(Avoiding the pull to reference US politics here.)
What would the implications be if a similar event occurred at, say, Google? Would it even be possible?
It seems that the onus for verification and in-depth analysis of a candidate falls onto the business. Is this just a case of poor decision making from the leadership group who hired the candidate? Is it uncommon to call more than one reference, or to simply Google a candidate and see what shows up? For such a high-level, government role... I'm sure there's more than just Google to reference as well?
I am not a lawyer, but it probably is not the same. Lieing to get a government job may have criminal implications depending on the job role and requirements, security clearance requirements, authority of the position, etc.., whereas lieing for a civilian job that is not involved in legal enforcement, government secrets, etc.. is likely a civil issue and the fallout would probably depend on the level of the position and the investment by the company involved. I'm sure there would be edge cases where I am incorrect. Probably in certain banking roles, or positions that bridge government and civilian orgs. Just guessing, really.
I would assume a CIO position would require some Australian equivalent of Top Secret Clearance. That would go beyond simple civil fraud into a criminal offense.
However, CNN left those implications off the story because it is more entertaining to imagine she is in jail for using Kate Upton as her LinkedIn profile pic...
Similar to the linked story here: the US currently has a President with no political experience, who has also hired family members for prominent roles in the government.
>the US currently has a President with no political experience
Which is a) known to all and b) considered by supporters to be a virtue, as is often the case for those in public life in many countries.
>who has also hired family members for prominent roles in the government.
Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner are Senior Advisors to the President, which are by definition positions whose main/only qualifications are "the President trusts them". Like her father, these two aren't paid a salary.[1]
Every US president since Washington, and every human leader since Ugg became chief caveman of the Grugg tribe, has had advisors that he trusts as much as (and, usually, more than) those with official titles below him. A common term for such for presidents is the Kitchen Cabinet.[2] Sometimes the Kitchen Cabinet gets titles to formalize their access to the advisee. In the US that's Senior Advisor to the President; in the UK it's Special Adviser to the Prime Minister;[3] in many countries it's Minister without Portfolio.
When one of your 'advisors' is charged with making peace in the middle east (among other ridiculous responsibilities), is he really an advisor? Was Ivanka acting in an advisory role when she hosted meetings at the UN? C'mon.
>When one of your 'advisors' is charged with making peace in the middle east (among other ridiculous responsibilities), is he really an advisor? Was Ivanka acting in an advisory role when she hosted meetings at the UN?
Kushner is the point man for the Middle East because Trump's attitude is that professional, full-time diplomats have consistently failed for 40 years, so why not try someone different? One of the prerequisites for such a role, arguably the most important one, is that both sides the envoy is mediating for know that said envoy has the president's trust.
As for his wife, again, there are no formal classes on "hosting meetings at the UN" at the Kennedy School or SIPA or Georgetown SFS, nor is there a "hosting meetings about women's rights at the UN" job description at State or anywhere in the executive branch (the existing US delegation to the UN's responsibilities are different). She either does a good job, or she doesn't and Trump sends someone else. Given that Ivanka has now performed the role over multiple years, apparently her father approves of how she's done.
So, in other words, "because Trump thinks it's ok, it's ok." You could have saved a lot of typing.
Everything you said is utterly preposterous. Physycists have failed to come up with a GUT for quite some time now. Should Jared be in charge of that as well? Perhaps Ivanka could do a university tour to shake things up a bit.
What progress have either of these two made on any front exactly? How's the experiment going, objectively? Because what I see is an almost completely ineffective foreign policy strategy and a bunch of appointees whose only real qualifications are being born to wealthy parents.
>So, in other words, "because Trump thinks it's ok, it's ok." You could have saved a lot of typing.
Yes, for these sorts of positions, "because [president] thinks it's OK, it's OK" is the criteria Trump and all of his predecessors have used. If you don't believe me, feel free to try to find a formal, defined qualification for "informal presidential envoy to hopefully get some/any progress done in an area no progress has occurred in four decades", or "host of some meetings at the UN for women's rights and other such causes". I'll wait. The only difference is that in these cases the envoy happens to be related to the president as opposed to say, an old college roommate (Example: Kenneth O'Donnell, whom Kevin Costner portrayed in Thirteen Days), or law school buddy (twenty for Obama early in his administration [1]).
