The title “associate” is generally used to connote more junior roles. Entry-level retail workers, for instance, are often called associates. Law firms refer to recent law school hires in the same way, and in universities, associate professors are ranked below those with the title “professor”.
The practice recently came to light when Cher Scarlett, a former Apple software engineer who raised concerns about alleged discrimination and misconduct at the company, filed a complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging that when Apple changed her job title to “associate”, it delayed the hiring process at a prospective employer by nearly a week, during which time the company rescinded the offer. Scarlett said the job verification service hired to vet her résumé was unable to resolve the discrepancy with Apple.
Irrespective of the reasons why they are doing it, this is a very bad and possibly unlawful practice
, said Laurie Burgess, an employment law attorney who represents Parrish in her labor board case against Apple. Seems to me that this action interferes with employees’ reasonable future economic interests.
Reed AlbergottiToday in ‘shit corporations pull when nobody’s watching’! Apple is straight up providing false information about their former employees whenever someone checks what their position inside Apple was. A petty tactic worthy of Apple’s usual arrogance that can be punishing to employees regardless of whether they left in good terms or bad. As people amusingly proposed on Twitter, now that this practice is no longer a secret, people could use it to their advantage by claiming in job interviews that they had more senior roles while working at Apple.
As a side note, I find this practice of using job verification services to vet future employees rather strange – likely another consequence of America’s incongruous rules. I went through similar checks of past employment when I was hired at local subsidiaries of US corporations, but I doubt they are needed or even legal under Romanian law. In my country, a government agency is keeping records of employment history for the purpose of calculating pensions upon retirement, and these are available upon request to anyone with a reasonable interest (including past salaries, which is not ideal…), so no need to rely on third party providers to verify it. But I guess American’s aversion towards centralization is preventing them from adopting similar solutions.
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