His boss fired him and told him why?
Never do that. When firing someone in an at-will state, just do it and explain nothing. Explanations can easily lead to lawsuits. It's just not worth the risk.
Never do that. When firing someone in an at-will state, just do it and explain nothing. Explanations can easily lead to lawsuits. It's just not worth the risk.
Hmm... what if you could have an employee sign a release as a precondition of being told why they were fired?
Bluffing is part of legal risk management.
The guy had some great experience but the CV was weird.
It was 10 pages long for 4 jobs. He listed every course he'd ever been sent on, including health and safety and diversity training ones, and just mixed his degree in somewhere with them. He listed each version of word he'd used (seemly every version released) with equal prominence as Java and SQL. Each time he'd been hired as a temp contractor he wrote his job title as CEO, because he was getting paid via his company.
My boss laughed at it and told me to bin it.
He needed to know what was wrong, or he'd stay unemployed (which was a shame for a guy with some great skills). I agonized for about a day and finally sent him some tips from my personal email, but I'm sure we could get sued if the strangeness was due to a disability. Something wrong there.
I won't disagree outright with that, but what is "the right thing" here?
The threat of litigation is incredibly real when it comes to employment issues. Even the most proactive employers (those that attempt to follow the law and keep meticulous records) face lawsuits from employees, former employees and job applicants. The potential damages can be significant (particularly for certain causes of action) and even small and seemingly baseless claims can easily result in five figures worth of attorney's fees (or more).
Here, despite apparently having some idea that his actions could expose his employer to a lawsuit, an employee decided that his employer should take on legal risk despite the fact that his supervisor effectively told him to proceed in a manner that would reduce risk substantially.
If as a result of this employee's actions, the company was unable to pay someone's salary, or had to allocate money from expansion to legal expenses, would you still suggest that the employee did "the right thing"?
At some point, probably around the time he was graduating from high school or college, somebody helped him put together his first resumé, and since it was naturally thin, they probably encouraged him to put in everything that might catch an employer's eye. He's probably never read anyone else's resumé.
I've seen this several times, and I've seen the opposite extreme, too. Somebody gets told early on "fit it on one page", and thinks that's how all resumés should be, forever. None of these people have any disabilities I'm conscious of, though in tech, a mild ASD would hardly be shocking. They've just been given advice that's either wrong or incomplete.
Meanwhile, I know one guy very well who does have a disability, and whose resumés have frequently been complimented. You'd have no way of knowing from them that he's in possession of a document from a psychologist that says PDD-NOS on it, and unless you know exactly what you're looking for, you're not going to notice when you meet him, either.
When it comes to employment matters, you can be sued by just about anyone for just about anything.
Opposing counsel can and will spin every fact that seems meaningless or innocuous. For example, the poster here indicates that he responded to the applicant through a personal email. This is not normal behavior, so you can bet a plaintiff's attorney would focus in on that and try to use it to suggest that the poster didn't response through his work email because he knew something wrong was being done.
Talk to any defense-side employment attorney and they'll all tell you the same thing: flimsy, baseless lawsuits are filed against employers every single day. But responding to a flimsy, baseless lawsuit costs money, and many of these lawsuits are settled because it's more cost-effective and expedient to pay to make the case go away.
Bottom line: taking action based on an unrealistic "you can't be liable..." attitude is extremely dangerous.
1) Cover letter. Explain why you want the job and why you're a good person for that job.
2) Contact Details & Education. Most relevant and recent should be top of the list.
3) Previous Work experience. List only relevant skills from each position.
Less is more. If they want more detail they will ask for it in the interview.
It's not a 300 word page filled with text.
Leaving space is also a good way for people to take notes on the CV (I've found that during my interviews the interviewer often used the CV like a checklist for asking their questions on my experience)
A year or so ago, I was applying for an internship at a small, local web dev shop that had some pretty cool projects in their portfolio. As the second interview was wrapping up, I had the impression that I wouldn't get the job. My default reaction would have been to simply ride out the rest of the interview, grab a coffee then move on, but for some reason I decided to ask them what their thoughts about me and my suitability for the position were.
And they told me.
They said that they would be completely candid, and asked if I wanted to proceed. I said of course. They then laid out all the areas that I had impressed them, as well as those that were red flags to them. Some of those were technical, and some were more about their general impression of me and my passion for the work.
Ultimately, I didn't get the job. I did, however, get to spend 20 minutes digging into depth on what potential employers viewed as my weaknesses and how I could go about addressing them, and that was perhaps even more valuable. They certainly weren't obliged to offer that advice, and I can't imagine they got much from it. Were we not all straight, white men in our mid 20s, I imagine they could have opened themselves up to a discrimination lawsuit. But, at the end of the day, they went out of their way to help me out and the advice stuck. I'll forever be grateful for that.
i'm certain this varies across companies, but in the startups i have worked for i've build very close relationships to many of my coworkers. i like to think there is a mutual trust established in that relationship. Part of that trust includes me looking out for their best interests, which i feel includes explaining to them what their next steps are to further their careers after they depart.
Just don't do that at firing time.
My attorney insisted I understand that when you fire anyone in California you must --you must-- say nothing pertaining to the reasons for the firing. I made the mistake of behaving like a human being once and it cost me thousands.
This happened because I told him I was letting him go because he did not sell anything. He (and the Labor Department folks, I'm sure) came up with some bullshit reason why I should pay him money anyway.
