idealpeople blog

Now here’s a story we can get our teeth into….

For those too busy to click the link, it’s all about a new system being set up called the “National Staff Dismissal Register”, which is a system where an employer can log the details of any member of staff who was fired or who resigned from their post as a result of theft, dishonesty or damage or a central register.

We stumbled upon this story quite by accident, but quite why there’s not more of a fuss being made it is beyond us (hey, maybe we’ve all been too interested in the Mayoral elections or the Champions League to care about something important and potentially damaging…), so we thought we’d have a go at…well, kicking off about it.

The general idea behind this is clear. You have a member of staff who is *accused* (this is the key part…wait for it) of doing something dishonest and is subsequently fired or resigns before going through a disciplinary. The employer in question then logs this person on this dishonesty database which other employers can check before offering them a job at any point in the future. This means that other companies reduce their risk of hiring dishonest people who might cause harm or damage at work. Clever? Maybe.

What’s absolutely not clever is that an employee (or ex-employee) can have their details registered even if they haven’t been convicted of a crime by the police.

WHAT? Er, what happened to innocent until proven guilty?

This is a solution so ridiculous that it deserves all the scorn that will inevitably be thrown at it - after it’s been implemented at great cost of course.

We can imagine thousands of people wrongly accused of stealing toilet rolls being literally incapable of finding a new job because of this - even though they have no criminal background and have never been shown to have committed an offence. Or, even worse - a company putting an ex-employee on the list just because their boss really didn’t like them….

We’re sure that there’s a few multinationals out there who earn scandalous profits despite paying their front-line workers miserable pay (ahem) who would benefit from this. However, we’ve got a couple of other suggestions as to how to solve this problem without having the side-effect of possibly ruining an innocent person’s career:

1) Let your competitors hire the people who you think stole from you
Seriously. If they are indeed guilty, then it’s your competitors who will lose out, isn’t it? Where’s the love-in come from?

2) Well, like, take a reference….
Last time we checked it was perfectly legal to mention in a reference that you fired someone. Have you tried actually taking a reference? It’s something you should think about maybe.

Of course, we’re not condoning stealing from your employer. But surely someone in a position of genuine authority must recognise the damage this could do? Please? First it’s checking people’s MySpace profiles for skeletons in the closet - now it’s this. What happened to hiring the best person for the job? Honestly, we haven’t heard or anything this silly all week.

In other news, we’ve just part-launched our new job-search functionality over here. Check out http://www.idealpeople.net/candidates/index.php. We’ll have a job search bar on the blog, just as soon as we’ve figured out how.

Happy hunting!