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Does your employer forbid the hiring of employee family members/close relatives?
If they encourage it, does your company have specific rules for it (ex. a manager cannot supervise their relative) or do they make no bones about people's perception of favoritism/bias?
My first retail job expressively forbid the hiring of family members. I didn't grasp it at the time and thought it was a stupid idea. Fast forward fifteen years and exposure to different corporate cultures, and now I understand why.
Does your employer forbid the hiring of employee family members/close relatives?
If they encourage it, does your company have specific rules for it (ex. a manager cannot supervise their relative) or do they make no bones about people's perception of favoritism/bias?
My first retail job expressively forbid the hiring of family members. I didn't grasp it at the time and thought it was a stupid idea. Fast forward fifteen years and exposure to different corporate cultures, and now I understand why.
I have never worked for an employer that forbade the hiring of family members of current employees, but my employer have all been pretty large organizations. However, most of not all had specific rules regarding such relationships, most importantly that a family member cannot act as a supervisor of another. It's a very good rule that all medium/large sized businesses should adopt. I understand that family businesses and other closely held businesses operate a little differently, but there are some folks who won't work for closely held businesses because of the favoritism that there often is for family member employees.
I've never personally worked for a company that just outright prohibited people from being hired if they have a relative working at the same place. However, just about every one of them had a nepotism policy.
I've worked at two places where someone MIGHT have questioned things. A large consulting firm where the CEO's kid was a staff consultant there as well. While the lines eventually connected - realistically, there were enough layers that it was unlikely an issue. Most people didn't even know since the guy wasn't the type to throw that knowledge around. The other was a husband/wife genomics team that ran a lab for a biotech I worked at. In that sense, they were essentially a team with regards to the work they were doing.
Years ago I worked at a major tire manufacturing company and it was very common to hire family of existing workers. It was astonishing what happened. One guy was the head of H.R. and both his kids were hired and then were pushed up into upper management positions in less than half the time it took other more competent people to progress. A lot of un-connected people were resentful of this.
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We have had that situation, even spouses working here, but when the wife got promoted and would have supervised her husband, he got transferred to another department. We do not allow a manager to supervise their relative, but do allow relatives to be hired. It did get messy once when a different husband and wife got divorced and both still worked here. Recently two engineers in different departments got married, a brother and sister both work in the same building but different departments, and we had a father and son in different departments.
Does your employer forbid the hiring of employee family members/close relatives?
Not at all. It's a family business, and his sons all work with us. They keep their heads down and do their work like the rest of us. None of them are management. In fact, I'm not sure he would ever put any in management because he is too aware of the implications. I believe they will each move on to bigger things eventually in another company, or perhaps even start branches of our company in other cities where we have client bases.
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