What can employers say about past employees...Follow

I've recently had a pretty bad experience with a new hire. While not top dog, I am second in command where I work. When my boss is out of town, I'm in charge. When he's busy, I make the decisions.

A couple months ago we hired a new electrical engineer to help out. We told him clearly what was to be expected, what he'd be doing, etc. He'd have to handle drawing machine schematics, wiring new machines and upgrades to existing machines, and troubleshooting/repairing existing machines. Pretty basic industrial electrician stuff. He seemed pretty enthusiastic about it.

Flash forward a week after he started working. We had our first major break down. Number one machine in the plant stops working, top priority to fix. We stay til about 8pm (3 hours over time) to get the machine running. The next morning, 8am rolls around, I look around... new hire is no where to be found. 9am, we call him. He says that all that overtime really did a number on his back and he had a hard time sleeping that night. Ok, what ever, he'll be in a little late? No, he just didn't show up at all that day.

Over the next month or so, we try to show him how things work, he doesn't seem to care. We have him repair simple things (stuff we give summer interns to do) and he does them wrong continuously, even after being shown how to do it right numerous times. We have him go over some old machines to update schematics, he spends days looking in the electrical panels, taking pictures, but in the end gets almost nothing done as far as updated prints goes.

Near the end of his second month, he starts missing days. No calls, just doesn't show up. He'd come in the next day with some excuse. Then last week he comes in on Monday. Then Tuesday doesn't show up. Then Wednesday doesn't show up. No show Thursday, No show Friday. By this time, the company policy is taking into effect. If you miss three days of work in a row without any attempt at notification, you are considered to have voluntarily abandoned your job. The following week, (this week), nothing. I contact a family member of his (a person I knew). He says "Oh, he's out of state on an interview. He said he gave his two weeks notice and quit". No... he just stopped showing up.

Now, I'm sure this person is not going to list us as a place of employment on their resume (seems he'd be stupid if he did). But in a case like this, if someone did contact me as a reference for this person... what could I legally say about them? I don't know what you are allowed to say about a past employee. I have many bad things that can be said about him, and they are all true. Since they are facts (not opinion based or how you feel about the person) can negative things be said about a person to their potential future employers?

Edited, Apr 12th 2012 10:10pm by TirithRR

Does you company not have an existing policy on this matter?

I know that there are ways you can state true, factual information abotu the employee, but I'm only an internet lawyer so I would be unable to provide you the nuances. As much as you may warn the next potential employer, it IS possible to ***** this up and wouldn't be worth that headache. Not worth taking chances.

Not that I'm aware of. We are a relatively small company that has seen some pretty crazy growth over the last 5-6 years (with a little hurt during the 2008 crash).

And I doubt I'll ever get contacted by anyone dealing with this person. I'm almost 100% certain that they won't even show this employment on their resume. The whole ordeal just got me curious about how, if at all, a past employer can warn future employers of truly bad employees.

You do have to be a bit careful about what you say, usually it is just yes or no if they worked for you before and whether or not you would hire them again. If you say he did something he can always claim he didn't and if he doesn't get the job due to it can claim slander and sue. Like Joph said say something like "Yes he did work here but he is not someone we would ever think about hiring again".

When giving a bad reference on someone, you need to ask the person asking questions of you to keep the questions to yes or no answers.

Our office is fairly relaxed in this regard, but it's still certainly expected that people will call in if they're absent. It might be codified in some way, but it's really just that people know what's expected of them, and we seem to hire pretty professional folk.

The fiance works retail at a saddlery store, though, and they have a real problem with this. The owner doesn't seem to be a good business manager, and is out in the field often. A lot of the employees seem to just not show up periodically, without calling in. If the owner is out, they have others sign them in to get paid, sometimes for a full 9:00-5:00 that they stayed home for. Seems like a real mess.

Edited, Apr 13th 2012 10:26am by Eske

My
Other deals with the personal stuff for the company we work for. I ran this question by her and she basically said you should not slander the person in any form. She also said if you do get a call request them to fax you the questions on paper with the company's info in the header. If they ate unable to do so, then stick with yes/no questions or watch how you word things. She said you never know who will try and get companies on slander charges by having a smooth talking friend call up and pretend to be asking about, but recording the convo waiting for the last employer to bash away.

I've run into a situation like this before. We only confirmed that the person worked for us and we gave the dates of employment (based on the paychecks). We always declined to speak about job performance other than whether the person was eligible to be re-hired.

