When applying for any positions, every applicant should be able to expect courteous treatment by the interviewer or HR manager put in charge of hiring.
An unfortunate incident occurred recently in the Seattle area, which was a textbook example of the kind of communications that no HR professional should ever send to any job applicant. In a story reported by ABC News, Minh Huynh, a Vietnamese immigrant whose English is still somewhat limited, received an email from an HR employee at Dash Delivery LLC for a position as a long-haul truck driver.
It was Minh Huynh’s 18-year-old daughter, Emily, who spotted the email and was shocked at the insulting way that the Dash human resources employee seemed to mock her father’s English skills, Minh Huynh speaks mostly Vietnamese and Cantonese. Emily said she rates her father’s English scale of 1-5 in terms of proficiency at a 2.5.
“Let me tell you now, if you no speak English”, the employee wrote, ”I will send you home.” The sender had also underlined the words, if you no speak English”, to add emphasis.
Emily, who goes over her father’s emails and points out where he might do better with his English skills, was taken aback by the passive-aggressive email that her father received and decided to do something about it.
The power of social media should never be underestimated. Emily took a screenshot of the offending email, called out the offending HR employee on Twitter to her roughly 300 followers. Within two days her tweet was then re-tweeted more than 16,000 times and was liked by more than 35,000 fellow Twitter users. The Tweet also caught the attention of the executives at Dash Delivery.
To the credit of Seattle-based Company, Emily Huynh received a letter of apology just one day after she tweeted her complaint about the HR employee’s actions. They also informed her that the employee in question had