is my future manager a bigoted jerk? — Ask a Manager

Remember the letter-writer last week who saw her future manager’s bigoted Twitter account and wanted to ask not to report to him? Here’s the update.

Thanks for publishing and answering my letter. I actually already have an update!

I ended up talking to Willow (my interim manager) about it the day after I emailed you. I wasn’t planning on it but we were meeting about something else and I brought it up when we were done. Turns out she’d also googled Xander, saw his offensive tweets, and had already gone directly to Giles, who’d escalated things to HR.

Willow told me that our company always vets candidates’ socials and that Giles told her that Xander’s twitter account apparently never showed up during the search. They suspect that he locked it down during his job search and made it public again after getting his offer. She also told me that Giles had mentioned wanting to confirm the account was actually Xander’s before taking any next steps. This was all late last week

This morning, our department got an email from Giles that said that Xander wouldn’t be joining our company after all. I don’t know the details but can assume that we pulled his offer. So I won’t have to work under this man!

Also, since some commenters were speculating, I can confirm that Xander’s tweets weren’t just conservative political stances that I disagreed with. Many of the things he regularly retweeted are blatantly racist, misogynist, and homophobic — there’s very little nuance there.

Thanks for publishing my letter!