I’d be more likely to send a check than hire her. I’d call, say “I saw your resume. I’m not the go-to person for hiring, but I realized when I saw your name that I never gave you any reward or anything for saving my life. I know you didn’t expect one, but I’d absolutely love to give you one if you’ll accept it.” And if she said yes, I’d write her a significant check. If she said no, I’d ask her what I could do for her instead
I’ve had bad assistants. A bad assistant can make your life hellish. A good assistant is a pearl beyond price.
Please don’t take this as an attack, because I don’t mean it as one. Usually in these threads you are very strongly on the side of utter honesty, which is why the bolded clause surprises me. Isn’t it a lie in the context of the hypo?
Jonathan clearly has the authority to make hiring decisions; he can intervene without being gainsaid. He is the go-to guy for hiring. Admittedly he’s tried not to exercise that power for both practical and ethical reasons, but he can hire her with a word if he’s so inclined.
If my sales director called me up and told me to take Applicant X’s resume out of the pile and make sure she was in the next training class, I wouldn’t question it. That is, if he didn’t explain, I might wonder why he was telling me to do this in the privacy of my own head, but I’d still do it. Veto on all hiring and firing decisions implies just that authority.
I foresee problems with the check option as well. Unless it’s a lottery jackpot size check, Amy’s going to reply that she needs a job, not a handout.
I don’t consider him the one in charge of hiring. He signs off on it. I’ve been in similar roles and I would not remotely consider myself to have been the “go to person” for hiring.
See if you can find her a job in the company, but give the Personal Assistant job to the most competent person available. Then have that new assistant send a box of tarantulas to Skald.
Tarantulas are not all that dangerous to humans. They make good pets if you don’t insist on sapience and affection in your companion animals.
b) Evil Inc. has already cornered the market on weaponized spiders, so even if you got some variety of arachnid that would be useful, you’d be buying them FROM me and returning my stock TO me for FREE. I’m not sure how you think that would be a bad thing from my point of view.
iii) Something something something Athena.
Ɣ) Even weaponized-spiders are not best delivered by box. Humans are a lot bigger than spiders, and though they have us beat on reaction time we’ve got it all over them on travel speed. If you’re going to attack someone with genetically engineered weaponized spiders, you do it by restraining them and then dumping the spiders onto them. Even then it’s iffy and frankly is best reserved for people with a spider phobia.
I’d send you tarantulas any day, as long as I am allowed to come visit them! I am not allowed to have any, and do so want, so I settle for a gecko, as I do not need sapience and affection in companion animals.
Helping Amy in this situation means putting other people at some level of financial risk, ie the company - it would essentially be a case of being generous with someone elses resources.
Dont know about a cheque, but Id be looking at other means of assisting her than simply giving her a job she may end up in trouble with. He should have plenty of options given the level he’s at.
She may not have scored well on the test, but some people are just poor test takers.
On the other hand, Jonathan does know that Amy has a “dive right in” attitude and she’s good in a crisis. Both of those are extremely valuable traits in an executive assistant.
If he can hire her for something without being prejudicial to the company, he should do so because he clearly wants to do her a good turn and she deserves. For instance, if one of the jobs she might grow into even if she’s not up to it, if the slack would fall on his shoulders in the meantime. If not, that’s really awkward, I’d look for something else he could do for her – perhaps helping her look for another job, and perhaps tiding her over in the meantime?
I’m not sure what would be possible. It’s difficult, offering money could be tactless, I think the best I could manage would be a “here’s a loan to tide you over, pay it back if you can, but please don’t worry if that’s in several years time or never” sort of thing.
He should separate his attraction from his help, otherwise he or she may feel he’s trying to buy her affection, which would be a disaster. Hopefully he can see if anything develops without being clumsy about it, which would make everyone feel awful. (And obviously, that would also be easier if she weren’t working directly for him.)
I don’t have a lot of confidence in standardized tests.
I think that willingness to jump into the water after a stranger and haul him to safety at personal risk and without reward or attempting to cash that in demonstrates tremendous honor personal integrity, and a willingness to take risks that are probably more important than all the standardized hiring procedures you could dream up.
If the sales manager feels she isn’t a good fit for sales, and you don’t think she’d be a good assistant, by all means find her another job. But I think it would be foolish to let someone who appears to be competent enough for a job and has demonstrated great strength of character go without more serious consideration.
If you could take job candidates out on a boat and stage an emergency without getting sued for it, I bet we’d see that used more often during the hiring process.
It would be unethical to give her a leg up over the competition, using Jon’s current ethical standards. Her interview went poorly. Her test went poorly. There is no reason to hire her.
