A Job Candidate Says She Would Need to Work For Us Secretly

Inc.com columnist Alison Green answers questions about workplace and management issues–everything from how to deal with a micromanaging boss to how to talk to someone on your team about body odor.

A reader asks:

We interviewed a candidate for a part-time position who had been out of our line of work for 10 years. I interviewed her because she had some other things on her resume that seemed really interesting (from a business she’s been running with a family member). Still, we are a quickly-changing industry and it is unusual to grant an interview to someone who isn’t up on the latest developments. So I thought she would be happy when we decided to check references and most likely offer her the job.

However, she told us she could not provide any work-related references — none at all — because (a) the ones from our industry were too old; and (b) it was important that nobody she deals with via her current business knows she would be also working for us, as they had to be under the impression that she is at her online job and available to them at all times. She offered us two personal references, both close friends. We asked again for anybody who could speak to her work ethic, attitudes, demeanor, etc. (a vendor, for example, if she’d rather not have customers know). She again refused. So we moved on with another candidate.

The other candidate is great, but I can’t help but wonder how the first person thought this would work if she did get the job. Is it normal for people who are running small businesses and have a side job to maintain this kind of secrecy between their two jobs? She did not even name her business on her resume — just put “family business” and mentioned the key elements of it. I figured out what it was as I am interested in the topic her online platform covers. They have a solid platform, but she’s not running Microsoft. Why the secrecy? Would people she deals with for her online business care if she had a job with us a few days a week? How could it possibly be damaging?

The best explanation I’ve come up with is that she is embarrassed that the business is not as profitable as she would like, which I assume is why she interviewed with us. But that is such a normal thing in family businesses, it’s hard for me to see how it could be important enough for her to lose a job over. What’s your take?

Green responds:

Yes, something isn’t right here.

One possibility is that she’s lying about her role in the business. You were able to figure out what business she was referring to, but it sounds like there’s no evidence that she works for it, or that she plays the role there she claimed. And refusing to allow you to speak to anyone connected with it ensures you can’t find that out. For all we know, it might not even be her family. She could have no connection to it at all.

Or maybe she did work there but flamed out in some spectacular way, and that’s why she won’t let you talk to anyone connected with the work — she embezzled, or set the place on fire, or posted embarrassing videos of their largest client all over social media, or anything that would make her conclude she needed to keep you from speaking with them at all costs.

Another possibility is that she’s telling the truth about her work, but is just shady. After all, she was apparently planning to lie to people at her current business (the family member who runs it with her and her customers) so they’d think she was still available to them at times when she’d be working to you. Or she was planning to continue to be available to them while she was working for you, meaning that she’d prioritize that work over the work you would have been paying her to do. Either way, she’s basically announcing — to you, the person she wants to hire her — that she lacks integrity.

A final possibility is that she’s out of touch with professional norms and the work world. This one seems like it’s true regardless of what else is going on, because refusing to provide any references who could speak to her work and just offering up close friends and thinking you’d be okay with that speaks to a real lack of understanding of how this works.

It’s also notable that she also declined to provide references from her previous work in your field a decade ago, claiming they were too old — because those would be better than no references at all, and it sounds like she didn’t even put that option on the table. There’s likely a reason for that.

It’s impossible for us to know what’s really going on, but everything about this situation is screaming “don’t hire this person” so it’s good that you didn’t. And it’s not that people can’t be in tough situations where they don’t have ideal references to offer. They can. The issue here is the extreme shadiness of all the details.

Want to submit a question of your own? Send it to alison@askamanager.org.