Woman loses a job offer after her former manager, who volunteered to be her reference, flags burnout concerns to the hiring company

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  via Vitaly Gariev

  Woman sitting at a desk with her hand on her head, looking overwhelmed while working on a laptop.

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• She was upfront with her manager about burning out from constant client work. The manager was supportive, said the door was always open, and then volunteered herself as a reference. That last part is important because nobody asked her. She offered. And then a few weeks later, she got on the phone with a hiring company and led with concerns about burnout, like she was doing them a favor.

• My former manager pressured me to put her down as a reference, and then basically made me lose a new job.

  
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  via Vitaly Gariev

  Focused woman typing on a laptop at a desk in a modern home office with shelves and plants behind her.

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• The new job had barely any client contact. That was literally the whole point. Burnout from phones and clients all day is not a mysterious condition that follows someone everywhere forever. It is a specific reaction to a specific type of work, and the solution was sitting right there in the job description. Raising it as a concern to the new employer anyway is either a misunderstanding of how burnout works or something less charitable.

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  via acuity-creel

• What stings about this particular situation is that the honesty backfired. Plenty of people leave jobs and say nothing real about why. She told the truth, her manager took that information in, acted warm and understanding about it, and then repeated it out of context to someone with the power to take away her next opportunity. That is a pretty clean argument for being vague in exit interviews.

• The offer to be a reference is the part that keeps this from being a simple story about a bad reference. A bad reference from someone you listed out of necessity is frustrating but understandable. A bad reference from someone who pulled you aside and said put me down, I've got you, is something else. That is a trap with a friendly face on it, whether it was intentional or just spectacularly thoughtless.

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• Reaching out to ask why seems completely reasonable. The answer probably won't be satisfying, but at minimum it closes the loop on whether this person should ever be listed again, which at this point seems pretty settled anyway.

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