>Everything you said is utterly preposterous. Physycists have failed to come up with a GUT for quite some time now. Should Jared be in charge of that as well?
Something like this, for which there is, in fact, a formal, defined criteria. The fact that you made such a ridiculous and obviously inapt comparison shows how desperate you are.
Your argument is ludicrous. No one is arguing that he can't do what he is doing. The discussion is whether or not he _should_. You can't argue that's it's a good idea, or that his decisions have produced any results, so you just continue to repeat the same nonsense. Talking to you is a waste of time.
>The fact that you made such a ridiculous and obviously inapt comparison shows how desperate you are
"Inept" is, I believe, the word you were searching for.
> No one is arguing that he can't do what he is doing. The discussion is whether or not he _should_.
Which is an inherently subjective argument, which is my point, as opposed to your saying that Kushner and Ivanka Trump are prima facie unqualified for their roles. Since you now know you can't prove this, you've shifted the goalposts.
>You can't argue that's it's a good idea, or that his decisions have produced any results
No, the onus is on you to prove that Kushner and Ivanka are inherently less qualified for what they are doing than, say, the examples I provided in my previous comment. Since being Robert Kennedy's college roommate and football teammate automatically means advising on national security matters in the Oval Office during the Cuban Missile Crisis, amirite?
I am not saying that O'Donnell was inherently unqualified for his role. On the contrary, for a position like his (identical to Kushner's and Ivanka's, by the way; just the title is different), being trusted by the person you advise is as important a criteria for such a role as any other. JFK trusted O'Donnell to work hard to give him good advice. Period. End of story.
Maybe Kushner will spend eight years over two Trump terms as Trump's Middle East envoy and no progress will be made in terms of Jewish-Arab peace. Such results would be ... about on par with all of his predecessors from seven different administrations over 40 years.
>"Inept" is, I believe, the word you were searching for.
Wrong again. "Inapt" is correct; your comparison of a position with formal, defined qualifications for versus positions without such is, as I said, an inapt one.
I was hired at one of the FAANG companies, and it turns out there was an issue with my college diploma where my college wouldn't release the records. My HR person hounded me for like 2 months until I got it sorted out(most of the time spent waiting on hearing back from my college administrators). I'd imagine I would have been fired if it appeared I couldn't prove I graduated the college I claimed - even though I've been in the work force for 15 years and assumed my college experience was largely irrelevant to getting hired.
It was annoying because it felt like my employment could be terminated rightfully at any time due to no fault of my own - but I'm happy that the company forced me to deal with it.
What happened was, while I had more than enough credits to graduate, I had an "incomplete" for a course in my last semester. I had dropped the course before the semester begam with the approval of my professor, but he marked me as incomplete instead of dropped, and apparently you can't get a diploma with an incomplete on your record(despite them letting me walk in graduation, and sending me a diploma a few weeks later).
Thankfully I had the whole email chain(because I bulk forwarded all of my college emails to my personal gmail address) at the time between my professor, the college administrator, and myself. If I didn't have that, theoretically I would have had to go back to college for a single class to finish out my degree.
Doubly-annoying because in my experience FAANG companies don't care if someone has a degree, at least for technical roles. It's "old tech" companies like Microsoft et al. that still care.
They don't care, but they do care if you lie. I don't care about someone's degree either, but I care about ethics. Imagine someone that can't be trusted working at any of the FAANG, what sort of damage can they do?
Do you want someone reading your Facebook message because they can, or your gmail, or accessing your AWS resources? Granted these should all be locked and have strong audit trails from a system perspective, but there's always someone with "access" and you need to trust them.
