Thrown Under The Bus

One of my Face book friends posed this question to every one for the day, If one of your co workers threw you under the bus what would you do? How would you handle it?

I found it very ironic that he would ask that question today because two of my co workers threw me under the bus on Tuesday. See part of my job is to confirm the start of employees once they have arrived for their first day of employment. Once I am notified by the recruiter and/or hiring manager of this occurrence I do what I need to do.

A few weeks ago things went a little differently. I used to speak to one of my recruiters on the phone regularly and in conversation he would mention things that would need to be taken care of and things that were coming up that I needed to prepare for. In this particular conversation I specifically asked about the status of two candidates because I had not heard anything and he said, "The group usually confirms their starts late. If I get the notification late then I will confirm them for you. No problem." I get in the next morning and see an email from said recruiter that I needed to confirm these people and when I went to go do such they weren't in the system to be confirmed. So during our next conversation after inquiring he said, "I already confirmed them, you got scared didn't you?".


So now it comes down to a week later, these people apparently weren't confirmed and the group is in an uproar and we are trying to scramble around to make sure these folks get paid tomorrow. So in the mix of these two begin to complain about how their people are not getting confirmed etc. My problem with this is 1) nothing was stated or said about the process and it would be professional courtesy to mention it and work out a way for the process to move smoothly, 2) If you said you were going to do it, confirmed you did it when you didn't, that is an issue and I am sitting here feeling set up and 3) If I have to chase you down just to get you to confirm your employees' start and if employee confirmations have become so problematic that your own managers bypass you and come to me then the problem is you, yet you want to complain about me.


In the end this resulted in two conversations with my supervisor and a removal of confirmation duties for these two which at this point I simply don't care. My response to it all? Sent and email stating that any requests and or informing me of tasks that they are to perform themselves in lieu of me are to come via email and email only. yes, I am feeling rather pissed and I feel some resentment begin to set in but what else can I do? How would you handle an issue such as this?