Editor’s Note: As I wind down as Editor of TLNT — I’m leaving next month— I wanted to share some of my all-time favorite TLNT posts. Here’s one from October 2013.
You know it and I know it, so it is hardly worth stating again, but there are a lot of jerks in this world.
This isn’t any great revelation. I’ve written about jerks at work a lot over the years, and Stanford professor Bob Sutton even wrote a great book about it a few years back titled The No Asshole Rule.
I wrote a review of Prof. Sutton’s wonderful book, and a lot of people seemed to enjoy my review, but good luck finding it online now because some jerk over at my former employer seems to have wiped it clear out of the archives for some reason.
So it goes when you’re dealing with jerks in the workplace.
Saying “No” to hiring jerks
This all came to mind this week when a friend sent me a CNBC story titled Help Wanted: Successful Candidate Must Be Nice. It digs into a new (and sensible) workforce trend of “specifically recruiting workers that aren’t, well, jerks.”
The story pointed to companies like Limeade and Panera Bread that go out of their way to NOT hire people with boorish personalities.
As the story notes, Limeade actually posted a job listing “for a communications manager (that) specified that the applicant must be “Nice: Life is too short to work with jerks.” It goes on to say: