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If they wanted to protect privacy, they would only have two responses: "We confirm that this person worked for Apple, ending on [date]. By policy, we don't dis
by dsr_ 5y ago
If they wanted to protect privacy, they would only have two responses:
"We confirm that this person worked for Apple, ending on [date]. By policy, we don't discuss any further details."
"We do not have records that this person worked for Apple."
- hammock 5y agoThat is essentially what wiping title record with "associate" does. It's a generic term that is commonly synonymous with employee.
- BoiledCabbage 5y agoNo it's clearly not. It's very clearly implying they had a job with the title "associate".
- awill 5y agoExactly. No information is better than inaccurate information.
- adrusi 5y agoNo it doesn't. It clearly could mean that, but it literally just means the person has associated with the company. I don't know why they'd use language that could create that confusion, but it's not straightforward dishonesty.
- ant6n 5y agoIt could mean that, but not clearly, and it really doesn't mean that.
- dev_tty01 5y agoSetting aside whether it is a good practice or not, if all of these agencies know that Apple does this, then it becomes a de facto meangingless term. If this has been an ongoing practice for a while and an agency is not aware of it, then it is a bad agency to work with.
- BoiledCabbage 5y agoSo your answer is "It's ok to be misleading. And because you don't know you're being mislead it's your fault"? Yeah I have a very different opinion of that situation.
- whynaut 5y agoThey literally pre-empted this response at the beginning of the comment
- nwallin 5y ago> It's a generic term that is commonly synonymous with employee. It is not. It implies an entry level/unskilled/probationary position. You would call a person who works tier 1 support an associate, or works the cash register in an Apple store, or a person whose job title reads "Software Engineer" and had been with the company for 2 months. You would not call a person whose job title reads "Software Engineer" and had been with the company for 18 months an associate. If you've got a stack of applicants and one of them comes up with some bullshit like their previous employer claims their job title was Associate and they claim their actual job title was Software Engineer, that means I either have to do legwork to figure out what's actually happening, is this person lying about their experience etc, or just hire someone else. It's not a disqualifying characteristic, but if the resume says one thing and the background check says a different thing, that's a red flag. Sometimes the red flag is nothing, basically all of us have had a scumbag for an employer at various points in our careers, who's might to lie about us to future employers just because they're spiteful. But red flags have to be chased down and verified before you can hire someone with red flags on their resume. Right now, in 2022, I would just hire them if they had a pulse, red flags or not. But when the next recession happens? And we've gone through three rounds of layoffs, and only now are positions opening up in onesies and twosies and there are 40 applicants? I'm just going to discard the 30 resumes with red flags. Among the 10 remaining resumes I'm gonna interview the 5 who went to the best schools and had the most experience.
- redler 5y agoSince it will be widely known among peer organizations that Apple has this policy, the presence or absence of the "Associate" title achieves this, in effect, does it not? I think it's unlikely someone seeking a 600K job will be mistaken for having been a retail employee.
- sumeno 5y agoBased on the article it obviously isn’t widely enough known to prevent people from losing job offers over it.
- torstenvl 5y agoAnd in that scenario, Apple is the bad actor for referring to a non-C-suite employee as an associate, not the employer who fired someone over unverified information and poor assumptions?
- sumeno 5y agoThey weren’t fired, they had an offer revoked. But either way, two things can be bad at the same time
- qqii 5y agoI'd argue that false data doesn't achieve this, it just confuses everything. Using an analogy in programming terms, it would be like `job_title <- Maybe "NULL"` whereas they really ment `job_title <- Nothing`.
- redler 5y agoI do agree with this. If they stick with this policy it would be better if they use some unambiguous title like “Former Employee”.
- seanhunter 5y agoThis was the policy during the time I worked at Goldman Sachs in fact. They wouldn't confirm any details other than your employment dates.