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Comment by workingdog | Hacker News Reader

I work around people who are reluctant to give an honest appraisal because of the fear of legal repercussions by asking:

"Would you hire this person again?" We get a 99% answer rate on that question.

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To be honest, I'm surprised that question works. It's close enough to a real opinion that eventually someone will lose a defamation case on it and then legal will tell HR to stop answering it.

It's a simple statement of fact, so it's pretty safe in most cases. Employment dates and "would we rehire" (simple yes/no, not getting into any reasons why) have always been the only questions we answer.

In that case, you could just say "So-and-so worked here since X date, and they were fired on Y date" and answer the real question. The value to "would you re-hire" is that it is vague, there could be other perfectly good justifications than "they were fired." But now we see people using the latter question as a 1-for-1 replacement for the former. So I expect eventually HR will decide it's too risky to let a civil jury decide if wink-wink is good enough.

‘Would we’ is subjective too. Different hiring managers would give different answers.

The actual answer HR will give you, the magic words are ‘are they eligible for rehire’.

Yes, that's correct. HR, not managers, provide these answers. The answer to the rehire question is not an opinion, and it's not subjective. It's a checkbox on the personnel record. It doesn't mean they were fired, either. The reason for or nature of their termination would not be discussed.

One previous employer said (to the reference/background checker) "our corporate policy is to never rehire anyone, no matter what". This quote was typed into the background check.

Another said "all our records are in a storage shed in another state, so we have no records of anybody". This stopped the background check dead. Until I called that employer "but I still have money in the 401k system!" HR_drone says "why yes you certainly do, have them call me back". The results of which also appeared typed into the background check results.

> I work around people who are reluctant to give an honest appraisal because of the fear of legal repercussions by asking: "Would you hire this person again?" We get a 99% answer rate on that question.

"Trick managers into exposing the company to lawsuits with this one sentence! In-house counsel HATES it!"

In seriousness, answering this question with "no" would quite likely still constitute tortious interference.

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