Question

Personally Yours: The negligent Hiring/Retention Case

GeNeral INformatIoN

Personally Yours is a personal assistant rm founded in 1997. After years of struggling to balance work and family, Sarah Winters established this company to address some of the challenges working professionals face in their busy lives. Personally Yours provides a wide range of services, including residential housekeeping, grocery shopping, household organization, home companion, adult day care and even handyperson services.

Sarah Winters started the company in her hometown of Tampa, Florida, with the help of a small business grant, personal savings, and three employees (her mother, sister and cousin). After several rocky years, Winters now has 15 branch offices located throughout central Florida and Miami. Each branch employs a branch manager who is responsible for administrative duties and approximately 15 employees who work either full time or part-time. The rest of her 250 employees are located at the Tampa headquarters. To keep operations lean, Winters has kept central administrative staff to a minimum; she has outsourced services such as payroll, accounts payable and legal services. But as the company grows, Winters has been rethinking this strategy.

role of Gary GarcIa, Hr suPervIsor

Gary Garcia has been the HR supervisor at Personally Yours for the past 9 years. His immediate supervisor is HR Manager Alyssa Williams. After attending a meeting
at the local SHRM chapter, Garcia came away with some great ideas about how their organization could improve HR operations. Overall, things are running pretty efficiently; but Personally Yours is a quickly growing, medium-sized organization, and in many ways, it still operates like the small, family-owned and -operated business it was just a few years ago.

For example, hiring processes are now standardized at headquarters and at the branch offices. Each job applicant completes a standardized application, submits a re?sume? (if appropriate for the position), does pre-employment testing, and undergoes a screening that includes contacting references and former employers and a criminal background check. However, this was not the case when the company first started, and many longtime employees have never gone through a background check. This is extremely troubling to Garcia, in light of the fact that their employees work in clients’ homes and have contact with vulnerable individuals (e.g., children, elderly, infirm).

role of alyssa WIllIams, Hr maNaGer

Alyssa Williams is the HR manager for Personally Yours, Inc. She has been in this position for more than seven years. Williams works in the corporate headquarters located in Tampa, Florida. She has an undergraduate degree in HR and is active in the local SHRM chapter.

Though her title is officially HR manager, her duties are more like a vice president of HR. She reports directly to the president and founder, Sarah Winters, who routinely consults Williams regarding both general and strategic HR management decisions. The company has outsourced some HR functions, such as payroll; however, when it comes to the remaining HR functions that are handled internally, top management takes a hands-off approach and allows Williams to exercise her judgment. (Williams is the highest-ranking human resource management professional in the company.) Williams feels complimented by the faith the senior management has shown in her. For example, all requests to create new positions must be approved by Williams.

role of vIolet jeNNINGs, braNcH maNaGer, tamPa-east

Violet Jennings has been the Tampa-East branch manager of Personally Yours,Inc., for the past 9 years. Jennings has been friends with the president and founder, Sarah Winters, ever since they attended high school together. Jennings was one of the first non–family members hired to work for Personally Yours, and she has been serving as manager of the Tampa-East branch for 6 years now. Before working for Personally Yours, Jennings worked in a number of positions, including housekeeping manager for a major hotel chain and customer service representative for a local utility company. Jennings was also a stay-at-home mother for several years and briefly owned a used-clothing store.

The Tampa-East branch is the largest branch office, with 17 full-time housekeepers, 11 full-time nurses, 19 part-time nurses, 10 part-time home health aides, and 6 full-time handymen. Jennings’ official job title is branch manager, but because of the close relationship she has with the Winters’ and her long tenure with the company, Jennings is frequently consulted by headquarters when they are making policy decisions.

Currently, hiring processes at Personally Yours are standardized at headquarters and at the branch offices. Each job applicant completes a standardized application, submits a re?sume? (if appropriate for the position), does pre-employment testing, and goes through a screening that includes contacting references and former employers and a criminal background check. However, this was not the case when the organization was first started, and many longtime employees have never gone through a background check. Because their employees work in clients’ homes and have contact with vulnerable individuals (e.g., children, elderly, infirm), HR supervisor Gary Garcia would like to reevaluate the company’s screening policies.

Assignment:

- You and the HR supervisor, along with suggestions from the branch manager, must determine if background checks on all employees (new and existing) are necessary. If so, you must develop a protocol to conduct them (e.g., which employees; how thorough).

- It has come to Branch Manager Violet Jennings’s attention that one of her longtime employees, Jackson Tibbits, a handyman, is on the Florida Sexual Offender list. After doing more research, they learn that 17 years ago, when Tibbits was 24, he was convicted of having unlawful sexual contact with a 15-year-old female. As a registered sexual offender, Tibbits cannot live within 1,000 yards of a school and must register with the state any time he moves. Also, he is prohibited by law from holding positions such as schoolteacher and healthcare professional. You, Garcia and Jennings must decide whether you should terminate Tibbits based on this newly discovered information.

Answer 1

Answer) The background check for the new and old employees is necessary.The following guidelines must be followed for background checking:

• Professional data: verification of dates of employment with last employer, job title, salary, performance evaluation and attendance.
• Personal data: verification of academic credentials, driving records (if relevant) and others.
• Inform candidates that you will check references.
• Get a signed waiver from the candidate authorizing you to contact references. (References may ask you to provide them with a copy of the authorization the applicant signed and a release of liability. So you may want to consider adding a statement to the authorization that the candidate releases references from liability for anything they say. The waiver should also provide that any reference material will remain confidential and that the candidate may not see it, whether hired or not. Without this assurance, many former employers and other common references are naturally reluctant to provide more than dates of employment and position held.)
• Focus on the facts. What were the job responsibilities? Under what conditions did the person work best? Why did he or she leave the company? Would you rehire that individual?
• Ask references only those questions that you can lawfully ask candidates.
• Never rely on a single reference. It’s legal to check public records to verify a candidate’s credentials. You can call a university to confirm a degree or a licensing body to verify that a candidate is really certified. You can run a criminal records check to see if an applicant was ever convicted of a crime (although it’s illegal to ask about a criminal arrest, which means the person was only suspected of a crime).

Answer) Jackson Tibbits must be immediately terminated from the job as he is a registered sexual offender.Although the case has been registered 17 years ago.But he is currently working as handyman he is in direct contact of clients’ homes and have contact with vulnerable individuals (e.g., children, elderly, infirm).And if he commits the crime again then this will make the organization vulnerable to a negligent-hiring lawsuit by any worker or customer who’s been hurt by the violent employee.A number of court decisions have established the principle that an employer has a “duty of care” to protect workers, customers and clients from injury caused by an unfit employee who an employer knew (or reasonably could have been expected to know) posed a risk. So he must be terminated.