the first person to accept the offer gets hired, reference checker asked how much sick leave an employee used, and more

[ResidentialBusiness]

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. Offering a job to multiple people and giving it to the first one who accepts

Decades ago, in the early 2000s, my friend was offered an assistant professor position at a university. She was told that the same job was being offered to several other candidates too, and that only the first person to accept the offer would be hired. Presumably as soon as one person accepted, the other offers would be withdrawn.

I have never seen this practice anywhere else. This makes me curious: is this legal? (We are in the U.S.) What do you think of employers doing this? What advice would you give someone who gets an offer like this?

It’s legal. It’s astonishingly terrible, though! First, it’s a crappy way to treat candidates, who deserve time to think over an offer and make sure it’s the right decision for them and not face pressure to beat everyone else to say yes. Second, good employers want new hires to have had time to mull over the offer so they’re confident in their decision (and thus less likely to cut and run soon after starting). Third, it implies that willingness to jump at the job is more important than who the strongest candidate actually is. Fourth, it’s just weirdly unnecessary. If there’s time pressure for making the hire, you can offer the job to your top candidate and explain the situation; you don’t need to turn it into the Hunger Games.

Related:
company offered me a job but wants an answer the same day

2. Reference checker asked how much sick leave an employee used

What do you do when a reference checker asks you something you don’t believe in providing?

I recently received an email regarding a reference for a former direct report. She was an excellent employee, and I was happy to provide it. They provided a list of questions via email and asked me to respond in kind. One of the questions was, “How many sick days leave has she taken during her employment?”

I don’t think that’s appropriate information to provide. I have no idea if it’s legal — I’m in the U.S. and the new company is in the UK — but regardless, I don’t believe an employee’s usage of sick leave should impact their reference or their hireability. (And if it does, in workload or reliability, then that’ll show up in the rest of the reference, so it’s still unnecessary.)

In this case, I was pressed for time, so I wrote: “An appropriate number, within allowable sick leave. I do not have exact figures.” (Which is true!) I think if it had been a phone reference, I would have been able to push back more clearly, but with an email, I wasn’t sure what else to do. Was that a reasonable response? Is there a better way to communicate “I will not help you fish for ways to not hire people who have human bodies and get sick sometimes”?

Yeah, that’s a gross question. As you say, there are far better ways to get at whether someone was a reliable, productive employee — by asking about their actual work, not digging into their sick leave and thus their health. It’s also interesting that they didn’t ask about attendance in general, but about sick leave in particular.

Your response was perfect.

Also, while I can’t speak to UK law, in the U.S. that’s not a question any reference checkers should be asking, because it’s too likely to elicit information about a disability in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

3. My boss is pretending to answer emails as my coworker who no longer works here

One of my coworkers, Jack, recently left the company. Rather than setting up an automatic response to emails that are sent to Jack, his boss has all Jack’s emails automatically forwarded to him.

Jack’s boss then responds to the emails as Jack (not just from Jack’s account — he signs off with things like “Thanks! -Jack”). I understand that the email account belongs to the company, not Jack, but am I wrong to think this is strange and might look bad to a client who receives an email from “Jack” only to learn that he’s been gone for months?

What! You are not wrong in your take at all.

If his boss wasn’t signing off as Jack, I’d give him the benefit of the doubt and figure he just found it easier to answer from Jack’s account (and was maybe a little technologically inept so didn’t realize there are better ways of handling it). But the fact that he’s signing off with Jack’s name is extremely weird and risks blowing up the trust of any client who finds out it wasn’t actually Jack who has been emailing him (at least, assuming this is the sort of work where clients have a relationship with Jack and aren’t just sending one-off questions to be answered by anonymous, interchangeable strangers).

Related:
my company pretends that former employees still work here

4. My office keeps forgetting my birthday, while they go all-out for others

I do outreach in a nonprofit organization, which requires me to travel between three locations in the county. At one location, staff birthdays are loudly recognized with balloons, cards, desserts, the works … except for mine. It has been overlooked for seven years. I talked to the manager of that location last year about it and her reasoning was that since my birthday is right before Christmas, that it’s easy to overlook. So, she put my birthday on the staff calendar.

However, as you can probably guess, my birthday was just forgotten again. There are four people at this location and I have worked there longer than all of them except one person. I work at that location two days a week with just as many hours as two of the other staff members there. I am starting to feel really resentful and hurt that I am not as important or appreciated as the other staff, just because my birthday falls before a major holiday. Am I reading too much into this issue and should I just let it go? Do you think it’s worth it to bring it up again to the manager of that location?

I think you are probably reading too much into it, but that you don’t need to let it go! I do think it’s probably true that your birthday is getting overlooked because it’s right before Christmas and a lot of people are out then. It’s very unlikely that it’s personal — especially if your coworkers are generally friendly people. You should let it go in the sense of “you shouldn’t keep stewing about it” (to the extent that that’s within your control), but you absolutely can and should point out to your manager that it happened again this year and that it doesn’t feel great, especially when you’d specifically raised it ahead of time.

However, since it’s important to you, it also makes sense to change what you do this year! At the start of December, why not approach your manager and say, “Since it’s slipped through the cracks in the past, I was hoping we could plan our normal birthday stuff for my birthday this year. It’s on (date).”

5. I’m contributing a substantial portion of my team’s charitable goal

My organization, like many, has an annual appeal for charity where employees can pledge as little as $1 per pay period (or as much as the fairly generous maximum) to charities of their choosing. The website lists thousands of charitable organizations covering almost any issue area that one could imagine. I have been contributing for several years and have increased my contribution each year along with my salary. An off-site administrator manages the campaign and distributes the funds and relays back an aggregate report on how much our organization has contributed. Based on that report, the org has had an overall pledge goal each year that we’ve routinely met. So far, so good.

However, over the past few years, the team has been highlighting the progress towards the goal and the final total, and it’s clear that my pledge is a substantial part of each annual total for the entire organization. We are a small-to-medium organization so it’s not surprising that a few people could make a big difference, but my pledge is around 10% of the organization’s pledged total (or more!). I am well aware that many people have good reasons not to contribute to this particular appeal (they have financial constraints on giving, they have charities to which they prefer to give directly, they believe in direct mutual aid or in person-volunteering instead, etc.), and I would never consider it my business to press others to contribute, but it is unnerving to see just how much my single pledge means for the organization meeting this annual challenge.

I am not currently planning to leave, but obviously employment across many sectors is in flux and I can’t predict the future. What, if any, responsibility would I have to share with the staffers who manage this campaign for my organization if I did leave? I am wondering if they’d even set a different pledge goal entirely if they knew my single pledge would no longer be included in the total.

You have zero responsibility to give the campaign organizers any heads-up when you start thinking about leaving! They can see who contributes what, and they are definitely aware that any of their top givers could leave at any time, or could change their giving patterns. That’s built into the system. They should already be looking at the fact that a single employee is providing 10% of their funds and trying to find ways to balance that out.

In any case, if you leave, they will either not meet their goal that year or they will adjust it or they’ll come up with some other plan to meet the goal. It’s not a big deal. (I mean, it might be a big-ish deal to the person charged with organizing the campaign — which ultimately is about PR for your company — but it’s not the sort of big deal where you’d owe anyone any special warning.)

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