1. Is it okay to check “off-book” references?
How do you feel about off-book references?
I work in higher ed, which is very small and notoriously bad about firing people. Most toxic situations are handled by getting the problematic employee to take another job. It’s generally known that a supervisor will give a sterling reference to someone needing to be pushed out.
Real example: I went to a meet-and-greet with a candidate for a middle management position and realized I knew them from a previous position. While I was there, he was known to yell at his reports, “dated” at least one student employee, and had to be assigned a “shadow chair” to attend his unit meetings to make sure he behaved. Luckily for us, he withdrew as he had taken another offer — where, I heard from colleagues over there, he was awful. Half his staff quit in six months.
I talked to the search committee chair and they said his references all spoke highly of him. I asked why the committee hadn’t asked me (our shared workplace was common knowledge), and was reminded that our hiring training said you could only talk to provided references, even if you personally know another connection. I asked our HR about this and they said a background check would reveal any real problems.
In an ideal world, candidates would be judged by their merits and there would be documentation of any problems, revealed in a background check. But in a world where fear of being sued seems to be the #1 principle, and it an be incredibly damaging to an institution if you make a bad hire, it seems essential to do a bit more investigating. What do you think?
If you personally know people who have worked with the candidate, and whose judgment you trust, of course you should be able to ask them what their experience was like.
It becomes clearer when you put it in more personal terms: if you were considering hiring a nanny to take care of your children (i.e., something with high stakes to you personally) and realized she had worked for a trusted friend, is there any world in which you wouldn’t ask your friend for her thoughts? A discreet conversation with someone whose judgment you respect and whose filters and biases you have some experience with — as opposed to a reference you don’t know at all — is hugely valuable. Your HR department is hamstringing you and your colleagues, and it’s a bad policy (and an unrealistic one too).
Related:
secrets of a reference-checker
2. My boss contacted my new job behind my back to try to renegotiate my start date
I recently resigned from a position at a large organization, gave the required notice, and have a signed contract with my new employer.
My manager asked whether I could delay my new start date to help with the handover. I told him I had already asked my new employer about flexibility in start date and they held firm on the agreed timing.
I later learned that he had independently contacted the external recruiter running the process and asked her to seek additional time for me to provide a handover. He did this without telling me. (I’m in a niche space, and the recruiter I worked with has placed everyone on this team for the past 10+ years. The recruiter had previously told me that she and my boss know each other.)
A few days later, my new boss’s boss called to welcome me to the organization. During the call, she specifically asked how long my contractual notice period was. As my start date had already been agreed on, the question struck me as unusual. I don’t know whether my manager’s request had made its way to her, so I don’t want to assume a connection, but the timing made me uncomfortable and concerned that a resourcing issue at my current employer was spilling over into my relationship with my new one.
Following my resignation, my skip manager called a meeting to ask if there were any issues in the team. When I raised what had happened, she seemed relatively unfazed and said she had seen managers contact recruiters in situations like this before. Her view was essentially that my manager should have asked me first and that I should confront him directly about this issue. That surprised me, as my instinct is that he shouldn’t have independently tried to reopen the issue at all.
Am I applying an unusually strict boundary here? Is it actually normal for a manager to contact a departing employee’s recruiter in circumstances like this?
No, it’s not normal! Your manager wildly overstepped.
You get to make your own decisions about when your last day will be, and your negotiations about your start date with a new job are between you and the new company. At most, your current manager could say something to you like, “Is there any chance you could stay until the 12th? It would help us a lot because of X, but I understand if it’s not possible.” Cutting you out completely and trying to reach the new company directly is a huge overreach.
You didn’t say how the recruiter responded when your boss contacted her, but hopefully she shut it down and said that was something she could only discuss with you and your new employer.
3. What do I say if I resign mid-promotion?
I’ve been at my job for six years, during which my role has substantially changed. The workload is much higher, and there are fewer of the things I enjoy. I stayed because I like my coworkers, still like some components of the work, and needed the leave and health care.
This time last year, I was starting to look for a new job because of the workload issues. But my grandboss asked if I’d be willing to take on a new role after a director (one of several I report to) retires at the end of 2026. In this new role I’d be supervising a newer three-person program.
It wouldn’t be a full promotion to my boss’s level, but it would be an intermediate step and pay bump. It’s not quite enough for full-time, so I’d keep “five or so” of my current projects to fill in any extra time. Then as the program grew, I’d drop those and focus on it full-time.
