Or, another Rhymer hypothetical.
Today’s story concerns Robin, a middle manager for a famous corporation we’ll call NunyaBidness. Robin supervises an inside sales team, one of twelve such in the call center she works at. This isn’t telemarketing; the IS employees do business-to-business selling and primarily deal with companies already using Nunya’s services, which involves things like negotiating pricing agreements, arranging technical support, helping the customers deal with regulatory changes, and so forth. They do both incoming and outgoing calls; each IS person has a geographic sales territory and is responsible for both recruiting new business and building business among their current clients. They spend 11 weeks out of a quarter in the office and the twelfth in the field. They’re assessed in two basic ways: productivity (time spent on the phone and number of calls per day) and sales (how much they revenue their territory brings in each year).
In Robin’s 20-person-team, there is a clear star, Mickey. Mickey consistently exceeds every productivity guideline by better than 10 percent. His sales numbers are even better than that; he’s consistently the IS in the call center. What’s more, he’s always ahead of the curve in continuing education and is a font of information. Everyone in the call center–not just his own teammates, but IS people from other teams and their managers–commonly turn to him as the quickest and most accurate source of information on several topics. Robin has more than once thought about recommending Mickey for promotion, and once even looked up his résumé to make sure he had the proper educational background; but Mickey always declines to go out for a better job. This doesn’t much bother Robin, as Mickey both makes her job easier and makes the entire team look better. The two of them are also good friends–or, at least, as good friends as is possible between boss and employee.
But one day Robin learns something that takes her aback.
She has a fuck-buddy, you see: Anne, a married woman so deep in the closet it’s a miracle she hasn’t choked on the hangers. Anne works in an extremely conservative field and refuses to be even seen in public with an out lesbian such as Robin; thus Robin knows their relationship will never involve more than rustling the sheets. Being commitment phobic, she’s okay with this.
One night, Anne & Robin are in the latter’s apartment outraging God, nature, and Pat Robertson. After the festivities are over with, Anne notices a recently-taken photograph of Robin’s IS team and lets out a happy chuckle; she recognizes Mickey, knowing both his first and last name. He used to work for Anne at a different company, Imagine Inc; then, as now, he was a star employee. He got fired for a reason Anne does not want to go into, except to say that it was utter bullshit, and she’s glad to see he’s landed on his feet.
But not all is wonderful. You see, the dates Anne says Mickey worked for Imagine Inc. do not jibe with what is on his résumé. Robin happens to have the copy of that document she printed out the last time she tried to get him a promotion; she double-checks it and finds that she’s right. Mickey claims he worked for the other company from 2001 to 2005 (immediately before starting work for Nunya); but from what Anne says, he actually left in 2003. (It is 2010 for when this happens.)
NunyaBidness has an explicit policy on lying on résumés: an employee found to have done such is to immediately terminated unless the vice president of the division–two levels of management above Robin–says otherwise. This issue has come up three times during Robin’s tenure; the VP refused to spare all three, but all of those were marginal or subpar employees rather than stars. The issue only goes to the VP if the offender’s immediate supervisor appeals the automatic process. Any manager or HR person who knowingly helps hire or promote such an employee is also to be terminated; and while simply knowing about it and keeping quiet is not a firing offense, a manager who does such is liekly to be written up for it if it’s ever discovered that she knew, and that could hurt her chances for advancement.
Robin did not hire Mickey. Both the manager who did, and the HR person who must have helped him cover up whatever he is hiding, have long since left Nunya.
What should Robin do?
