Job inducement is a term with which you might not be familiar. It’s never a bad idea to learn about it, though, just in case it ever happens to you.
This article will serve as a brief job inducement crash course. We’ll cover what it is, as well as what you can do if you ever encounter it during your professional life.
What exactly is job inducement?
Before we get into what job inducement is and how it impacts you, we’ll run through a scenario. Let’s say you’re working at a job, and you’ve been there for a while. It’s by no means your dream job or company, but you’re reasonably content there.
Then, a headhunter reaches out to you. You probably know the term headhunter: it refers to someone who works for a company who tries to approach individuals to tell them about a position for which they might be suitable.
Maybe a headhunter will talk to you when you’re unemployed and actively looking for work, but they might also try to recruit you while you’re working for a different company, often within the same industry.
This is the latter scenario. The headhunter tells you about a great position available in their company for which you would be the perfect candidate. They might woo you with offers of a corner offer, a great benefits package, more vacation time, and a higher starting salary.
You take them up on the offer. Before long, though, you realize this was a mistake. The job is not like the headhunter described it, or else they fire you a few months later. Now, you bitterly regret giving up your former job, which you didn’t love, but which was stable.
Essentially, this is job inducement. It’s luring you away from a job based on false pretenses and then either expecting you to continue working at this inferior position or else firing you soon after you come over to the new company.
What can you do about this?
If you ever experience job inducement, you might feel understandably furious. Who wouldn’t be, especially if you have a spouse or partner to support, along with kids, a mortgage, rent, utility bills, etc.? You were in a stable position, and now you’re working at a job that’s nothing like the headhunter described it, or perhaps the company unceremoniously fired you.
If this sounds unrealistic, you should know that it happens a whole lot more than you might expect. Some industries are notorious for this sort of thing happening, but it can occur in virtually any niche.
There’s a bit of good news, though. If you have a headhunter working on behalf of a company who pursues you and then pulls the proverbial rug out from under you, you may be able to bring legal action against that company. There are laws in place that offer workers protection against job inducement if you can prove it.
When are you likely to win your case?
As you might expect, winning a lawsuit you bring against a company based on a job inducement premise can be tricky. They will probably hire their own lawyer if they don’t have one already on retainer, and they will vigorously defend themselves.
They don’t want to give you money based on your lawsuit’s own merit. However, they also don’t want to get a poor reputation within the industry, as they almost certainly will if this case gets a lot of press.
If you can gather as much evidence as possible that job inducement of the kind we described happened to you, you have the best chance of winning. In that respect, it’s just like any other kind of lawsuit.
You’re trying to convince a jury that the events happened like you say they did, assuming the case ever goes to trial. It’s always possible that the company’s legal counsel might tell them to settle if they feel like you can produce an overwhelming evidence amount that can sink them in court.
If you have emails talking about how great the new job is that induced you to leave your old one, those will help. If you can produce witnesses who overheard the details about the fantastic opportunity this company offered you, you may have to call them to the stand.
The more evidence that proves your case, the larger a compensatory amount you can expect to receive if the jury believes job inducement happened as the law defines it.
What else can you do to give you the best chance to prove a job inducement situation?
Aside from trying to gather a preponderance of evidence that proves job inducement by your current employer (or your former employer, if they fire you quickly after hiring you), finding the best possible lawyer who’s an expert with these cases is your best bet.
If you have a situation like a car crash and you’re attempting to hire an attorney because you want to sue the other driver, you will probably find dozens of lawyers nearby who can help you. Those situations happen so frequently that some attorneys exclusively handle car wreck cases.
Job inducement cases can be more challenging to prove, and some attorneys would just as soon not deal with them. Because of this, you should do extensive research on the lawyers in your area to determine who handles these sorts of lawsuits, as well as what their track record is with them.
When you go to see the lawyer you’re potentially going to use, ask them about previous lawsuits they’ve had like yours, as well as what strategy they’ll employ to try to win your case for you. If you like the answers they give you, you can move forward and hire them.
While job inducement can make you feel violated, you should know that there are frequently ways you can fight back against this predatory practice in court, and you can often get recompense and satisfaction.
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