Fact is, assuming that the economic climate in this hypothetical is the same as in the real world right now, there are lots of desperate people looking for work. I’m guessing that at least one, if not several, of the desperate people scored higher than her on the exams. Someone who allows life events to affect their performance will NOT make a good long-term employee. Jon would do better to seek out an employee who is in similar circumstances as Amy but was able to focus on the test and interview despite them. Since he presumably can’t do this (since those questions aren’t acceptable at an interview), he should stick to looking at the test scores and interview performance.
Speaking of, how did the interviewer even KNOW that Amy is about to lose her house? Anyone who would voluntarily offer that information at a job interview is instantly gone from the list of acceptable candidates, as far as I’m concerned.
Additionally, if he intervenes to get her hired, the hiring manager will know that her performance and interview were crappy, but nepotism stepped in to save the day. Ill will and rumors being what they are in an office of this size… I can’t see the situation going well for Jon’s OR Amy’s careers.
Nope, sorry. A executives corporate power isn’t just his to do with as he pleases, it’s entrusted to him by the owners, and the structure depends on people using it in that way.
Pompous sounding, I know, but that’s what the oft-derided good-old-boys networks were made of. And what the current ‘mentoring’ model appears to be a fancy name for, unfortunately.
That being said, a high powered executive has considerable personal power and wealth. It should be well within his abilities to reward her with his own assets, not his companies. Which is kind of what ‘reward’ implies, anyway.
The most theatrical, (and therefore, obviously the best) would be to set up an anonymous scholarship carefully tailored so that only she could qualify for it, to get her skills up to snuff and a little living money while she’s doing it. Then, he could watch from afar as she fell madly in love with the evil TA’s brother, and walk off, alone but holding his bare head high, into the pouring rain.
If he’s really got to cheat, he should at least do it in a ‘do no harm,’ manner. Find her job she’s actually qualified for, in a position where he’s not supervising her, at more or less the company rate for her work.
–
Ura would never accept a part-time position at a company partially owned by a relative. Never. Absolutely never under most circumstances. Except possibly between 2003 and the present.
The bottom line is that the hire needs to be competent. They have to suffice. If JS thinks she can do that, then he should hire her. If not, then he shouldn’t. In other words, the life-saving episode changes the hiring from value-maximizing to value-sufficing.
As long as she’s marginally qualifid I say hire her
There’s a million people with decent test scores or good resumes. That kind of thing can be taught, it can be faked. But a person who would risk herself for others is innate, or at least moreso than test capability.
Hire her. Help her out in the resume building department. Teach her interview skills. Other people with better resumes will get more chances but how many people’s lives has she saved that can affect her career?
Just because she doesn’t measure up at first glance doesn’t mean she’s totally incapable of the job. We’re talking a sales position here, not nuclear physics. Get her some help in presentation and who knows, maybe her interview skills aren’t indicative of her people skills. In a more comfortable environment, she may excel, and you know that if there’s ever an earthquake or someone’s choking she’d jump right in to help.
The ethical, and to my mind, right, thing to do is – more or less like Mr Excellent said – for JS to contact the person making the hiring decision and let them know that he has some additional knowledge about one of the applicants, emphasizing that he still wants the best applicant hired, and certainly understands if this additional information isn’t enough to put Amy into the top.
After that, out of gratitude for the whole saving-his-life thing, JS might want to contact Amy directly and offer his help with her job search, through networking and/or feedback on resume and interview skills.
JS should also keep her hotness or lack therof completely out of his consciousness as much as he can of course. An old guy who saves the life of a 20-something woman has a slim chance of having that create some romantic attraction, but if the saving goes the other way, not much chance.
Well, the fact that Jonathan knows Amy is hot doesn’t mean he’s attracted to her. I mean, I know women, unrelated to me, whom I can recognize “objectively” as being hot in the estimate of most men, but who simply don’t do it for me for whatever reason.
I am horrified at the thought of hiring her for this job, and at the many replies that go along with the idea. Jonathan would be abusing his position and failing at his duties to do so.
He does seem to owe her a considerable personal favor, and personally rescuing her with offers of financial help seems like a good option.
Failing that, it would actually be better for him to embezzle the funds to help her with, than to hire her. Both are stealing from his employer to satisfy some kind of personal obligation he carries, but hiring her would further commit his employer to furthering this theft and would likely do personal harm to various other people in the process. If he just stole the money, the offense would be less open-ended, and the perpetrator more easily caught and dealt with.
I’m sorry, but that is complete and utter bullshit. The OP does not say that Amy is unqualified. It says that 60 people tested better than she did on the test, which means that about 240 people scored worse; in other words, she was better than 60% of her competitors. It says that she stank of desperation in her interview, but given that she’s been out of work so long, that might be forgiven. Jonathan knows from personal experience that she’s capable of making swift and correct decisions under pressure, which has to count for something.
Giving her a chance to succeed is not stealing. Nothing in your post indicates that you know what the word stealing means.
Which is not to say that I think she should necessarily be hired. I just think it’s ludicrous to call doing so stealing.