My Job Offer Was Rescinded After I’d Given Notice
thecut.com
thecut.com
> I simply told the HR person that my previous boss and I didn’t have a good relationship, and that I could not rely on her for a reference.
If a company presses for a reference from your current employer and you don’t think it would help, simply decline. Most people can point to non-solicit clauses in their employment contracts that disallow employees from recruiting or facilitating employees from being hired away from the company.
Whatever you do, don’t volunteer information that you were not in the good graces of your manager. That’s a warning sign that something might have been wrong or that the employee is problematic.
Offer alternative references or give excuses that the reference isn’t allowed due to non-solicit. But don’t volunteer an implied negative reference on behalf of the person most recently familiar with your work performance.
This specific story doesn’t entirely make sense, though. If the employee already quit their previous job and had an offer that was contingent upon a reference from the previous manager then it doesn’t make sense to continue to withhold the reference. Withholding the reference is the only 100% way to lose the job offer. They should have at least had a conversation with the previous manager and asked for a good reference for a non-zero chance that the manager would help them out. It doesn’t make sense to choose the only guaranteed option to lose the job offer.
There's no reason to risk your current job until the new job is secured.
Any employer that expects otherwise should be avoided at all costs. Admittedly, even this is not entirely full-proof, but it is the bare minimum.
The point I want to make here is, that no one on the team had the balls to tell me that they are unhappy with my performance and instead told my boss very late. I did not have a chance to improve or change anything. It can happen to anyone and any time.
In hindsight this is still the best thing that could have happened to me.
How can you commit to a start date if you don't give notice?
It's polite to give at least two weeks notice, but to meet that social norm you just need to only agree to start dates at least 2 weeks into the future. (And if you want to give more than 2 weeks notice... well... that just means you need to shift your start date farther).
If you leaving suddenly wouldn't cost society any more than you getting sick suddenly, I don't think the norm does any good. That's true of jobs where you're a replaceable cog (like a clerk at a store) with no need to transfer knowledge.
On the other hand if you're at a job where you have long lasting context, which it is painful to lose, it would be bad for society to have it be the norm that you quit without transferring that knowledge.
I don't think that this norm needs to be tied to the norm about how you're compensated (provided that you are fairly compensated, but if you're not, you shouldn't have taken the job in the first place), whether that compensation includes notice when you're being fired, or not, seems irrelevant to whether or not it should be considered your responsibility to give notice. The two situations are only superficially similar.
But I also think this misses the point, plenty of people do plenty of rude things when they win the lottery (so it's not a good barometer for what is polite), and the circumstances are substantially different when you're leaving because you now have "f u money" rather than leaving because you're going to do the same thing for a different employer (so it's not a analogous situation).
Circumstances where I wouldn't give advanced notice are cases where I felt I was being mistreated (being rude is worth leaving earlier, plus I have minimal sympathy), or there was an opportunity that really couldn't wait (being rude is sometimes worthwhile - it's a balancing act).
I imagine your contract is binding (though I'm no lawyer and it may depend jurisdiction), it's just not a common term in my experience/the experience of people I know.
Have the new company commit to a start date in 30+ days, and then give the notice.
Companies hiring can legally ask for some really personally risky actions. And some will.
You should never assume they have your best interests at heart. You can push back against this, and there's a respectful, reasonable way to do that in the process.
Broadly, this is the reason boxing bouts begin with "Protect yourself at all times." Because there's no taking back a sucker punch after the bell that dropped you to the mat.
Ultimately, the best advice I'd give would be to prepare your moves, so as to avoid putting your future self in bad, must-act situations. Be someone who can afford to pass on an offer, if the company acts unreasonably, versus someone who has to say yes to requests like this.
That was rough. He wound up starting an advertising circular type thing and got along OK. Writers and publishers... it's a compulsion.
And in that case "Sue the new owners" wasn't gonna work anyway, they were the family that owned the rest of the county. The paper had been the effort of one of their strays and was being ended with prejudice. The story was quite entertaining, in a squalid local swamp politics way.
Must say I was glad that I grit my teeth and refused to put in my notice at my other job. The schadenfreude and relief at having dodged a massive bullet really kicked in when I found out who was the "more qualified candidate" eight months down the line at a local DevOps days.
Also knows as "the candidate we can pay less"
No doubt I’m butchering how it works, but basically one can sue for “damages” incurred due to someone not following through on a promise or implied agreement. Contract not always required, just reasonable actions based on a reasonable expectation of someone following through.
A good example might be a neighbor agreeing to build a fence if you purchase the wood. You buy it, they back out and you can’t return it.
https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/at-will-e...
Again, it’s all shades of gray and likely heavily depends on your state of employment, but I’m not sure there are too many companies that would like to waste tens of thousands on lawyers when you bring a case.
At a minimum you might get some token payment to make you go away that helps cover some of the costs incurred.
Obviously an employment lawyer would be the best to determine if that works in your particular situation.
The article said the final offer was contingency offer. Pretty confident that if I leave a job to take another based on offer with a contingency that I have no control over…the only person at fault if I end up with no job is me.
To me, that just shows that the new employer does not value people. Employees are just object to be managed.