Details plz. If it's a fun story anyway.

We have a strict no call no show policy here. If you are conscious, you are expected to at least send a text message if you're unable to be there on time. If you are late without notice, you will be sent home without pay for the day. If it happens with any regular frequency, you're out.

A single no show without an attempt of contact won't get you fired if you have a reasonable excuse and you were not incapacitated, but the second time it happens, you're gone.

As for the questions: The "eligible for rehire" is the big one. If the parting was sweet sorry, as it was when I was a supervisor at my first call center job because I was downsized, then the person is eligible for rehire and would probably be welcomed back given the opportunity. Or, if the person left the job on their own volition, they are usually eligible for rehire.

As your dude didn't provide the requisite two weeks notice, you can call him not eligible for rehire on that basis alone and be done with it.

Not so much, but I won't let that stop me.

Flew the guy up from Denver for the interview because he had worked for a fairly reputable person in the industry and his resume looked good. He showed up dressed like he had just woken up. We're pretty casual, and scientists don't usually sent fashion trends or anything, but you could at least button your shirt or something. First clue something was amiss...

We chatted for a while and while he seemed to know all the key topics we brought up, his answers were lacking any real depth. After he left we got on the phone to his old lab and talked to his boss. The guy put down he operated various instruments on his resume, but it turned out he never did more than maybe turn them on, or maybe put a sample in the tray. He was there 6 months as an intern type person a couple of days a week and mostly just shadowed people. So one of those, "no he didn't do that" "he wouldn't have touched that" "well he might have once..." "I'm sure he watched someone do that..." type of phone calls.

We have a policy of "Never hireing anyone with a first name that is the same as a major constellation" anymore at other work after one truely epic failure of hireing practices. This individual, "Orion" was hired as a workroom computer repair technician. Some workstation builds and repair, a bit of light facility cabling, drive image creation, etc. Seemed to know what he was doing in the interview, had a good reccommendation, so we hired him. The guy was a complete disaster. The first day in, he tears up the entire workroom cable infrastructure, which has worked flawlessly for the past 5 ish years, and decides to route it all into an IP KVM. Which might have been ok in theory, but it took 8 available computer repair bays and turned them into 1 repair bay. he also did this by jut routing large stacks of cable all over the workspaces, and then leaving it. When asked about it, he told his immidiate boss "oh, if you don't like how it looks, you can clean it up". His boss being a rather tolerant individual let that go. Next, he went through the available computer benchstock and decided to overclock them all. on air. With stock cooling fans. Needless to say, none of them survived very long, but they lasted long enough for about 15 or so computers to have come back into the shop for various reasons. Most of them were easy fixes, bad ram, bad power supply, etc. He declared each and every one of them unsalvageable and sent them to the surplus pile. He also deleted a bunch of fairly critical process files that were backed up, on theory that the replacement he was working on was going to work so much better someday. Good thing we had backups.Then he decided to go do some cableing at a remote facility, to "help". He drilled through an exterior wall with a half inch drillbit for a single network cable, didn't even caulk the hole, ran the bright yellow cable diagonalyl up a wall across a window opening, diagonally again across a roof, down to the switch, where he left an apperent 50 foot service loop for an 16 foot wide room, and instead of nicely coiling up the service loop. he tossed it all over the network gear like some sort of horrific cable spooling accident. After that, he came back, managed to **** off his boss even more, and got fired on the spot.

After all that, the worst part was the guy just wouldn't blow his damned nose! Every single day you would hear him talking, and then in mid sentance, this horrible <Snerrkkshshs!> sound of him inhaleing all the snot. Multiple times. I still have nightmares about it.

The best part was 3 months later, he actually put us down as a job reference, and they called. When asked if we would consider rehireing him, his former boss just laughed his *** off for about 3 minutes, then replied "No" and that was the end of that.

That wasn't the craziest person though. The best one was the guy who was using his work laptop to store the 5,000 pictures of his cats he had taken (not to mention all the games installed, on the laptop, at work, at a government facility with a monitored network that scans for installed software...) A few months after he left, we got a call from the police to be on the lookout for him because he had left a "suspicious package" at his mothers doorstep and was in hideing, and they thought he was going to come shoot us up or something. It turns out the package was a large bag of cat *****, and he just really hated his mother, according to the police follow up call.

I don't think Magi from here got a good reccommendation either...

I understood half of that, and it was enough.