If your college degree was described in your resume and was a differentiable factor in your hiring they may have been forced to confirm it's accuracy or be open to fair hiring lawsuits - for instance if you are white and another candidate black with him having a 2 year degree against your 4 year degree and all other things equal - if you lied about your 4 year degree then the black candidate would be more qualified for the position and, if preference absent any factual difference is given to white candidates often enough that can violate the equal employment opportunity act - if that happens often enough, the government can come down on the company hard.
Additionally, a four year degree might qualify your employment for grant subsidies for research while a lack there of might make it harder for the company to justify - I've worked in a few places now where my employment has been government subsidized since I've worked on novel research.
Basically, HR is stupid complicated and I'm sorry the experience was negative, but they were probably compelled to make sure they got that information to insulate the company from various legal exposures.
It almost certainly wasn't - I went to a no-name tiny state school with a crappy CS program and had a mediocre GPA. The most relevant thing which probably got me an interview was merely being employed at another FAANG company when the other FAANG company contacted me.
I think in a private company you'd need to prove not only that the hiring was a waste of funds since the person was ineffective but also that they premeditated and succeeded at damaging the company during their tenure to get a general ruling that'd result in jailtime or a government enforced fine - the other recourse a company might have is if they committed fraud when they signed their employment contract.
I think it'd be extremely dangerous for private corporations to run to the government for enforcement in the case that this sort of fraud occurs and that it'd be well if judges were highly skeptical of employers - otherwise, given the power imbalance of employers, they may be able to abuse such a system to subsidize their labour costs.
Private employers should also be given no opportunity to reclaim any costs arising from such a situation[1], as that too could be too easily abused.
1. And currently they are not, if you've ever wondered why nearly every employer prorates vacation time even for senior employees it's because if, on Jan 1, you took all your vacation days and then quit - there is no legal way for the company to try and reclaim the wages you were erroneously paid out - though if there was any pending funds coming to you (a bonus for instance) the company can usually deduct costs from those funds or just wholly withhold them, depending on the way that payment was described.
> I think in a private company you'd need to prove not only that the hiring was a waste of funds since the person was ineffective but also that they premeditated and succeeded at damaging the company during their tenure to get a general ruling that'd result in jailtime or a government enforced fine - the other recourse a company might have is if they committed fraud when they signed their employment contract.
That's an "advantage" I'd never thought of to the standard US company boilerplate that you don't have an employment contract and (almost) nobody at the company has the authority to change that.
Most places care about results. If you get in and do the work correctly I don't care so much about your background.
However for things like medical doctors, we need more care. Most people reading this could successfully be a medical doctor for a time: most people know enough to fake it and most problems are either obvious (or the right tests are obvious and from the results...) or go away on their own. You might not give the best treatment, but you can come up with something that is "good enough". However eventually (a few days) you will come across something the the average person doesn't know but a real doctor would.
I work for a Bay Area company. We fired a hire shortly after finding out that there were issues on the resume.
As I didn't work closely with this person, I don't remember the details. What's clear is that HR will usually check up on employees after their start date, because it's assumed that no one's lying.
In another case, a company that I interviewed with ghosted me. (When I met the founder, he was late, had a bad attitude, ect.) They ghosted another friend of mine, and ended up hiring a rather unsavory person. When we were in school, their new hire was the campus drug dealer and cheated off of a friend of mine. They fired him a few months later when they found out he had a criminal record for cocaine.
So, yes, it's common for (Edit: American) HR to continue investigating new hires and then fire them shortly after due to issues with credentials or criminal records.
Private companies stop associating with you and/or sue when they feel wronged, that's the hammer they have to swing. The government's hammer is accusing you of a crime and sticking you in jail (and maybe letting you back out if a jury doesn't agree) and people who wrong them are nails. I think that distinction is probably more relevant here than whether the specific lies in question constitute a crime. It explains why this person is getting jailed whereas people that do this and get caught in private industry get excommunicated from said industry and/or sued.
In theory. In reality 'they' nearly always lack to the power and budget to actually accomplish anything, so they do in fact devolve into being the fall guy when something gets compromised.
