Thursday, August 04, 2005

Firing Employees in the Information Age

If you didn’t think it was already tough enough to fire an employee, check out this web site.  It’s dedicated to stories submitted by former employees about their terminations.  If I had to guess, it’s a marketing strategy for an affiliated site (a search engine for job postings).  I read through a couple of “stories” and none of them seemed silly, outrageous or embarrassing to me (at least not the ones that sounded true).  Most of them just made me cringe.  One of the posts is titled “Fired Over Known Handicap”.  Who’ll be surprised if some company files suit, claiming it was defamed by one of the stories?  (On a related information-age lawyering note, always remember to seek discovery on an employee’s post-employment communications—you might be surprised by what you find).