That is an important detail to point out – you are expected to check background, but to also make your hiring decision agnostic to certain categories. And you KNOW there’s always going to be someone who’s going to argue that you’re just making up excuses.
Seems to me that the clean solution, at least for large companies with the economy of scale to make this possible, is to have one person whose role in the hiring process is only to search social media for anything objectionable, and are only allowed to forward that information on if they find specific categories of objectionable material.
Ok, but how do you hire THAT person?
And, come to think of it, that’s not completely clean, either. If the person who’s doing the social media search is racist or otherwise biased, they might look at equivalent images and label them as “illegal substance abuse” for one candidate, but as “normal college partying” for a different one.
No.
She was being sarcastic and riffing about being a stereotypical clueless American tourist. She thought that only her friends could see it. She credibly explained that and sincerely apologized because it was still in awful taste. That’s how she was able to rebound.
That was my very first thought and this guy was a different story. There was thing thing that went viral where people would get into the CfA drive through and then just order a water. The idea is that it would lose them business by gumming up the works. This dude was a virtue signalling ass who made a video of himself doing that and making a big production of it and harassing the teenager who worked there about her employer’s political positions. It didn’t help him at all that the worker was nothing but kind and gracious. Then he was so proud of himself that he posted it on youtube. Would you want someone with such insanely poor judgment running your business and being the face of a company?
I remember it when it happened and her explanation made sense to me because right around the same time as this happened, my wife was traveling to South Africa to work on a pediatrics AIDS project and my brother’s Republican and Christian wife said, “I hope she doesn’t get AIDS” under her breath, but intentionally loud enough to be heard by me. It was and still is a common attitude among a certain type of American.
Unless I’m missing something, there are only two possibilities: either she made a racist joke, or she made a sarcastic comment that riffed on racists.
The first possibility would warrant her firing, of course.
The problem with the second option is that it’s indicative of someone with tremendously poor judgment that they would post a supposedly sarcastic comment with little or no context, right before going incommunicado for 11 hours. She should have known better to post something that could be so easily misconstrued, especially as a PR executive. So it is unsurprising that she was fired before she landed because the second option is a fireable offense as well for someone in her position.
My guideline throughout my life has been to avoid putting anything in writing (whether on social media or email) that I wouldn’t want my boss, my significant other, or my mother to see. I would think that a PR executive would be equally circumspect.
(Indeed, I am always amazed at office workers who exchange or forward racist or sexist “jokes”—especially on work computers and devices—and are mystified when they get fired for it. Sometimes I wonder if poor judgment goes hand-in-hand with the sexism and racism.)
Justine Sacco placed herself right into the same milieu.
With that said, poor judgement is far more forgivable than racism. We all make mistakes in judgement. So I have no issue with Sacco being given a second chance.
Apropos of nothing, this scenario was riffed on in Family Guy, when Brian posts an inadvertently racist tweet right before going in to see a movie.
By the time he’s finished the film (only a couple hours later) he’s been vilified online.
It’s not hard to imagine where the idea came from.
https://familyguyfanon.fandom.com/wiki/Don’t_Trust_the_D_in_Apartment_23
Not at the time, no, but people can learn and improve from their mistakes.
Which is still different for me than the ex-cop who killed a kid in cold blood. It’s just too great a risk to ever allow him to carry a gun as a cop again.
The problem is many/most of the Karens never posted anything to their social media; they were filmed by someone else & are on someone else’s social media. If you have someone go viral with a common name & HR does a background screening are they even sure it’s the same John Smith unless they bring that person in for an interview
It’s important to note that she thought that only her friends could see the comment, she hadn’t meant for it to be public. She and her friends had a history of making sarcastic comments to each other. It was earlier days of the internet, so people,still made blunders like this. It’s a big screw up, I agree.
Earlier this month, one of my company’s employees forwarded an email to me from one of our vendors. I don’t know if he’s aware of it or not, but the email contained the entire correspondence chain between the employee and the vendor, including a homophobic ‘joke’ from the vendor and the employee’s off-color reply.
At least two of my company’s managers have seen the email, but I don’t know if they’ve actually read the whole thing.
You just reminded me of something that happened in the early 90s where I worked. This would never happen today without serious repercussions. One coworker was away from his computer and a different coworker thought it would be a hilarious prank to send an email from the first guy’s account that said something like “I can’t keep this secret anymore. I’m gay”. Around ten of us were copied including their manager.
By the time I got ti it there were several replies following up on the “joke” until the manager squashed it. HR was never involved.