I currently live in London. I’m being headhunted for a job at a company I previously worked for 7-8 years ago in Tokyo; I quit to take a more senior position in New York (left that job and ended up at my current company back in Tokyo, then sent on assignment to London).
The company - call it Company A - trying to hire me back wants me to run the London team, which is fine by me (my current company wants to bring me back to Tokyo, my family and I would rather stay in London). An earlier team of managers at Company A hired someone for the London team - someone I know, because a) she was on the team I inherited at my current job, b) she had a massive (unrequited) crush on me, that is until c) I fired her.
And now I found out she will be at a small dinner party I was planning on attending later this week. I have no idea if she’s heard I’ve been short-listed (hell, I *am *the list) or not.
Should be fun! Will I end up having to fire the same person twice? That’d be a first.
Am now debating if I should go to the event this week or not…
Just do what you want. You sound like the kind of dickhead that no one wants to work for anyway. I’m sure that later on she will be counting her blessings.
Why did you fire her? You’ve said she had a crush on you, but that’s not grounds for dismissal unless she started sexually harrassing you? No ‘fire at will’ in the UK, as you will already know.
Of course I didn’t fire her for that; she was let go because she was one of the under-performers. Lovely person, just not cut out for the role she was hired for. The awkward part - and I discussed this with HR beforehand - was if we needed to be concerned over ‘hell hath no fury like the woman scorned & fired’ repercussions, as it were, because I’m not 100% convinced she has the most stable of personalities. As it turned out, things were fine, and I suspect it cured her of the crush rather quickly, so maybe a silver lining. Such as it is.
(I’ve only had one ‘office affair’ - with my wife).
Having to let people go is by far and away the suckiest thing about my job, and there isn’t anything even remotely close to second. And I bust down every door I can to find something for them, either internally or at other firms - I’ve helped get people jobs in other departments - and other firms - where they were a better fit so there was no long ‘down’ time between paychecks. I’ve written numerous references for people that warranted them. I’ve dog-sat for a former co-worker on job hunts out of town, and last year my wife and I even watched after one woman’s kids when I was on vacation and she went full-on job-hunting for a few days after being laid off from another department.
Callously relish? No.
But neither am I running a charity shop, and if there -was- a ‘second worst’ part of the job, it’d be trying to run a team when someone clearly isn’t capable of pulling their weight. Just browse through the gadzillion IMHO and Pit threads where people bitch and moan about the incompetent people they have to put up with at work. I run small, very tight cohesive teams, and I run things on budget. I’d much rather have a budget that lets me amply reward the team members doing the work.
I make my job a lot easier simply by not hiring incompetent people to begin with. Early in my career I thought I was just lucky with my hires; now I feel it’s one of my core strong point. Of the 50-odd people on my team at present, 15 are people that worked with me at previous firms, 15 are people I hired new, and 20 or so were either people that were on the team when I joined or people I’ve taken from other departments in swaps with people I was moving out. The person in question should never have been hired for the role she was being asked to do at the company I’m at now. She’s doing essentially the same role at her current company - key word there is ‘essentially’; I don’t know 100% it’s exactly the same - and she joined six months ago. Is it possible she’s improved? Quite possible. Is it possible she’s a good fit for her specific role? Quite possible. Something I’ll have to evalute.
But my post was more about the awkwardness of going to a dinner function where this person is there, the whole ‘she had a crush on me and then I had to make her redundant’ bit, and I have no idea how involved (if at all) she is or has been in my hiring process so far.
Thanks for responding, DragonAsh, and congratulations. It appears you have already accepted Company A’s position. Have an enjoyable time at the dinner party.