Is there a good way to answer that without looking terrible? I was fired after 4 years due to politics but I know it's terrible form to bad mouth your old boss at all. So I'm left either looking like an ass for badmouthing my old boss or looking like a terrible employee that must have been fired for a reason.
Posted Sep 2, 2010, 12:27 AM UTC
How would a prospective employer know you were fired in the first place?
Well they see the most recent thing on your resume had an end date. So they are going to ask and you know they will call your old employer. I dunno maybe I'm just paranoid but I'm pretty sure they can tell people checking your references that you were dismissed and did not quit or get laid off at the very least. .
Don't bet on it. At least in America, employers are generally very careful nowadays about letting on about any reason someone has left their employ. You can get yourself into an awful lot of trouble very quickly if you tell anyone (including your now former co-workers) anything about why you have left, whether if reflects poorly on you or not.
I've been fired from jobs in my life. Not once did it affect me negatively later, mostly because no one (including me) talked about why I left the job.
This is the safest way to go about it.
Just never mention it as the candidate. It's really up to the due diligence of the employer to find out and if they don't, great you get the job and you pray that no one in management from the previous company meets your current. If they do find out (again this sometimes occurs from talkative managers during the background check) then you don't get the job.
You're not under a legal requirement to say "Yes I was fired" on a application form or during interview. Also, make sure if this occured that your resume doesn't have a huge gaping hole of employment (e.g. "So you worked at Allstate from 2006-2007 correct? So what did you do since then". "Oh, um nothing.. I was uh, looking for work".) At least fill it in with education, "consulting work", or playing Mr. Mom. Having your own imaginary consulting company is the best way to go but not recommended as it's a pretty large lie.
Having your own imaginary consulting company is the best way to go but not recommended as it's a pretty large lie.
Everyone I know in IT (me included) takes on side-jobs. I set up my little consulting company, in part to round out my resume to cover up times when I was between jobs.
But your suggestion to get education when between jobs (or at least claim to) is important. Right or wrong, employers aren't going to ask or care if you are looking for work between jobs (because they will just presume you are); they are going to want to see how you are bettering your skills.
Speaking as a recruiter who has done background checks, legally, I'm only supposed to ask the person on the other end when the employment began and ended, did they do a satisfactory performance / would you hire them back, what their skills were.
However, since it's a one on one conversation without someone overseeing it, sometimes it goes, "Andrew? Yeah he was a nightmare. Looked at porn all day on his laptop and had awful hygiene problems. Was always late for work and couldn't get his work done on time. We had to fire him".
Not a PC conversation, but that's usually how it goes.
I don't begrudge recruiters or prospective employers from asking why someone has left a job. That's doing their own due-diligence and it never hurts to ask that question.
But answering that question, whether the answer is positive, negative, or neutral? Huge mistake. Someday that will come back and hurt you in big ways. That person might very well be a turd and deserved to be fired. But the cost of defending yourself from a suit over it will kill you, whether you win or not. As serious, you might have to show other documentation or provide testimony that may expose you in other ways to litigation or embarrass you further.
And you can't always be sure that the person you are talking about an ex-employee with is someone who isn't looking to use what you say against you. All it takes is a friend of the ex-employee to call and ask for a reference, to check to see what you are actually saying about that person.
Right, in some cases I find, most managers are just too nervous about giving much info. They'll just stick with the "yes he was employed here from so and so date" and "I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to give you more info than that".
The average person doesn't do their due diligence to study staffing laws to know what is okay to say vs. not okay.
Just out of curiosity, when can a manager give a bad "review" of the employee if someone calls them to check a past employee's employment?
For instance, at my job I've never had any problems, we have reviews mid-year and end-of-year and so far (I've only been out of college for a little over a year, so two of these reviews) my reviews have always been "meet expectations" or "at expectations", but never exceeds or falls below.
If you go around the company I work at you'll see plenty of people browsing the web, facebook-ing, twittering, youtube, news, etc. - I mean you can't program 8 hours straight :/ But I'm wondering if these could be used, "Yea he browsed the web a lot for non-work related things".
here's a good link:
[http://jobsearch.about.com/od/interviewquestionsanswers/a/interviewfired.htm]