Dr John Sullivan Talent Management Thought Leadership
Note that the often boring topic of ethics has suddenly become a key talent attraction factor!
Anthropic is an AI company that has successfully made its “put the public interest first” ethics strategy a major element of its employer brand image. Of course, every company says that it is ethical on its corporate website. But in almost all cases, those “ethical statements” don’t translate into real corporate ethical actions.
As a result, ethics haven’t been much of an attraction factor among top candidates. But recently, that has all changed in a business world where AI has become so dominant. The media and the Internet are now flooded with articles and discussions on the need for placing ethical limits on the application of AI technology. The importance of acting ethically has also risen recently because of a perceived decrease in ethics in the executive branch and Congress.
In my view, it’s time that talent leaders realize that ethical AI usage (and ethics in general) have recently become a major attraction factor for top talent. And not just for top AI talent, but also for every top candidate that is now only willing to work at a corporation that will be a heavy but ethical user of AI.
So, if recruiting top talent is essential at your company, it’s time to consider moving ethics and values from their current obscure website corner and proactively making ethical corporate actions a primary driver of your employer brand image.
What Is An “Ethical Employer Brand”?
An ethical employer brand is a modern talent strategy that focuses on highlighting a company’s ethical actions (that put the public good first) in order to improve its recruiting and retention. The strategy has three foundational components. The first is prioritizing ethics and creating the policies necessary for driving ethical actions. The second element is actually producing the ethical actions that will get the company “talked about”. And the third is proactively increasing the likelihood that your corporate ethical actions will receive the maximum exposure and publicity.
The Anthropic Story Has Two Parts
Anthropic is a privately owned public benefit AI corporation that produces leading-edge AI tools. And two of its tools, Opus and Mythos, have been drawing numerous positive ethics headlines over the last few months. The first “ethics stand” occurred around their Claude DoD military product that wouldn’t allow the use of weapons without human intervention.
And the second ethics stand involved their Claude-Mythos corporate AI product, which could, in the wrong hands, allow unscrupulous users to identify and exploit even the most hidden of enterprise software vulnerabilities. Below, you’ll find a brief synopsis of how they built their ethical employment brand based on how they released these two products.
Part I – How Anthropic’s military product helped build their powerful employer brand
In a world where some question the ethics of selling any corporate product to the military (e.g., Palantir), Anthropic once again received widespread and almost 100% positive press when it refused to sell its Claude AI product for modernizing national security to the military. They publicly declared that they would only provide this product if two product features that raised serious ethical issues were omitted. The first omitted feature would have allowed the autonomous use of lethal weapons without human approval! The second omitted feature was a mass domestic surveillance feature that would clearly create serious public privacy issues.
Omitting these two questionable product features (and refusing to back down) created a great deal of positive publicity immediately after the military not only rejected their product, but later labeled the company a “supply chain risk”. This effectively blacklisted them from all future defense contracting.
Well, the fact that Anthropic was willing to give up a $200 million government contract almost immediately impressed everyone worldwide. And Anthropic then made another bold strategic move: rather than negotiating with the military behind the scenes and in secret, its leadership took their case directly to the press and the public. And the massive, almost 100% positive publicity that followed made this little-known corporation a “giant” in the world of AI and recruiting.
Part II – How limiting the distribution of its Mythos product served the public interest
In 2026, after Anthropic discovered that its corporate AI product Claude-Mythos was so extremely powerful that, in the wrong hands, it would allow unscrupulous users to identify and exploit even the most hidden of enterprise software vulnerabilities. The company decided to postpone the general distribution of this product. So instead, the company released a “product preview” only to 50 major tech organizations. And that preview version has been provided to these major companies, with an opportunity (before any public release) to find and fix the previously hidden vulnerabilities in their critical enterprise systems.
However, instead of implementing the preview product secretly, Anthropic boldly announced its approach in a public blog post. Clearly, their willingness to put “the public good first” ahead of immediate profits, without being forced to do so, generated a lot of positive publicity and goodwill for them. And their willingness to do it all in public once again boosted their employer brand (Note: the OMB has recently announced that it will allow federal agencies to begin using Mythos).
These two back-to-back rounds of extensive positive publicity have built Anthropic’s employer brand in less than a year, to the point where its recruiting brand is now beginning to rival those of Google, Nvidia, and Amazon! While at the same time, these ethical actions significantly raised the likely value of the company during its upcoming IPO.
Action Steps For Enhancing Your “Ethical Employer Brand”
For those who wish to strengthen their recruiting by taking proactive actions to enhance their ‘ethical employer brand’, here are a handful of tips and action steps to consider.
- Realize that concern over AI usage will only increase – at least over the next two years, you should assume that there will be a continuous increase in candidate and public concern over corporate ethical practices. And that means that your recruiting function will need to increase its emphasis on spreading positive information about your company’s ethical practices.
- Realize that an ethical employer brand will give you a competitive advantage – because you can’t make a company ethical overnight. Suddenly stating that your company is ethical won’t have any impact on the attraction of top candidates. However, if your company successfully builds a complete ethical employer brand, that powerful brand won’t likely be matched by your talent competitors.
- Identify the best channels for spreading your ethics message – a key element of the strategy is to have your company’s ethics widely talked about. And today, that means talking about them on podcasts, giving presentations at conferences, and having them written up on the Internet and in mass media.
- An ethics focus will also positively impact retention – not only will having a strong ethical employer brand enhance your recruiting, but it will also help to improve the retention rate of your current employees.
- The costs will be minimal – fortunately, shifting your employer brand so that it now fully embraces ethics and the public good won’t require any additional hiring or draw more from the recruiting budget. It will, however, require that you make an individual accountable for building and maintaining that new ethical brand image.
- You must measure the impact of your ethical employer brand– because all new recruiting programs must be data-driven. You must measure the impact of your ethical brand on recruiting. And the easiest way to do that is to ask a sample of recruits and new hires to force-rank their attraction factors. And if you have done a good job, the rank of ethics should increase each year.
Finally, Remember These 3 Key Takeaways
- Make ethical practices something that everyone talks about – the first step in creating a strategy is getting everyone to talk about ethics and their importance in recruiting and retention. So encourage your managers and team leaders to place the topic high on their meeting agendas.
- Reward ethical practices – whatever is measured and rewarded gets done. So make acting ethically something that is measured and rewarded. And consider making it a requirement for all managerial promotions.
- Create a story inventory that covers your best practices – because broadly spreading the word is an essential element of a successful ethics strategy. Create an internal “story inventory” website. That your managers, recruiters, and employees can use to learn about examples of your most notable ethical practices and stories.
Thanks for finding the time to read and share this article.
Notes for the reader
This is the latest article from Dr. Sullivan, who was called “the Michael Jordan of Hiring” by Fast Company.
You can subscribe to his Aggressive Talent Management newsletter (which focuses on recruiting tools, current recruiting opportunities, and recruiting trends). Either here or by following him on LinkedIn.
