This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…
1. My boss announced layoffs while wearing sunglasses (yes, it’s Anna Wintour)
You may have seen the reports last week that Anna Wintour wore sunglasses throughout the indoor, in-office Zoom meeting in which she announced corporate consolidation and immediate layoffs of many of those in attendance. I was in this Zoom meeting and as a regular blog reader, I’m curious to know your thoughts. This is not done, right? Right??
In my opinion, the way in which this news was announced (midweek, as gossip with no official statement, while wearing sunglasses) has only propelled a raft of well-deserved unflattering press coverage. Probably not coincidentally, I’m told a number of comms staffers were laid off last month.
You are correct: laying off people while wearing sunglasses is rude and bad management. It sends the message, “I don’t take this seriously, even though it’s very serious to you, and I’m definitely not invested enough to pay you the respect of looking you in the eye.”
As someone whose whole career is built on understanding the messages clothes and accessories send, Anna Wintour knows this.
2. I suspect our writing job candidates are using AI to write their applications
I was recently involved in recruiting a new copywriter and editor for my team. As part of the application process, we asked applicants to answer a few short written questions. We use this to find out about how their experience meets the essential criteria for the role, as well as seeing their writing style and grammar skills.
We got applications from some brilliant candidates, but there were a couple that gave me pause. The first thing I noticed was a lot of American-English spelling in their answers (think ‘prioritize’ rather than the British ‘prioritise’; we’re based in the UK). There could be several reasons for this, but it did set off a couple of alarm bells for me, as I know most AI generators use American-English. I also just got a bit of an odd feeling from their answers — they felt very stilted, impersonal and “buzzwordy” in a way that just felt strange compared to other applications.
On a hunch, I copied and pasted a few answers into an online AI detector, which said that AI content was likely present. (I also copied some other candidates’ answers into the program and those came up as “no AI content detected.”)
I mentioned my suspicion to the hiring manager, who said she’d take a look. In the end, we didn’t bring these applicants forward as we had lots of candidates with far more relevant experience and knowledge. We sent out our standard email rejection to them, just like the other candidates we didn’t move forward.
But how would you handle this if the candidate was a possible frontrunner? I had no concrete proof that they’d used AI for their answers but it did look like a real possibility. Is this just the way things are going these days? Would you have mentioned the possible AI use in your rejection or just left it? I don’t know if I’d have felt differently if the job wasn’t so writing-focused.
There’s no reason to mention your AI suspicions in the rejection letter (which most of the time don’t contain specific reasons for the rejection, especially when the person wasn’t even interviewed).
I think the question about how to handle it if the candidate was a frontrunner is a bit of a contradiction — because you were assessing these candidates’ writing skills and the thing that tipped you off was that their writing was bad/weird/stilted, so by definition they already weren’t frontrunners for jobs where writing is a central focus. But if you had a candidate whose writing was good but something was still screaming AI to you and the person was otherwise strong, a good next step would be to give a writing test during an interview, so you could see their writing skills in real time.
(Of course, unless the interview was in-person, they could still use AI. But at some point, it’s reasonable to conclude they’re either a good writer or they’re good at using AI to generate good writing. You’d need to decide if it matters for your context if it’s the latter. If it does — like if they won’t be able to use AI once on the job for legal/proprietary reasons — you’d want to make that very clear and ideally invest in assessment processes that rule it out, like in-person testing.)
3. Employer is blowing up my phone after firing me for “misconduct”
My small, family-owned employer of four years let me go in early November. I had had a disagreement with the owner and, having seen them fire many employees out of the blue, I suspected I’d be let go at the next opportunity. They opposed my unemployment claim on the basis of “misconduct,” stating I’d made “too many mistakes and had been warned.” In my opinion, I made a normal number of mistakes (two, in the entire year), and had never been warned, in writing or verbally, nor put on any PIP. In fact, I’d always received excellent performance reviews and had been told I’d be receiving a performance bonus the following week and my metrics were up.
Naturally, I appealed the unemployment decision, and the day after I received notice of my hearing date, my former employer began blowing up my phone (three to five times a day, every business day since then). They never leave a message and it’s causing me considerable anxiety. How do you suggest I handle it? Ignore it? Document it for the hearing? Email them to please let me know, in writing, what they need?