This seemed ideal: keep the coworkers I like and the great benefits, but avoid burnout. So I accepted and negotiated a decent raise to start when I took over in Q3. They announced this plan in January, and we had plans for a gradual transition of my current projects to others. But almost none of my workload has been shifted, because no one has capacity. They claim to be trying to hire but “can’t find anyone.” I’ve been trying to muscle through to get to the finish line, but it’s been tough. Project counts are high and morale is low throughout the office.
Then, six weeks ago, my grandboss informed me that my current work performance is poor. This is true but also not unexpected with this workload (per outside sources). Oh, and by the way, the new role will actually involve keeping half of my current projects — I’d keep (at least) 30, not five. They’re hiring a new person for me to supervise too. So this means the reasonable workload job I stayed for is now 50 hours/week at best, and lots of the work I dislike.
This is the second major switch of a role once I’d agreed, and the delivery is typical of management, and even if they agree to make changes, I just don’t trust their word anymore. So I started looking and am in the process of interviewing somewhere that would be a much better fit.
My main concern is leaving when I’ve agreed to or just started this new role. In a perfect world, I’d be able to give notice before my training starts, but that depends on other companies’ speed of hiring. And regardless of when I leave, they’ve still been planning on me taking over this new role for a year now. There is not an obvious replacement among my coworkers in the new role, especially with the workload issues. And asking not to take over after discussing it for a year feels like a dead giveaway I’m looking to leave. Is there any graceful way to leave? If it burns the bridge, it burns the bridge, but I’d rather minimize the flames if I can.
You can just resign when you’re ready to leave, regardless of the timing. This isn’t a situation where you’re backing out of an agreement — they are the ones who already backed out of the agreement. They’ve switched the job from five projects to 30 (!) and gave you a wildly different workload than the one you thought you’d be taking on. They’ve also told you that you’re doing a bad job with your current workload and, without lowing it, I’m not sure what they’re thinking will happen once you make the switch.
When you resign, you can just say that you know the timing isn’t ideal but this opportunity fell in your lap and isn’t one you can pass up. This stuff happens! People leave jobs when things were being planned around them all the time; your employer may not be thrilled, but you’re not wrong to do it and they’ll make do. (Alternately, you could point out that the job on offer from them changed significantly from the one you’d agreed to originally, but I don’t think you even need to go into that.)
4. I’m being laid off while pregnant
I recently found out my company of 10 years is laying me off on 12/31. My severance, which starts to pay out in January, covers 20 weeks of my current salary, meaning I can finish out my job in December and be paid through most of May 2027, at which point I’m eligible for unemployment, roughly a quarter of my current salary. It’s not a bad runway! Except for one thing — I am pregnant and due in February.
Do I try to find a job now, knowing I would be 4+ months pregnant when I started, and forgo the severance offered by my current company (they will not give me severance if I don’t stay through December 31)? This would leave me without FMLA coverage while working a new job, and the possibility I could only take six weeks of disability postpartum, depending on a new employer’s generosity. Telling a new employer I will have to take leave in five months or less could also start me off on the wrong foot, and for this reason I am hesitant to use any networking connections to get a job while pregnant.
Do I finish the year and collect severance? The severance would last for ~14 weeks after my baby is born, but I would have to job search while postpartum which seems like an uphill battle, and mentors in my industry have warned me against a resume gap, which I would have starting in January. Even if I could explain away the gap verbally, it would still appear on my resume and I fear it would get in the way of getting interviews. Oh, also, I now really dislike my job.
Is there a clear answer? Or a third option I’m not considering?
I’m always a fan of giving yourself the most options you can. In this case, that would mean starting a search now and assessing any offers individually. You might get an offer good enough that it warrants foregoing the severance from your current job, or you might decide you want the security of a certain offer, even if it means giving up the severance. And you can find out what the offering employer will provide as far as maternity leave and factor that in.
As for interviewing while pregnant — it’s illegal for employers to consider your pregnancy in assessing your candidacy, and explaining you’ll need leave in five months or less will not start you off on the wrong foot with any decent employer. It’s a thing that happens when employing humans. (On a practical level, it tends to faze larger employers much less than smaller ones, so you might particularly look at larger companies.)
Related:
when should I tell my interviewer I’m pregnant?
is it dishonest not to disclose you’re pregnant when you’re interviewing?