That maybe true, but I am assuming that you are looking at it from a non Australian position. (If not I apologize). It could be there are laws there that say it is fraudulent to obtain a public office position by overstating your qualifications.
Correct. This was what I was attempting to convey (but failed miserably) with the "!==" instead of "!=". Thus, one could be misleading by categorizing fraud as lying, which is exactly what's going on with this title.
It's especially egregious in this instances as most everyone lies, at least a little, on their resumes because often it's the only way to get pasted HR filter BS.
Not all lying in all circumstances is fraud, but the legal definition of fraud is essentially "intentionally lying to obtain a benefit at the expense of someone" in a bit more precise words, so at least this case of lying on her resume matches the definition of fraud.
The precise words are different for each jurisdiction, for example, the South Australia criminal law (https://www.legislation.sa.gov.au/LZ/C/A/CRIMINAL%20LAW%20CO...) says "139—Deception; A person who deceives another and, by doing so— (a)dishonestly benefits him/herself or a third person; or (b) dishonestly causes a detriment to the person subjected to the deception or a third person, is guilty of an offence." - in essence, all lying to get a benefit or harm someone else; though they've chosen to label that particular crime 'deception' instead of 'fraud' as in many other places.
just what is it with these sensational headlines in hackernews these days? recently skipped over an iphone location services issue one as well. come on guys.
It's about time white collar crimes are taken as seriously as other crimes. If you break into someone's home and steal $10,000, no one bats an eye over imprisonment. But if you steal $100,000 from taxpayers, you suddenly become a lot more sympathetic.
I wonder to what extent this is because burglary is committed by people who are poor and not well educated, whereas white collar crimes are committed by people who look just like your friends and colleagues.
It's hard to fight the biggest cheaters, because they have lots of money and can afford lawyers. When big tech companies and billionaires get to avoid taxes with stuff like tax loopholes and offshore nonsense, you have a lot of sympathy for the smaller guy stealing a measly 100K.
For burglary it could also just be fear and risk of violence. If someone is willing to forcefully break into a house, they are probably willing to harm the owner if they happen to be home. A better example would be to compare white collar crime to shoplifting as neither of those crimes has the same undertones of violence to them.
>It's about time white collar crimes are taken as seriously as other crimes. If you break into someone's home and steal $10,000, no one bats an eye over imprisonment. But if you steal $100,000 from taxpayers, you suddenly become a lot more sympathetic.
Breaking into a home is a violent crime whereas white collar crime is nonviolent. You can often return property, you cannot make someone un-experience a burglary. Don't get me wrong (i.e. "I know that if I don't include this disclaimer someone will try to) white collar crime and corruption like this should certainly be prosecuted but there's a reason we generally don't punish it as severely as violent crime since we generally consider property less valuable than life and health.
Exactly. Almost anyone would much prefer to lose $100 to a scammer than someone who breaks into your home and takes it. The latter is far more violating and scary.
> I wonder to what extent this is because burglary is committed by people who are poor and not well educated, whereas white collar crimes are committed by people who look just like your friends and colleagues.
Not much since poor people who are friends and colleagues to other poor people also make the same judgements.
From your ISP or the WiFi access point at your coffee shop injecting JavaScript into the HTML pages that the site sends back to you, since it's not https. (Yeah, I know, you should use a VPN if you're at your coffee shop, but not everyone bothers.)
I thought my browser didn't load the page correctly. It's sad that seeing simplicity on a webpage raises alarm bells that some error probably occurred. Very refreshing to read it as a lite version.
though certainly not what she should/would go to prison for, the claim that she "used a photo of supermodel Kate Upton as her LinkedIn profile photo," does seem the most bold to me.
At least in the US, most companies will discard any photos on resumes (or just reject them outright) to avoid unconscious bias. I'm surprised Australia doesn't do the same.
This is a modern trope used to headline news articles:
[A thing occurred. Here are the consequences.]
Usually, both the fact and the consequence are intentionally vague. The point seems to be to entice you want to read further.
