The company I work for is expanding rapidly. One result is that I have a handful of positions I’m trying to fill. Regardless of the position and who it reports to, I always insist on taking part in the interviews. I leave the technical interviewing for others, I want to meet the people, find out who they are, get some idea if I think they’d fit in with the rest of the team.
So today I’m interviewing this guy. I’m looking at his CV and I see he was at his last job for a year and that ended several months ago. I ask him if that had been a contract position and he says it was. Since he’s not a native HK’er, I ask him how he’s managed to stay in HK since then. (I consider it a relevant question because I need to know if I’m going to have to sponsor an employment visa for the guy.) It turns out he’s got a new job. It’s not listed on his CV so I take a guess that it’s pretty recent and of course it is.
He tells me it’s another contract position, this time for six months, so I ask when the contract ends. Next May. So you just started this contract? That’s right. And you’re going to walk off it right away? Yes, he only has to give one month’s notice. But you just started the job – don’t you feel any sense of responsibility to the company you’re working for or the agency that placed you there? Well, he’s assuming that they will just dump him at the end of the six months so he owes them nothing and can quit any time. He had, by the way, no compunction about sharing this information with me. There was no hesitancy, no attempt to pretty it up in a nice ribbon and a bit of sparkle, he was fine with the whole thing.
Of course, legally speaking, he’s correct. He can. And if he goes into a contract with that kind of attitude, then the odds are pretty strong that his contract wouldn’t be renewed when the six months are up, if he makes it that long. And the odds are even stronger that I have zero interest in hiring someone with this kind of attitude.
Is it just me? Are there other employers not bothered by that sort of attitude, who don’t think, “If he does it to them, he can do it to me?”
The amazing thing is, over the course of the past few months, he’s not the worst I’ve seen, not by a long shot. But he certainly was the most brazen.






