Many years ago, I posted my resume on a job site to see what my options were. An enterprising recruiter called my current (at the time) workplace asking if they'd need help filling the position I might be leaving.
To make his pitch, he asked to speak to the "hiring manager", which happened to be me. He quickly hung up.
Once he fired a guy for not working on his house...that employee was hired as help desk. Thankfully I passed all my interviews and they called him right after I was almost guaranteed to get the position. Took a few insults from the guy, but haven't heard anything from him since I left thankfully.
Every time someone has a casual "Well, you can just sue them" answer to being wronged, they forget that the court system (at least in the US) is inaccessible unless you're rich and richer than your opponent. If my employer does something wrong to me, like wage theft, fraud, harassment, discrimination, it doesn't matter that I can sue them in theory. In practice, it's me and my $5,000 in life savings vs. 100 corporate attorneys working at a $N billion company who will inundate you with paperwork and motions and procedural tricks. Not to mention, if you sue them, they will fire you in retaliation (which is also probably illegal) and may even go so far as informally blacklisting you in your industry. So you're giving up your time, your life savings, likely going into debt, and giving up your future employability, just to pit your one already over-worked attorney vs. their army. Good luck.
That doesn't mean that suing is easy or cheap, but only that things are way more balanced than your comment makes it look like.
One attorney may be all you need if the evidence is grossly in your favor. No point denying yourself the opportunity, especially if you can afford the consultation fees.
If its a difficult case, then a good lawyer will tell you ahead of time that they don't think they can win and that you probably shouldn't pursue the case. If its borderline, they'll probably accept the case but you gotta pay them.
If its ridiculously easy, they'll take the case for free on their dime / contingency (because they're so confident they're gonna win).
Vis a vi the original question,
"I never said that. Do you have a recording?"
Especially when you get the follow up questions, and find out HR left contemporaneous notes in their HRIS tool, which corroborate the story.
Remember that the standard for a civil suit is not “beyond a reasonable doubt”, but “more likely than not”. I really don’t think you’d need a recording to win that case.
Employees with grievances sue companies all the time, because it works for them.
Companies may have lots of money, but that doesn't mean they want to burn it. They'll often settle even frivolous lawsuits because it is cheaper than litigating.
On "slam dunk" cases, some lawyers will work for small retainer and large cut of settlement. You no longer have to spend time chasing. You just supply lawyer with info when requested.
In a case like this, your lawyer would send their lawyer a letter, their lawyer would tell them they’re going to lose, and you’d negotiate a settlement.
Consider that is exactly what bigCorp wants to you to feel. With that in mind, your feeling of daunt is doing exactly what the bigCorp? So do something for yourself and not in bigCorp's favor, and get over it and do what's right.
Trust me I do what I can where I can!
Small claims, yes. District court and above, not always. Winning the case? Even harder. Trying to a get any lawyer on contingency against deeper pockets is not practical 99% of the time.
Suing a major corp with cause though? They’re going to spend $10,000 just to respond. If you have any basis for your suit whatsoever, they’re going to settle. See: almost every patent lawsuit. A corporation’s in-house counsel is there to avoid getting sued. Once you sue them, they need to get outside counsel involved and the costs mount very, very quickly. It’s just not worth it.
I would talk to a lawyer before assuming this kind of thing. In my experience (having tried), I do not.
> Once you sue them, they need to get outside counsel involved and the costs mount very, very quickly.
The retainers are already paid for or insurance covers that. The sentiments (eg inefficacy of David vs Goliath) are built up over common experiences, not simple misunderstandings of how a case is likely to proceed.
Reputation is important! It can be the difference between one company having complete control over your future, and being able to choose to do what you want.
"Would you hire this person again?" We get a 99% answer rate on that question.
The actual answer HR will give you, the magic words are ‘are they eligible for rehire’.
"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.
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.
Heck I don't even update my LinkedIn until a year or more after I move companies. I do update it way before I might want to jump ship again, just like the "Looking for work" flag. My current employer's HR department will get no direct signal that I'm actually looking if I can avoid it. I'd go as far as not using LinkedIn functionality to apply to something. For all I know LinkedIn provides a paid for service to my current employer that notifies them, that I'm interviewing.
Eventually I got a call about my friend, and I discussed my friend and my experience working with him. But at some point the caller asked me about myself, and if I was interested in other positions.
This turned out to be a recruiter (who was placing my friend), but he was not interested in my friend - he recruiting from the reference list.
ugh.
Apart from this reference nonsense asked right in the first form - refused of course leading to exclusion by some automation immediately - I met with ability test of rapid finance related calculations - not enought time to complete all and only tests how good I am in finance tests having a non-relaistic idealistic scenario as a context - for an engineering position - which then "will be the baseline for promotion decisions" later. Refused to take the test, then I was refused too. All this after successful engineering interviews and conceptual agreement on particulars (salary, location of work, start date).
Not remembering I got refused and calling me with the same kind of position in couple of weeks, greeting me with "you have experience that fits perfectly" just to offer me something require experience I don't have so obviously not reading the long forms they mandate to fill in down do the last dot, and similar clue and careless aproaches are what I experienced.
There are dozen or (famous in their field) organizations I could discourage people from applying to due to the dumb procedures even on the most elementary level. Frightening what could go on there concerning organization and administrative tasks.
All have very cutting edge approaches to forming a perfect work environment that they consider the utmost importance if you look at their career pages with explosively happy all young and dynamic and diverse and smart and pretty people. They are full of bulls..t and they know that (or hopelessly clueless which is equally frightening).
The only benefit is If they sign I can use customer names instead of generic descriptions (e.g. "large bank" or "telcom provider") and I can show product interfaces.
Personally I thought an optional NDA strikes a good balance, but I've been surprised at how many candidates just sign NDAs automatically. We communicate that it otherwise has no bearing on their application but I suspect some believe that it'll increase their odds.
Enforcing an NDA is more difficult then a lot of people think. If you have a legal department you can threaten to sue an individual for anything including breach of an NDA and in that sense it can be effective. But the only times an NDA has been enforced in my working experience is when there is real theft of intellectual property and you don't need an NDA to prevail in that situation.
https://www.acc.com/resource-library/issues-enforcing-nondis...
I understand that finding people who do what I do is hard, but that scenario made me sick to my stomach.
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