A post about procrastination

I'll get to it tomorrow...

The coverup is worse than the crime, Part II

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how former Arkansas football coach had an issue with credibility. Sure enough, there is another situation, that has some similarities to what I wrote about.

This time around, it was announced yesterday that the Scott Thompson, CEO of Yahoo, has been caught padding his resume. Today, the board member in charge of hiring Thompson is not going to run for re-election to the board. There is only one step left in this story to have yet happen.

Thompson must resign from his position or the board should fire him.

As it stands, Thompson has zero credibility with any of his employees. Or at least he would have none with me if he were my CEO. His deception is telling all of his employees that it is OK to lie to get ahead.

While it appears on the surface that he is qualified to be the CEO of a large company, if he is willing to lie about the credentials that he has, what else is he willing to lie about?

Yahoo has been a company that has been in trouble for a long time. They need a leader that not only people within the company can depend upon, but those outside. Thompson is not that leader.

The coverup is worse than the crime

It's said that character is defined by what you do when nobody (or most people) are not watching.

For those that don't pay attention to sports, former Arkansas coach Bobby Petrino was fired on Tuesday. In the world of sports, most coaches get fired for the team not doing well. Quite the opposite in this case as Arkansas was one of the top teams in the country the past several seasons.

So why would a university fire a coach who was doing so well? By lying to his boss about the details surrounding a motorcycle accident he was involved with.

Sure, it was embarrassing that it was discovered he was riding with a woman half his age, while his wife and four kids were some place else. But a lot of people in high profile positions have affairs and survive.

But when the boss started investigating and asked Petrino what was going on, Petrino should have told the truth, but he didn't. Then when it was revealed that Petrino hired the woman he was having an affair with, over 158 other applicants, that raised some serious red flags (not to also mention the throwback to the days when the boss would hire the secretary who couldn't type).

At that point, the athletic director didn't have choice but to fire Petrino. Having been discovered that he hired his mistress would have probably come out at some point (if not publicly, people within the program would have found out - if they didn't know already). But the athletic director was also lied to about what really happened.

Had Petrino come clean to his boss early in the investigation (or even before one was started), he may not have saved his job. But he would have been able to at least take the high road - if there was much of one in this case. By trying to cover up his actions, it made the final decision to be fired that much easier.

As the links to the articles above showed, his character was largely questioned already. By now, his character is in tatters and he may never coach again. Learn from this, so that you don't kill your career. The lesson, as always, is that the coverup is indeed worse than the crime.

Here is how to lose a large pool of potential candidates

In an effort to network and reach out to others, I participate in a few Twitter chats. I do this not only to learn about what other people are saying and thinking, but to also share a few nuggets of knowledge that I have.

I was in one last night and notice some excellent answers being given by someone who works in HR at a US based automaker. Following the chat, I exchanged a few tweets back and forth with her, and she provided a link to the career website for that company.

After not having the best experience at the last conglomerate that I worked for, I was not expecting to find much of anything that I may have liked. However, I encountered a major problem before I could even see what kinds of jobs they had to offer.

When I pulled up the webpage, I noticed that nothing was formatted correctly, poorly laid out and just a major mess. Since I use the Safari web browser, I occasionally encounter this problem. So, I tried Firefox, since that will fix all problems I come across with Safari.

Except I then had the exact same problem.

Since I was not sure quite what the problem was, I sent a tweet to my contact at this company, and explained the problem. Her response: "Hi Rob, currently our ATS for job openings works best with Internet Explorer right now."

Seriously? This immediately brought back my failed attempts to apply for another major company that handles prescription drug plans when I had similar issues with viewing and applying for jobs within their company.

But with web browser usage somewhere around 53 percent being Internet Explorer...these two companies are missing out on up to 47 percent of their talent pool by letting their jobs sites be only accessed by IE. I'm not sure who is making these decisions within the companies, but if I were CEO, and I discovered this, someone would have some explaining to do!

So if nothing else, make sure your job website can be accessed by multiple web browsers. If this was 1997, I might understand. However, being 2012, access by multiple browsers over multiple platforms is a requirement!