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Job seekers would like guidance on how to find a job with a firm whose values reinforce their own, a place that would be a good personal fit. At the same time, because of legal compliance requirements, it is crucial that employers find employees that fit the company's value system so that the company can maintain an effective ethics and compliance program. This article looks at the legal, regulatory structure in both the U.S. and E.U. with an emphasis on reflexive corporate governance. It also reports the findings of a survey of E.U. and U.S. executives with a reputation for nurturing ethical business culture to discover what virtues and factors are most important and, thus, something a job seeker might look for in finding a strong, ethical company. Finally, the article raises the cognitive issues of the importance for job seekers to examine their own psychological biases so they are evaluating a position based on what really fits their values.

Whether characterized as corporate social responsibility (CSR), business ethics, or some other name, best practices in a given industry often fall short, thus causing efforts of companies seeking to improve their own CSR practices to fall short as well. A typical CSR model uses philanthropic donations to demonstrate the company's commitment to social welfare. Even a strategic version of CSR falls short of what it could achieve. To be sure, these can be important efforts worth celebrating, but we seek to raise the bar higher. Our case study focuses on the pharmaceutical industry because of our experience working in and studying that industry. In Section 2, we identify the typical CSR efforts of pharmaceutical companies. Dissatisfied with the scope of current efforts, Section 3 switches from an inductive approach to a deductive one in which we rely on scholarly literature and some exemplary benchmarks to propose a stronger model of corporate ethics. At the heart of this model is the claim that optimum instrumental benefits accrue to corporate CSR actions when they are undertaken for sincere aims rather than for instrumental ones. Section 4 then explains how this framework provides a way for pharmaceutical companies to embrace a more robust model of corporate responsibility that could be extended to other industries as well.