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I Got Catfished by a Candidate

saastr.com

271–280 of 662 posts

Re: I Got Catfished by a Candidate

#271
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are controlling how work is done then you have an employee. If subcontracting is unacceptable and you are still hiring contractors then you are just trying to run around employment law, at least in the US

I appreciate and largely agree with what you've said, but I think you're neglecting a context where there's an NDA or similar involved, which is what I assumed was meant by "even vaguely sensitive". As far as I know, there's no legitimacy to someone who's signed an NDA somehow sublicensing that NDA without the explicit approval of the issuer of the original agreement.

That's entirely true about NDAs, but then are you really hiring a contractor or just misclassifying full time employees so you're off the hook with employment law?

Re: I Got Catfished by a Candidate

#272
post #210
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are controlling how work is done then you have an employee. If subcontracting is unacceptable and you are still hiring contractors then you are just trying to run around employment law, at least in the US

do you have specific citations or is this some ideological stance? to me it makes zero sense to hire a vetted contractor who can then just toss say, classified data, over to some unknown random. it's a completely untenable proposition.

If you are requireing who can do the work and how it's done you've constrained the person into an employee-employer relationship regardless of what you decide to call. Contracts are like an interface, you are setting up an agreement on what is being provided and don't care about the implementation. When you constrain the contract so much that only a single person can fulfill the contract you are just abusing the concept of contracting.

In the example above with NDAs and security clearance that can be a perfectly valid requirement, but you can't reasonably be upset if the contractor subcontracts out to someone else with clearance who has signed the same NDA

Re: I Got Catfished by a Candidate

#273
post #272
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you have specific citations or is this some ideological stance? to me it makes zero sense to hire a vetted contractor who can then just toss say, classified data, over to some unknown random. it's a completely untenable proposition.

If you are requireing who can do the work and how it's done you've constrained the person into an employee-employer relationship regardless of what you decide to call. Contracts are like an interface, you are setting up an agreement on what is being provided and don't care about the implementation. When you constrain the contract so much that only a single person can fulfill the contract you are just abusing the conc…

i don't agree with your definition of contracting, but either way i'm particularly interested if you can point to some legal code that forbids a contract from containing a "no subcontracting" clause. that would be quite interesting.

Re: I Got Catfished by a Candidate

#274
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever been part of lay offs on the employer side? Any single company whose done that action has lied as they led their employees to believe that they would be working on some project for a while, while simultaneously planning to let them go. That's just a single example of a common lie in companies, and there are more like "we follow best practices", until those practices start costing money. Every single com…

I actually have been. I informed people as soon as I could, and sent them home immediately without telling a single lie. To some extent this comment also tries to paint withholding information that people aren’t entitled to as lying. Which are absolutely not the same thing. Also, do you know what happens to companies that have mass layoffs cloaked in dishonesty? They destroy their own reputations. An outcome that ent…

"as soon as I could". That's not "as soon as I knew".

My point is that lieing isn't a binary option. If people told literally no lies our society would fall apart. White lies are social lubricant to get through the day.

This matters in the discussion because employers have made their job positings be full of lies 99% of time. When everyone can expect that a random interaction is going to be mostly lieing then it's moved into white lie category, the same way that if you ask an American "How are you doing" the social expectation is for them to say good or great, regardless of the actual reality

Edit: I think the person talked about in the article has moved way past white lie and into unhireable status, but I feel like the idea that 100% honesty is the only policy is ignoring all of reality

Re: I Got Catfished by a Candidate

#275
> He impressed each interviewer with his knowledge and passion for the brand, his sales acumen, outbound hunter mentality, and overall presence.

> Our Catfish never faltered, kept a smile on his face the entire time, and did his homework. We even talked about sales operations, discussed the pros and cons of MEDDIC, and talked about Salesforce workflows. I mean, this guy was pretty good.

Sounds like they were an excellent candidate. That you let go.

Re: I Got Catfished by a Candidate

#276

> He impressed each interviewer with his knowledge and passion for the brand, his sales acumen, outbound hunter mentality, and overall presence. > Our Catfish never faltered, kept a smile on his face the entire time, and did his homework. We even talked about sales operations, discussed the pros and cons of MEDDIC, and talked about Salesforce workflows. I mean, this guy was pretty good. Sounds like they were an excel…

A good employee who goes to great lengths to deceive others will eventually create more trouble than they're worth.

Re: I Got Catfished by a Candidate

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>someone who apparently otherwise would have been a great candidate Dishonesty is an intolerable trait. This person clearly wasn't a great candidate. Lying at work is just about the only thing I'll always fire somebody for.

> Dishonesty is an intolerable trait. Dishonesty which you can detect is apparently intolerable. But dishonesty which you never catch may not be. That's one of the points of the article, the other being that the candidate apparently showed a solid set of skills in the interviews. Dishonest people are dishonest, but they also might be lazy and thus willing to apply a skillset rather than deal with the complexity of ad…

That's a bit of a tautology. You first have to be aware of the existence of something in order to then tolerate it.

The thing about dishonesty (aside from the fact that a person willing to be dishonest about one thing, is more than likely willing to be dishonest about other things too), is that it tends to beget more dishonesty. You tend to have to tell more lies in the future to maintain ones you told in the past. As I've said elsewhere in this thread, you can get ahead on the basis of dishonesty, but only if you lack integrity. Keeping a lie concealed for ever seems to me like it would require luck or tremendous effort, otherwise it's probably not a very interesting lie.

Re: I Got Catfished by a Candidate

#278
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can put whatever you want in your contract. Good luck holding it up in court. Personally, I wouldn’t talk too loudly about how I want contractors to behave like employees.

i'm not sure what you mean. do you have some reference to point to that says a "contractor" can't be expected to not sub-contract or work in a particular place and time? i'm honestly curious.

Yes, the law.

You don’t get to enforce when and where a contractor works. They can perhaps agree to it to keep a good relationship, but they are not obligated, and if they change their mind the only thing you can do is fire them.

You also don’t get to choose how they do their job. If they agreed to do something for a given price, they can do it how they see fit, even hiring a subcontractor. Don’t like it? Don’t hire them.

If you want control of both of those things, you want an employee. Now, there’s plenty of contractors that will behave like employees for you, if it gets their foot in the door, but if the IRS finds out you could be in trouble.

Where do you work?

Re: I Got Catfished by a Candidate

#279

> He impressed each interviewer with his knowledge and passion for the brand, his sales acumen, outbound hunter mentality, and overall presence. > Our Catfish never faltered, kept a smile on his face the entire time, and did his homework. We even talked about sales operations, discussed the pros and cons of MEDDIC, and talked about Salesforce workflows. I mean, this guy was pretty good. Sounds like they were an excel…

They were a great candidate right up until the "lied on their resume and in job interviews, also created a fake email address and phone number to pretend to be someone else" part.

Re: I Got Catfished by a Candidate

#280
post #273
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are requireing who can do the work and how it's done you've constrained the person into an employee-employer relationship regardless of what you decide to call. Contracts are like an interface, you are setting up an agreement on what is being provided and don't care about the implementation. When you constrain the contract so much that only a single person can fulfill the contract you are just abusing the conc…

i don't agree with your definition of contracting, but either way i'm particularly interested if you can point to some legal code that forbids a contract from containing a "no subcontracting" clause. that would be quite interesting.

I looked and couldn't find any limitations on subcontracting that werent specific to federal contracts so it likely that my personal view doesn't match up to the law
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