Unrelated to the validity of this advice: it's kind of sad that our society has evolved legal structures that make it prohibitively risky to tell another human being why you're taking an action against them.
Hmm... what if you could have an employee sign a release as a precondition of being told why they were fired?
It is a sad statement, made all the more so when you have an experience that bucks the trend.
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.
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.
You can't be liable for a disability you don't know about, and I wouldn't assume he has one.
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.
> You can't be liable for a disability you don't know about, and I wouldn't assume he has one.
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.
All mine has is name / address, etc followed by course studied and the relevant topics studied during that course.
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)
I'm curious about your comment "but I'm sure we could get sued if the strangeness was due to a disability." If the possibility that the candidate's "strangeness" was due to some sort of disability crossed your mind, how did you justify putting your employer at risk of a lawsuit by communicating with the candidate, particularly when your superior had directed you to ignore his submission?
Doing the right thing is worth taking a little risk. As a side note, some people send out a crap resume while on unemployment so they don't get interviews. In theory you need to look for work, but if you have a fair amount of savings and want to spend the summer surfing then it's a 'safe' way around the rules.
> Doing the right thing is worth taking a little risk.
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"?
So it's ethical to disobey instructions from your superior and take an action that could negatively affect your employer and the other people it employs? That's not "ethics". That's an unwillingness to make a difficult decision (leave your job if you truly believe that you have been asked to take an unethical action).
Well, we have laws in place to protect people against discrimination. Unfortunately, when people's backs are to the wall and they lose their jobs, some like to make up all sorts of things to make a few bucks.
Not all societies do this. New Zealand seems to be headed to a blame based system, but our healthcare system, while far from perfect has a fairly good part called the accident compensation corporation. It's no fault, pays out for accidents, prevents lawsuits and helps get to the bottom of issues constructively, without a defensive mask. It has had rough times of late unfortunately.
Hmm... what if you could have an employee sign a release as a precondition of being told why they were fired?