been de facto chosen to fill the position before the job is posted. In a situation like that, lengthy, complicated questions could be viewed as information mining from those who have expertise, but no chance of getting the job they're seeking by providing it.

Michael Connor is editor and publisher of Business Ethics Magazine. (Yes, I too was speechless that there is such a publication. I assume businesses will be dumbfounded, since many are unaware that the words, " business" and "ethics" can be used in the same sentence. Check out the magazine - http://business-ethics.com/ )

Connor is not entirely sure what he thinks of the supplemental question thing. "It's always difficult to generalize because these situations can vary to a great degree, depending on the job and how senior the people are," he said. "I'm not sure organizations are taking advantage of job seekers. It's more like the process has gotten so institutionalized. My instinct is that it's more thoughtless than unethical, kind of an institutional insensitivity, which may border on unethical."

But Connor has another concern. "Some of these jobs are posted, just to show you did the search. Worse than stealing ideas is that nobody even looks at them." Prozac anyone?

The University of Colorado, Denver, has been known to ask some extensive supplemental questions, so I went there to ask how the questions are formulated and if there's a line in the sand on what's reasonable to ask.

I contacted three communications representatives at UCD, all of whom were very nice and referred me to a fourth person who asked me to contact a fifth, in human resources. Ah, The Dark Side. Despite repeated attempts, the HR representative did not return phone calls or emails.

Lesley Bishop, Interim Director of the Experimental Learning Center at UCD, said her department attempts to compose questions that will help determine the skill set of applicants. "In our department," Bishop explained, "most questions don't get asked until the phone interview or face-to-face, and we have a search committee where applications get reviewed by actual human beings, not just run through a computerized screener."

Seems like the Experimental Learning Center might be a good place to apply.

I have no Tips from the Dark Side for you this week.  It's apparently too gloomy and vaporous over there to use a phone or computer.

Happy hunting gang, I'll be back next Friday.
Ann