As far as clickbait titles go, this is probably acceptable, but nonetheless it's getting pretty annoying. It's almost always a guarantee that the full details of the story will be more nuanced, and therefore will not carry the emotional weight of the headline, and the reader will be slightly disappointed.
I don't mean to be argumentative but I think this example is worse than that, as are most clickbait heds.
It intentionally misrepresents the truth to get you to click. It is designed to create a false picture in your mind. That to me puts it right up there alongside the worst of the worst, particularly when coming from one of the biggest journalism organizations in the world.
[J-School survivor -- apologies if I'm a little touchy on the subject.]
I imagine the head of HR is going through a few difficult conversations, too. This is huge fail for them (also a huge learning experience - I don't think they'll ever make this mistake again).
Good for them, this is as it should be handled. Someone should send this article to the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) board, as their CEO, Marcy Wheeler was found to have lied about her background in a similar manner, yet they have declined to take any action for some mysterious reason.
I'd be a little harsher on the people who hired her honestly. It sounds like a systemic organizational failure, and while I certainly don't think the lady is blameless here, the failure of those entrusted with spending public money and hiring her should be facing some serious criticism.
The system worked this out with minimal damage (22k was paid out before the fraud was discovered) why should more labour be dedicated to detect such a trivial and rare error? If this sort of thing is rampant in australia then it'd make sense, but the detection of her fraud definitely cost less than beefing up reference checking to be in depth on everyone.
It was news worthy and neither the article nor anything I've seen described this as a common or repeated occurrence, the article is pretty poor in quality but I think it's reasonable to read it as implying that this was a rather outstanding event. It is somewhat hard to judge but it seems a reasonable reading.
Right now they should be reviewing the background checks of everyone in the entire enterprise, as all of those people were subject also to the same obviously lax scrutiny. Starting with leadership and those in sensitive roles.
HR employees directly responsible for scrutiny in this particular case should be punished to include, at a minimum, placement on probation. (I agree with AcerbicZero though, I'd prefer they be fired.)
I know a particular individual in my locale that has lied up at a relatively young age. They're now a C-level for a major security vendor. They were fired from two major companies (F100) for failure to abide by corporate policy. The second firing was due to trying to get the parent company to buy services from a company they were attempting to start and double dipping hard. They constantly lie about having a PhD (they don't and as they were getting it from University of Phoenix in something not related to what they stated it was in). They've misrepresented themself when giving public talks stating they led a team of 50 when their team was 5 (I was on the team). They're just a cancer on society who is very extroverted and innately good at social engineering others. I ran into them at a local food establishment a month ago and they wouldn't make eye contact. I'm likely one of the few who they know knows the truth. The point I'm trying to make with this is I wish there was a way to expose people like this. They're a charlatan through and through and it's disconcerting watching them provide no value other than acting as a talking head who appears confident in the BS they're spewing.
If they're C-level, then the company's board of directors should have vetted their resume. If they claimed a degree they don't have during the process, that could get them fired (it got Scott Thompson fired as CEO of Yahoo). Assuming this is a public company, see if you can confirm from press releases that the degree was claimed, then write a letter to the board members and CC investor relations and corporate council. Someone would likely run a degree verification at that point.
I would guess the previous firings would be overlooked because the firing companies likely won't say anything on the record, and lying about team size is too small to be worth proving.
Sounds EXACTLY like what Mina Chang, the deputy assistant secretary in the State Department's Bureau of Conflict and Stability Operations did.
The difference is Ms. Chang claimed to be on the front cover of time magazine.
Speaks volumes on the process to get into these positions. Might as well save the hundreds of thousands spent on college and pickup a copy of Adobe Photoshop to supercharge your resume to get those high paying gigs.
Begs the question, how many top positions are filled with completely unqualified individuals?
It doesn't seem outrageous that there are criminal penalties for lying when it comes to certain public jobs, especially one as high-ranking as chief information officer.
Tangentially, though, I can't help but wonder about the staggering incompetency of the hiring committee. Not only did they seem to fail routine background confirmation, but how did this get past them:
> But the lies didn't end there. In earlier submissions, the court heard that Theriault used a photo of supermodel Kate Upton as her LinkedIn profile photo, according to CNN affiliate 7 News.