You’re under no obligation to talk to them; feel free to block their number if you want to. Personally, I’d answer one of the calls because I’d be curious to see what they wanted and they have no power over you anymore — but if you’d be happier blocking and ignoring, that’s a fine way to go. It would also be fine to email them, say you’ve seen them calling you repeatedly, and email will be the best way to reach you.
Really, any of these options are fine so do the one that will bring you the most peace of mind. (You can document the calls too if you want, although they’re unlikely to come up at the unemployment hearing, which is going to be tightly focused on what led to your termination.)
4. I retired a year ago and my old coworker still calls for help
I retired a year ago. Before leaving, I thoroughly trained the two employees who would be picking up my duties, which included thorough documentation of processes, logins, and passwords.
However, one of those employees apparently lost the instructions on how to terminate a company-paid cell phone account so my work phone account could be terminated. Ultimately, this person (not a manager) made a decision to just keep paying my wireless account and hope their manager didn’t notice. Over the last year, this person has called me once or twice a month to ask questions about other processes or for advice on handling a situation. I have helped as best I can, feeling that since they were paying for my cell phone, the least I could do was help if I could.
But finally in November, they figured out how to transfer the account billing responsibility back to me, and I said basically, “Okay, so now you aren’t paying my phone bill any longer, please don’t call me for work help any more. I trained you and Jane and it’s been almost a year; you should understand those processes by now.”
Now that person is calling me again, asking for help, and I refused. This is causing some hurt feelings. For example, they used to invite me to birthday lunches at local restaurants, but they’ve stopped since I refused to keep helping. It’s a tradition that retirees are also invited to the annual holiday potluck, but I wasn’t invited. When I said “no more calls,” their behavior in the moment was odd, like with a betrayed note in their voice. This person has a long history of avoiding learning how to do tasks that they don’t want to be responsible for.
Other retirees apparently continued to provide help long after leaving and I don’t want my good reputation/relationships to suffer, but there is no compensation possible, and I want my working life to be OVER. Do you have any advice?
It’s not normal to be expected to answer work questions a year after you retired! In certain circumstances, you might be willing to be consulted extremely occasionally on something very important — but not frequently, and not on basic processes the person was already trained on. Frankly, you could have declined to help even while they were paying your phone bill; you didn’t ask them to do that, and it was their decision to continue it. Their paying it didn’t create any obligation that you needed to repay.
As for what to do now … do you care about going to the birthday lunches and the annual potluck? Because if you don’t, this is easy: you’ve already handled it, and now you can ignore this person’s calls (block the number if you want!) and go about enjoying retirement. If you do want to attend those events, coordinate that with a different person in the office so you’re not dependent on the embittered guy for your invitations. (But also, don’t underestimate the value in making a clean break and letting those events stay in the past now that you don’t work there anymore.)
Either way, you’ve made it clear that you’re no longer available, and you can ignore the calls or say “sorry, I’m retired — I’m no longer a resource for this stuff” without any guilt at all. (If you really want to shut it down, you could ask that person’s manager to ensure the calls stop, which would be very reasonable to do at this point.)
5. Commuting reimbursement in a one-car family
My spouse and I have one car. I mainly use it, because I work out of the house and while my job is technically accessible by public transit, the commute would be four times as long and I have some chronic pain conditions which make that difficult.
My spouse mostly works from home, but infrequently has to travel. He does not usually use our car for work. His boss has mentioned him going to a site that is about 2.5 hours away by car.
If they ask him to drive there, would it be appropriate to either ask to rent a car or if they could cover my Uber to/from work? It would probably be in the $60 range roundtrip. I am not sure if this is an appropriate request, or how to word it.
It’s really unlikely that they’d cover your Uber to and from work, since you’re not their employee, but it would be normal for them to pay for his transportation since he is. He shouldn’t frame this as “I have a car but my spouse uses it” (since that’s too likely to raise “can’t you work out a way to use it on these days?”) but rather as “I don’t have a car” or “I don’t have a car available to me during the day.” They almost surely have other employees without cars, and it’s normal to expect them to cover non-car-owning employees’ transportation to other sites when necessary for the work. He just needs to explain he’ll need that.
