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When Your Last Job/Company Was So Terrible You Can't Get Hired Again...

There's a lot of opinions about the companies around you - in your city, in your industry, etc.  When recruiting, some of these companies are net positive for candidates related to their ability to be the final candidate, some are net negative and most are neutral - because you've never heard of them in your life as an HR pro or recruiter.

"Wow, she worked at Google.  That is so cool"

"Ugh.  He worked at HealthSouth - didn't the FBI raid that place for fraud?"

"What the #### is Zenecom?"

Positive/Negative/Neutral.  Those are really the 3 choices related to the impact a current or past company has related to a candidate's prospects to get hired at your company, unless you're a complete ass and are skeptical of companies you've never heard of - in which case you should unsubscribe to this blog and/or delete this page from your history. Haspel

Eventually, even a negative perception of a company fades into something neutral over time, which is good for all the decent people that get branded by working at a company that goes through a big scandal, fraud or court proceeding.  HealthSouth DID get raided by the FBI one fateful day in the early 2000's.  The company survived and now no one blinks an eye at hiring someone with HealthSouth on their resume.  Even decent folks working at the Weinstein Company (true company, 150 employees, I'm sure not everyone there is answering the door at their office or hotel in an open bathrobe) will eventually be forgiving for working at a place where bad stuff happened.

Are there any companies or positions you can't recover from?  Probably, but they have to be really bad.  I found one - how about running a black-site prison where torture was the normal?

Oh boy - here we go - more from the Daily Beast:

"Long before Donald Trump ever nominated Gina Haspel to run the CIA, a memoir from a former CIA top attorney contained a line with the power to do serious damage to her chances.

Haspel’s informal nomination ran into immediate jeopardy last month over her 2002 supervision of the agency’s first secret black-site prison, located in Thailand, where two early detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, were tortured. (She directly ran the black site, though after Zubaydah’s most intense period of torture that year.)

But in his 2014 book, John Rizzo, a longtime senior CIA lawyer, indicated that Haspel was responsible for the incommunicado detention and torture not of two men, but of dozens, potentially. Former intelligence officials interviewed by The Daily Beast have portrayed Haspel’s experience similarly.

Haspel, if confirmed, would be the first director to rise from the CIA’s operational ranks with uninterrupted service since William Colby in 1973, which helps explain her depth of support from within the agency. But she’s also the first potential director from the CIA generation involved in post-9/11 torture, making her nomination inescapably a referendum on a dark period of history that the agency wants definitively resolved and human rights advocates say demands vastly more accountability than it’s received. 

Imagine that resume making into one of your searches.  "RAN BLACK SITE OPERATION DESIGNED TO MAXIMIZE INFO GATHERING FROM DETAINEES.  EXCEEDED ANNUAL MBO BY 39%. INCREASED EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT SCORES BY 17%"

The whole Haspel for the CIA job underscores the art of hiring the candidate who's operated in tough backgrounds.  We value people who have been in tough environments who have done tough things, but at some point they get branded to the extent we might not be able to hire them.  

You've ran an outsourced call center?  Hey, you might be the gal to help us get more accountability and rigor in our "customer success" center (code for call center with no discipline).

Wait, you spent 3 years in Bangladesh developing sources of information and you can't provide the address? 

We're going to have to get back to you about this position. [Says something generic about keeping resume in system if something good comes up]

 

Comments

staffing agencies

There might be fewer chances of getting hired again after terrible things happen from your last job. However, if you keep yourself humble and give them an honest opinion of what had happened there is still a chance that you will land in a job.

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