(Unless the defendant looks very similar to Upton)
The storm about that was so stupid. Tons of good and high-ranking people don't have degrees in the field, and somehow working for other IT companies suddenly didn't count as experience because it was just too funny to drag the music degree out. (It's quite possible she wasn't qualified for what they'd actually needed or bad at the job, but "LOL music degree" isn't a reason to assume that)
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadWhat would the implications be if a similar event occurred at, say, Google? Would it even be possible?
It seems that the onus for verification and in-depth analysis of a candidate falls onto the business. Is this just a case of poor decision making from the leadership group who hired the candidate? Is it uncommon to call more than one reference, or to simply Google a candidate and see what shows up? For such a high-level, government role... I'm sure there's more than just Google to reference as well?
However, CNN left those implications off the story because it is more entertaining to imagine she is in jail for using Kate Upton as her LinkedIn profile pic...
Should be easy considering this happened in Australia...
Color me surprised.
Not at all.
>the US currently has a President with no political experience
Which is a) known to all and b) considered by supporters to be a virtue, as is often the case for those in public life in many countries.
>who has also hired family members for prominent roles in the government.
Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner are Senior Advisors to the President, which are by definition positions whose main/only qualifications are "the President trusts them". Like her father, these two aren't paid a salary.[1]
Every US president since Washington, and every human leader since Ugg became chief caveman of the Grugg tribe, has had advisors that he trusts as much as (and, usually, more than) those with official titles below him. A common term for such for presidents is the Kitchen Cabinet.[2] Sometimes the Kitchen Cabinet gets titles to formalize their access to the advisee. In the US that's Senior Advisor to the President; in the UK it's Special Adviser to the Prime Minister;[3] in many countries it's Minister without Portfolio.
[1] https://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/30/trump-white-house-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_Cabinet
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_adviser_(UK)
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minister_without_Portfolio
Kushner is the point man for the Middle East because Trump's attitude is that professional, full-time diplomats have consistently failed for 40 years, so why not try someone different? One of the prerequisites for such a role, arguably the most important one, is that both sides the envoy is mediating for know that said envoy has the president's trust.
As for his wife, again, there are no formal classes on "hosting meetings at the UN" at the Kennedy School or SIPA or Georgetown SFS, nor is there a "hosting meetings about women's rights at the UN" job description at State or anywhere in the executive branch (the existing US delegation to the UN's responsibilities are different). She either does a good job, or she doesn't and Trump sends someone else. Given that Ivanka has now performed the role over multiple years, apparently her father approves of how she's done.
Everything you said is utterly preposterous. Physycists have failed to come up with a GUT for quite some time now. Should Jared be in charge of that as well? Perhaps Ivanka could do a university tour to shake things up a bit.
What progress have either of these two made on any front exactly? How's the experiment going, objectively? Because what I see is an almost completely ineffective foreign policy strategy and a bunch of appointees whose only real qualifications are being born to wealthy parents.
Yes, for these sorts of positions, "because [president] thinks it's OK, it's OK" is the criteria Trump and all of his predecessors have used. If you don't believe me, feel free to try to find a formal, defined qualification for "informal presidential envoy to hopefully get some/any progress done in an area no progress has occurred in four decades", or "host of some meetings at the UN for women's rights and other such causes". I'll wait. The only difference is that in these cases the envoy happens to be related to the president as opposed to say, an old college roommate (Example: Kenneth O'Donnell, whom Kevin Costner portrayed in Thirteen Days), or law school buddy (twenty for Obama early in his administration [1]).
[1] https://www.politico.com/story/2008/12/school-buds-20-harvar...
It's quite different from ...
>Everything you said is utterly preposterous. Physycists have failed to come up with a GUT for quite some time now. Should Jared be in charge of that as well?
Something like this, for which there is, in fact, a formal, defined criteria. The fact that you made such a ridiculous and obviously inapt comparison shows how desperate you are.