Had I given no reason whatsoever it is likely that there would have been less grounds to even bring forward a case. I'm summarizing something that is a bit more complex than the above but the overall idea is very much there.
Regrettably what you have to do is smile every day, take notes, document everything and, if the decision to fire is made, simply fire people without any explanation whatsoever. It goes something like this: "I'm sorry. I have to let you go. Here's your check." And walk them out immediately.
Oh, yes, if you can you should really consider having a witness to the firing. I was laid off twice in my life and both times there were three people in the room. Years later I would understand the reasons behind something that seemed weird and almost demeaning to me at the time.
I don't like having these kinds of relationships with people I work with but the legal framework in our state pretty much dictates you act this way for simple self preservation.
Frankly, I never understood why sales professionals don't just work for a good wage and that's it. The very engineers who build the products earn a decent wage, work long hours, are continuously studying and sharpening their skills and devoted years of schooling to even be able to get the job.
In my early exposure to sale folk I recoiled at the idea of paying someone commission because I felt that if one person got commissions then everyone involved in bringing the product to market was just as entitled to them. Of course, the problem is far more complicated than that and I quickly learned you simply could not hire a good sales person unless they saw some kind of pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. That's just the way that side of the universe has devolved and that's it.
One approach I have never tried is to have everyone on stock options. Pay the sales folks a good salary, not some crapy $30K/y base + commissions. The theory being that they are going to want to work just as hard to get the company to a level where their stock will make them a bundle of money. A lot of folks in sales are very mercenary in nature and end-up living from battle to battle, commission to commission. This sets-up a situation where it might actually be difficult to convince them to use a forward looking approach and forgo the usual deal in favor of stocks at some time in the future.
My experience got me to the point where I determined it was a far better idea to identify someone with no sales experience and bring him/her up into sales from within the company. No bad habits, better connection to the business, actually thankful for bringing them up to a level where they could earn real money and a whole host of other benefits. Once I tried that approach and had good results I never hired another sales person from the "real world" again.
Live and learn.
How does an unsuccessful salesman owe you several thousand dollars? And you are saying you withheld money at the time of firing.
Sales is precarious, but sales without a base is nasty.
I also notice in your language terms like "he, effectively, never earned". Basically, it sounds like this guy worked for you, didn't do so successfully and then you were forced by a court to pay him for his time, rather than you getting into trouble for letting him go.
I was going to treat you to a tune on the worlds tiniest violin, but I told the mice about your plight and now they are refusing to play it for you.
There are many approaches to paying a sales person. I've probably tried them all. This particular variant was one where you pay a base salary, say, $30K/year and, on top of that, a advance on unearned commissions. So, every week the sales guy is getting a check with two components, one he earned and one he is presumed to earn in the future.
In most agreements the sales person is liable for any commission that was not earned at the time of separation. If I paid you $5,000 in advanced commissions and you only earned $2,500 at the time of separation you owe me $2,500. That's money I was loaning you every week on the assumption that you would sell and actually earn it in the future.
This is standard stuff, nothing revolutionary here. I have to say that as an engineer dealing with sales people was one of the most difficult and gut wrenching things I've ever had to do. It took me years to understand the, sorry, sub-species. I've seen it all.
Anyhow, the fellow in question had been advanced commissions for nearly 90 days before I let him go. Yes, I was a sap back then. I actually kept thinking that this guy would wake up after my frequent pep talks and start selling. I let him float by all the way to the 90 day mark. When I laid him off I gave him a check equivalent to four weeks of his base pay and withheld (did not pay him) the commission advance I had been paying him all along. Why? He was gone. Like I said, he actually owed me money. And, again, I was nice. I was only supposed to pay him two weeks at the point I let him go. It was near the holidays and I decided to give him another couple of weeks to be helpful. Big mistake. This was during my early days of dealing with such folks and, true to what I said above, I was a total sap. BTW, I've never had problems with engineers, web developers, marketing people, production folks, not even the shipping dudes (other than the occasional swiping of wrenches and minor tools from the shop). No, it was always the sales guys that kept me up at night until I learned.
Here in California the labor department is decidedly anti-business. It was almost a foregone conclusion that his complaint would be decided on his favor. I was too naive and inexperienced to understand the game being played.
If anything, a justifiable reason as to why you are fired should be mandatory. You don't have to be a 'protected' minority to deserve a fair justification for being fired.
I'm all for the right of employers to fire who they want, but we can't expect employees to be responsible for how their actions impact the company and not expect the same in return.
He's lucky to have been a self-reliant young entrepreneur with probably other ways to make a livelihood. It could have turned very ugly had he been a father caring for a sick child without other resource than his job, all that because some nitwit didn't like his hairdo.
Duties and rights, not just one or the other.
That's what you got from this article? Yay for hypocrisy!
The right solution, in my opinion, is allow fire-at-will like we do in California, and have thorough unemployment benefits so that it's not worth making a fuss over.
The Zappos model [2] of $2,000 bonus for quitting one week in is great, I wish more places would use it.
[1] http://hrmagazine.be/fr/newsitem/la-france-au-top-des-cotisa...
[2] http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-09-16/why-zappos-of...
Some other states are more employer friendly, and others are less.
Explain nothing? It may not be worth the risk, but it's a pretty shitty thing to do to another human being.