Tell the truth or disguise? 3

[MedicineEng]

Imagine this hypothesis:
You live in an area with a big shortage of a particular resource, for instance engineers.
You work with a very good engineer with whom, not being exactly your friend, you maintain a cordial relationship.
One day you receive a call from a headhunter trying to get references from this engineer to take him to another job.
What would you do:

-You tell the truth and tell him that he is a very good engineer and risk that he will leave the company leaving a really bad situation to be solved;

-"Protect" the company and paint a "darker" picture in order to have the headhunter loosing its interest?

 

[controlnovice]

Most companies don't want you to say anything. They might be liable.

If you say the person is great: They get hired but prove to be extremely bad. You, at ZZZ company, lied about the person to get rid of them.

If you say the person is not good: The person looking for the job gets PO'd at you, and ZZZ company.

Best response is to just politly respond you are not allowed to respond per company policy. We can only be a reference to let the 'headhunter' know the person worked for us from date X to date Y.

______________________________________________________________________________
This is normally the space where people post something insightful.

 

[kchayfie]

If you say "I found xxx really difficult to work with" it could be that you find every man and his dog difficult to work with. Likewise if you say "I loved having xxx around" it could be because you're a sadistic SOB and you loved watching xxx crush the spirits of other co-workers. You're not lying, you're conveying your opinion and what the rest of the world chooses to do with that opinion is entirely down to them!

 

[IRstuff]

There was a book floating around about a decade ago that had a bunch of double entendres for this type of question, along the lines of:

"His performance was unbelieveable."

The Oracle at Delphi, of course, was the epitome of this concept.

TTFN

FAQ731-376