HRGuru

I am not opposed to family members working in the same organization.  In some cases, such as small towns, it is inevitable for family members to belong to the same organization.  It is important to ensure though, that you have an arm's length in hiring - no conflict of interest in reporting relationships and abiding by non-preferential treatment.  Transparency is vital.  This seems really hard to put into practice  if you are the hiring manager and candidate is your sister-in-law,  Personally, I would not support hiring a family member  because I think it would be difficult to manage the upside and downside of what an organization needs to do should there be some legal challenges - hard to be impartial. Interesting question.  I wonder how someone who has hired a family member has been true to the principle of fairness.

Among the candidates  those  who are selected they would say the process of selection is absolutely correct and those did not qualify they might think , things were not fair . Even everything is fair own relatives should not  be hired .Because  even if the relative candidate qualifies in all aspect other employees will tell it is the manager who made it .  To think the darker side more ,many employees will maintain a fair distance from him/her thinking this is a managers people. Offcouse there will not be less who will try to lift relative employee unproportionately.

I love the answer "it depends," because that is so true.      Some smaller organizations and some non-profit, religious organizations seem to pull this off quite well.   As do some very large organizations where the related parties can be separated by supervision.

Be prepared that no matter what, what affects one employee can affect the other related emplloyee(s) and this can be very serious in terms of morale and turnover.  

I'm neither against it, nor in favor of it. 

I hired a family member for a temporary summer job only to find that she did not have good alphabetization skills.  (Yeah, I know, probably should have tested her, but I figured any high school graduate from Los Angeles should be able to file correctly.  I was wrong.  Plus, not sure her parents [close family freinds] would've been real happy when she failed and I didn't hire her.)    So, I had to pretend the assignment was over and then hire someone else to get the job done right.   Yes, I was weak and didn't fire her.   Wasn't worth the brain damage in the family affairs department.