Also, its hard in the US to get a legit work contract an an employee - its all "at will" labor. If you really a solid guarantee, become a 1099 contractor and get a contract for services, where there are the three main components - an offer of payment, an offer to supply labor and a signed agreement by both parties.
Why would someone sign something like this? or at least be aware that it's a risk
If that's the way they play it, my plan if I get a new job is to simply ghost my current one.
Most sensible companies these days will only do one of the following:
(a) Give no reference; or
(b) Give a factual reference (i.e. dates employed, job role(s) and, erm... that's it).
Seems like anticompetitive behavior to me.
There was more flexibilty for reference letters written for summer interns but that was a more informal process.
2 years down the line imagine you're in line for your dream job. Manager's about to pull the trigger, and they see that Joe also worked with you at Acme Consulting.
'Hey Joe, we're thinking of hiring giantg, what's your thoughts?'
'giantg? Yeah he was good, but then one day he just didn't turn up for work. Not sure what he did...'
The important part here is that if my company tells my old coworkers why I left or the circumstances around it, that would be a violation of employee privacy and a violation of their own policies. Lawyer please.
And it's not about your team it's everyone in your company. Plus potentially a bunch of their friends they mention the story to.
"Hey Joe, didn't you tell me about a guy called Giant who just disappeared one day when you worked at Acme? Was it Giant G?"
"Yeah, it was, why?"
"Oh, he's popped up as a potential hire, I'll tell HR to nix him"
I guess it really depends on the size of your local market, but in my area I've bumped into multiple people more than once across jobs/contracts/meetups/etc.
Waste what money? If it's a good case, then it would be handled on a contingent basis.
Frankly, I'm tired off all the BS prestige and reputation. I have plenty of people that have a high opinion of me and that wouldn't change with this scenario. People who did find out would message me to ask what happened. I actually ran this scenario by a friend at the company and they said it makes sense and they would do the same thing. It's stupid that promotions and hiring is all about backroom deals and bias.
I understand that it can be useful input to a hiring decision, but there are surely better ways to obtain that validation.
Addition: It is similar to making it a requirement to own a university degree for a senior dev position. There are enough devs out there with many years of experience.
I don't have one. Never have, and neither has my wife.
When you're not explicitly working as a contractor, it's quite common in the US to have no explicit contract of employment. You're hired, you're on the payroll, you have a job description, but the only things governing your relationship with your employer are the policies of whoever hired you and whatever laws are relevant to where you and they are.
And no, contrary to popular belief, attorneys don’t always take good cases on contingency, especially one that could drag on a while. Why wait 2-12 years for a fat payday, no matter how sure a thing?
Funny enough, one of my coworkers from previous job did what the author did, he lost both jobs, so he sued both. I don't know the outcome (NDA), but he did managed to get settlement from my old company.
How common are these in tech in the US?
If they were commonplace in London I am pretty sure the candidate pool would be slashed by about 95%
I’ve not had to get one since joining “the tech industry”, but my family members who are more traditionally employed all have them every time they switch jobs and are at least theoretically subject to random testing - including those working at the C-level of very large companies.
Also, my understanding of the drug test I took isn't about cannabis, but more on the hard drugs.
It was more common up to about 8 years ago and then just pretty much faded overnight to my recall.
Personally having just gone through a job search, I wanted to be transparent and when asked did tell companies that I was interviewing with a number of places- ok, totally reasonable. Then as things played out, I made it through the process with one company, while the rest said no after some misadventures in maximum binary tree depth.
The one company that liked me, in good faith, asked about the interviews with other companies, so I just said "You're my top choice currently" not wanting to give some negative signal that I couldn't cut it with the others, but also not wanting to seem like I was just playing hardball.
IMO, I wouldn't consider this person "my previous boss" and just provide a reference from a previous employer.
I wonder how long they worked together? Was it a few weeks, months, or years?
I wouldn’t take it as though the previous manager gave them pause, however, people come and go and good managers manage that.
It’s far more likely that HR was disconnected from the people actually making the decision and did a piss poor job of being a responsible HR department. HR is never your friend though, HR is internal management consulting and you should never forget that when you are not the person who asked them to consult.
Most of these "contracts" are just one page documents saying the company makes the rules and can change them at any time with or without notice, that they can terminate or lay you off at any time for any reason (at-will states).
But to me, the real red flag of this story was the offer. That the hiring company had a policy like that, should have been a “thanks for the offer, but I think now’s not quite the right time, check back in the future” moment.
There should be some kind of retaliation-impossible, big-money-and-censorship-immune-by-design employer review site out there for people to talk about this kind of stuff. I confess I don’t know how to insulate against those threat models while keeping the trash out and establishing/maintaining credibility…
Ideas welcome! :-)
How can you get a good reference from the employer you just left? There is this surrealist idea of work ethics where the employer would say that John was great and we don't mind he left us in the middle of a project.
I was asked once by a US company for references, gave a few good friends who said that I was the next Elon Musk combined with Einstein, and probably Peace Nobel Prize winner. And that I had this terrible flaw of working my ass off for my company. I passed with flying colors
I am glad that with everything wrong we have on France, at least we do not go through this madness.