Case Study: Too Good to Be True
As a regional recruiting manager for a large chemical company, one of your responsibilities is to hire experienced personnel for senior technical or management positions. In response to an ad that your office placed in a trade web site, you received the resume of a candidate who appeared to be extremely well qualified, possessing advanced degrees and significant experience. Subsequently, an interview was arranged with the candidate and this went quite well. Also, you checked the references that the candidate provided. The references were positive, reinforcing the impressions that you and other employees in your company had of the candidate.
However, just two months into the new position with your company, the employee is not working out. It is would also seem that the candidate and/or his references overstated his qualifications. Your company's probationary period ends in three weeks, and you have a decision to make. Do you terminate this person and prevent bigger problems in the future, or do you try salvaging the situation and working with him?
From professional meetings, you are on friendly terms with a former colleague who happens to work at your employee's former company and is familiar with his work. Something feels "wrong about this," but you decide to call your colleague and inquire about the seeming disconnect between the employee's performance and the reference provider's estimation of his abilities. In response, your former colleague confesses that there were problems with the candidate but that the company generally gives positive references because of the increasingly litigious environment in human resources.
You have some leeway since the employee is still within the probationary period and can be dismissed without extensive repercussions. However, to preclude future problems like this, what should you do?
Questions for Discussion:
1. What are the relevant Principles for Professional Conduct that may apply here?
Precept #2: Maintain a recruitment process that is fair and equitable to candidates and employing organizations.
Employment Professionals Principle #2: Employment professionals will know the recruitment and career development field as well as the industry and the employing organization that they represent, and work within a framework of professionally accepted recruiting, interviewing, and selection techniques.
2. Has something resembling this situation ever happened to you and to your organization?
3. Have you ever given "false positive" references to a prospective employer for someone for whom you were serving as a reference? If not "false positive," have you withheld negative information or reduced its "toxicity?" If so, why?
4. If your organization has a policy stipulating that, as reference providers, you only give the dates of employment of candidates to prospective employers, what is the rationale?
5. Would you ever consider ignoring your organization's policy on not providing reference information? In particular, what if the individual were a stellar candidate and would only benefit from your providing such information?
6. When faced with reference providers who only give dates of employment for candidates you're considering, what other ways can you attempt to gather information about a candidate's performance history or potential?
