What is the best course of action when an employee's significant other applies for the same job as him/her?

Question

I'm in an interesting situation as a project manager. We've recently hired a promising new employee and told her that we were still looking for applicants for the same job. A few days later someone inquired about the job who, after a quick Facebook search, turned out to be our new employee's boyfriend.

This situation may very well prove to be a wasp's nest of ugly issues:

• We interview him and have to reject him
• We hire him and they have an argument/disagreement in their relationship but still have to work together at their jobs
• We hire him and they break up but still meet every day because of their jobs
• One of them gets promoted who becomes the other's superior

The company is pretty small so we can't hire him to work in another department.

What's the "standard" course of action in such a situation? I'm inclined toward having an honest conversation with her about the pitfalls of working with someone's significant other and if she says they considered the problems that might arise, I would go on with the hiring process as if nothing happened; I would make an interview appointment and try to be as objective as I can while evaluating him.

Answer 1

Ignore it. Move forward as if you did not know this information. Relationships, and all the downstream drama, are organic risks of every workplace. Expect professionalism from everyone and move forward.

Answer 2

TL;DR

Being proactive is great. Solving the wrong problem---or worse yet, a phantom problem---is significantly less great.

It's None of Your Business

As a project manager, people's private lives are none of your business until and unless:

1. It actually impacts the project you're running.
2. Your HR department makes it your business through some sort of formal policy.

Referrals Imply Relationships

Referrals in general are good business practice. Almost by definition, if you get a hiring referral from a member of the team, chances are good that the people have some sort of relationship. It may be romantic, or perhaps they were just coloring buddies in kindergarten.

Why go to a dark place and assume that any one type of relationship is better (or worse) than another? Should spouses be excluded from consideration on their merits? Same-sex partners? Ex-Army buddies? Old college roommates? Where do you draw that line?

If you reject referrals from people who know each other, you risk:

1. Reducing your potential labor pool.
2. Alienating the people who offer the referrals.
3. Chancing that people might quit to go work somewhere else, where they can interact in workplace-appropriate ways with people they clearly want to work with.

Teams Require Trust

NB: "You" isn't aimed at the OP. It's intended as an if-the-shoe-fits sort of pronoun.

If you don't trust your team members to make solid referrals, or to act like adults in the workplace, then the hiring manager should probably resign immediately. No, that's not a typo.

Lack of trust for members of the team is a clear indicator of one or more of the following:

• You believe you've hired people with poor judgment.
• You believe you've hired people who are unable to behave in a professional manner in the workplace.
• You actually have concrete instances where specific team members have displayed poor judgment or unprofessional conduct.
• You haven't fired the dead wood, or otherwise reversed the poor hiring decisions that were made.

If you've made a hiring error, welcome to the human race. If you've made a team-full of hiring errors, shame on you. If you've made a ton of hiring errors and those people are still around...well, the problem isn't the applicants or the yardstick for measuring them; it's the person doing the measuring.

Answer 3

When you say you have hired one employee already and are still looking for others to recruit, are you looking for multiple people with the same skills who will be in the same level/pay bracket or are you looking to replace the existing one. If the latter, since you have already hired the candidate, do you have a plan to transition this person out of this role into a new one if a more suitable candidate pops up? If this is the case, then I do not foresee too many workplace issues.

If you are looking to hire multiple people for the same kind of work because you have budgeted efforts as such, then I can only say I have worked on teams that had both partners working on the same team and reporting into the same manager (although this is not ideal) without too much drama. However, having a couple report into the same manager is never ideal and some companies mandate that such employees be managed by different bosses.

Answer 4

A few days later someone inquired about the job who, after a quick Facebook search, turned out to be our new employee's boyfriend.

Ignore knowledge from Facebook, don't do "quick facebook searches" as part of your hiring procedure. This is not reliable information at best. At worst it is outdated or even intentional sabotaging the other persons job chances. In some contries (Germany) that may even cause collisions with the law.

The only thing which you can learn from this is that the person which openly states this relationship may be much too open (at best) regarding information on facebook.

If you are in a country where employers can ask to know about employees relationship status you may give them the normal form when they are hired and see what they write.