Pay Me to Go Away

You and your job no longer a good fit? There may be an alternative to either quitting outright or waiting around to get fired

by Liz Ryan

Nine months after its publication in this space, the column illuminating the seamy HR practice of fake job interviews is still generating lots of mail (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/10/05, "Was That Really an Interview?"). As I wrote, you can be the victim of a fake job interview if the company suddenly closes an open job requisition after your interview was already scheduled.

In that case, rather than embarrass itself by calling you to cancel, the company may subject you to a for-appearances-only interview, which you'll doubtless find one of the easiest interviews you've ever experienced. No surprise. There's not actually any "there" there, and no incentive for the interviewer to do more than spend a pleasant hour in genial conversation with you. You'll walk away thinking you've got the job wrapped up, when there was no job available in the first place.

The large amount of mail that this column still generates got me thinking recently about other unexplored corners of the HR underworld. There's plenty that goes on behind closed corporate doors that ordinary working folks don't understand. One of these shadowy practices—understand, it's not well-known, but perfectly legitimate—is the one I call "The Third Path."

The Bad Match

Here's the way it works. You're a white-collar professional employee, and things aren't going well at your job. There could be any number of reasons for that. Either you haven't gotten the resources you were promised, or for some reason a higher-up doesn't like you, or the company's direction has changed since you were hired. Or maybe the job just requires a set of skills that you don't really possess. The reason isn't important. The issue is that you're in the wrong job. The company knows it, and deep down, you do too.

No one is happy: You're not at ease, and your boss is dismayed. Your manager would love for you to win the lottery and give notice today, but that isn't happening. You've got no real incentive to quit, but neither are you on anyone's short list for Employee of the Year.

So here's what might happen. Your boss will say, "Gee, Stan, you're a great guy, but things aren't going all that swimmingly in your role." And you'll say, "What would you like me to do differently?" or otherwise ask for direction. And the boss will give you some direction if he or she can, but you know that the road ahead leads downhill.

Laser-Surgery Elimination

Now you have a problem, but so does your employer. In the traditional corporate paradigm, there are only three ways out of a job. You can quit, be fired, or be laid off. But if the company wants to get rid of you via a laser-surgery-type position elimination (i.e., yours is the only head to roll) they can't replace you in that job for some period of time. If the position is being eliminated, they can't exactly post the same job on Monster.com the next day. So companies get stressed under these circumstances.

They want you to quit, but they can't tell you that. There's something in HR law called "constructive discharge." It means that a company that tries to fire you by simply harassing you (like that poor guy in the movie Office Space whose desk was moved further and further away from the action until he was finally working in the basement) can get in trouble. So they can either begin the ugly process of firing you, or sit on their hands and wait for you to start job-hunting and accept another offer.

As it happens, companies are often slow to start a Performance Plan, otherwise known as the "first warning, second warning, see ya!" process. It's time-consuming and awkward, and involves HR: all reasons for your typical corporate manager to delay taking action. But this is an opportunity for you. Here's how to initiate the Third Path scenario.