Ethical requirements in job advertisements: A deep learning approach

This study examines ethical requirements in job advertisements as a proxy to understand how ethical qualities are required in the job market. We apply deep learning and natural language processing to analyze the ethical requirements in 196,272 job postings from 13,703 companies across a variety of industries and professions. This large sample allows us to generate a holistic review of ethical requirements in job postings by industry and profession. Specifically, our results show that less than half of the job postings in our sample include requirements for ethics, despite increased attention to ethical conduct. The IT industry had the fewest job postings with ethical requirements compared to other industries. Of the topics within ethical requirements coded in this study, obligations to professional standards occurred most frequently whereas information confidentiality and privacy are less prevalent. Our results have important implications for the ethical practices of businesses and academic ethical education.