What are the areas where HR professionals can have a major impact on ethics within a company?

Human resources professionals can have a major impact on a company's ethics, so long as they are empowered and supported by the individuals in charge of managing the company. Human resources professionals are generally in charge of evaluating potential employees and conducting the onboarding process. This allows them to perform an initial screening and exclude individuals with prior ethics issues from continuing further in the hiring process. The onboarding process is an opportunity to make the rules and values of the company clear. Human resources professional can emphasize ethics at this point to ensure that all new employees understand the importance of ethics within the company.
For current employees, human resources professionals can hold semi-frequent ethics training events that require employees to review the ethical rules. This can be done with practical problems to highlight how employees are expected to respond. Finally, when an employee acts in a manner inconsistent with the ethics of a company, human resource professionals should provide support for an action to discipline or remove the employee.
While human resource professionals can have a significant impact on the ethics of a company, their work will be unsuccessful if the day-to-day life in the company shows that unethical actions are rewarded or ignored by management.