>The fact that you made such a ridiculous and obviously inapt comparison shows how desperate you are
"Inept" is, I believe, the word you were searching for.
Which is an inherently subjective argument, which is my point, as opposed to your saying that Kushner and Ivanka Trump are prima facie unqualified for their roles. Since you now know you can't prove this, you've shifted the goalposts.
>You can't argue that's it's a good idea, or that his decisions have produced any results
No, the onus is on you to prove that Kushner and Ivanka are inherently less qualified for what they are doing than, say, the examples I provided in my previous comment. Since being Robert Kennedy's college roommate and football teammate automatically means advising on national security matters in the Oval Office during the Cuban Missile Crisis, amirite?
I am not saying that O'Donnell was inherently unqualified for his role. On the contrary, for a position like his (identical to Kushner's and Ivanka's, by the way; just the title is different), being trusted by the person you advise is as important a criteria for such a role as any other. JFK trusted O'Donnell to work hard to give him good advice. Period. End of story.
Maybe Kushner will spend eight years over two Trump terms as Trump's Middle East envoy and no progress will be made in terms of Jewish-Arab peace. Such results would be ... about on par with all of his predecessors from seven different administrations over 40 years.
>"Inept" is, I believe, the word you were searching for.
Wrong again. "Inapt" is correct; your comparison of a position with formal, defined qualifications for versus positions without such is, as I said, an inapt one.
After 15 years really? That is annoying...
What happened was, while I had more than enough credits to graduate, I had an "incomplete" for a course in my last semester. I had dropped the course before the semester begam with the approval of my professor, but he marked me as incomplete instead of dropped, and apparently you can't get a diploma with an incomplete on your record(despite them letting me walk in graduation, and sending me a diploma a few weeks later).
Thankfully I had the whole email chain(because I bulk forwarded all of my college emails to my personal gmail address) at the time between my professor, the college administrator, and myself. If I didn't have that, theoretically I would have had to go back to college for a single class to finish out my degree.
Do you think the company would have let you continue to work while completing the course? Especially if it was like a foreign language or something?
Do you want someone reading your Facebook message because they can, or your gmail, or accessing your AWS resources? Granted these should all be locked and have strong audit trails from a system perspective, but there's always someone with "access" and you need to trust them.
Additionally, a four year degree might qualify your employment for grant subsidies for research while a lack there of might make it harder for the company to justify - I've worked in a few places now where my employment has been government subsidized since I've worked on novel research.
Basically, HR is stupid complicated and I'm sorry the experience was negative, but they were probably compelled to make sure they got that information to insulate the company from various legal exposures.
I think it'd be extremely dangerous for private corporations to run to the government for enforcement in the case that this sort of fraud occurs and that it'd be well if judges were highly skeptical of employers - otherwise, given the power imbalance of employers, they may be able to abuse such a system to subsidize their labour costs.
Private employers should also be given no opportunity to reclaim any costs arising from such a situation[1], as that too could be too easily abused.
1. And currently they are not, if you've ever wondered why nearly every employer prorates vacation time even for senior employees it's because if, on Jan 1, you took all your vacation days and then quit - there is no legal way for the company to try and reclaim the wages you were erroneously paid out - though if there was any pending funds coming to you (a bonus for instance) the company can usually deduct costs from those funds or just wholly withhold them, depending on the way that payment was described.
That's an "advantage" I'd never thought of to the standard US company boilerplate that you don't have an employment contract and (almost) nobody at the company has the authority to change that.
However for things like medical doctors, we need more care. Most people reading this could successfully be a medical doctor for a time: most people know enough to fake it and most problems are either obvious (or the right tests are obvious and from the results...) or go away on their own. You might not give the best treatment, but you can come up with something that is "good enough". However eventually (a few days) you will come across something the the average person doesn't know but a real doctor would.
As I didn't work closely with this person, I don't remember the details. What's clear is that HR will usually check up on employees after their start date, because it's assumed that no one's lying.
