oh for sure there are examples where people abuse the employment relationship - those who churn jobs simply looking for severance/unemployment, chronic medical

oh for sure there are examples where people abuse the employment relationship - those who churn jobs simply looking for severance/unemployment, chronic medical issues or absences which lead to very low output, etc. and its understandable that a manager would try to weed those out. that can also lead to many false positives, IMO. personal example, in my first job out of college my manager and i did not get along. i assume they wanted to fire me and began to build a case against me, emailing HR every morning i was not at my desk by 8:30 AM. i was naïve and the HR rep basically told me i should quit because my manager had "evidence". so i did, and it took a LONG time to find another job because of the "Scarlett Letter". it then becomes a self fulfilling prophecy since the longer you're without a job the more suspicious it becomes. it all just feels very classically corporate to me, from a time when people stayed in one city/town for a long time and if you had a gap in the resume it was automatically detrimental to you because all the good people already have jobs.