In another case, a company that I interviewed with ghosted me. (When I met the founder, he was late, had a bad attitude, ect.) They ghosted another friend of mine, and ended up hiring a rather unsavory person. When we were in school, their new hire was the campus drug dealer and cheated off of a friend of mine. They fired him a few months later when they found out he had a criminal record for cocaine.
So, yes, it's common for (Edit: American) HR to continue investigating new hires and then fire them shortly after due to issues with credentials or criminal records.
Yes, and there are a lot of government employees in many countries.
Why? She has been caught
- The position is in a public office
- She impersonated former employers
- She hired her brother, who wasn't qualified for the position
- It is not the first job she got by lying on her résumé
It's especially egregious in this instances as most everyone lies, at least a little, on their resumes because often it's the only way to get pasted HR filter BS.
The precise words are different for each jurisdiction, for example, the South Australia criminal law (https://www.legislation.sa.gov.au/LZ/C/A/CRIMINAL%20LAW%20CO...) says "139—Deception; A person who deceives another and, by doing so— (a)dishonestly benefits him/herself or a third person; or (b) dishonestly causes a detriment to the person subjected to the deception or a third person, is guilty of an offence." - in essence, all lying to get a benefit or harm someone else; though they've chosen to label that particular crime 'deception' instead of 'fraud' as in many other places.
I wonder to what extent this is because burglary is committed by people who are poor and not well educated, whereas white collar crimes are committed by people who look just like your friends and colleagues.
Breaking into a home is a violent crime whereas white collar crime is nonviolent. You can often return property, you cannot make someone un-experience a burglary. Don't get me wrong (i.e. "I know that if I don't include this disclaimer someone will try to) white collar crime and corruption like this should certainly be prosecuted but there's a reason we generally don't punish it as severely as violent crime since we generally consider property less valuable than life and health.
Not much since poor people who are friends and colleagues to other poor people also make the same judgements.
(Maybe also sound.)
https://text.npr.org/ is pretty great as well - it is https.
[A thing occurred. Here are the consequences.]
Usually, both the fact and the consequence are intentionally vague. The point seems to be to entice you want to read further.
As far as clickbait titles go, this is probably acceptable, but nonetheless it's getting pretty annoying. It's almost always a guarantee that the full details of the story will be more nuanced, and therefore will not carry the emotional weight of the headline, and the reader will be slightly disappointed.
It intentionally misrepresents the truth to get you to click. It is designed to create a false picture in your mind. That to me puts it right up there alongside the worst of the worst, particularly when coming from one of the biggest journalism organizations in the world.
[J-School survivor -- apologies if I'm a little touchy on the subject.]
https://macro.economicblogs.org/naked-capitalism/2018/08/smi...
Privilege isn't mysterious.
What is the data indicating this error is "rare" in the organization in question?
Right now they should be reviewing the background checks of everyone in the entire enterprise, as all of those people were subject also to the same obviously lax scrutiny. Starting with leadership and those in sensitive roles.
HR employees directly responsible for scrutiny in this particular case should be punished to include, at a minimum, placement on probation. (I agree with AcerbicZero though, I'd prefer they be fired.)
Often quoted as "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing".
The world needs people like you to speak up, to keep people like them in check. Do it anonymously if it suits you, but please do it.
I would guess the previous firings would be overlooked because the firing companies likely won't say anything on the record, and lying about team size is too small to be worth proving.
The difference is Ms. Chang claimed to be on the front cover of time magazine.
Speaks volumes on the process to get into these positions. Might as well save the hundreds of thousands spent on college and pickup a copy of Adobe Photoshop to supercharge your resume to get those high paying gigs.
Begs the question, how many top positions are filled with completely unqualified individuals?
Tangentially, though, I can't help but wonder about the staggering incompetency of the hiring committee. Not only did they seem to fail routine background confirmation, but how did this get past them:
> But the lies didn't end there. In earlier submissions, the court heard that Theriault used a photo of supermodel Kate Upton as her LinkedIn profile photo, according to CNN affiliate 7 News.
(Unless the defendant looks very similar to Upton)