A friend owns a small business in a State bordering Utah. Plenty of LDS types in the area.

He does not hire mormons.

He has had way too many negative experiences and now steers clear of them. Way too many hire on, go through the training - somewhat extensive - and then quit. A lot of that "quit" is for church stuff. Sunday work, nights and weekend shift changes, missionary callings - and so many use "church excuses" he just quit hiring mormons as a result.

Odd part is that more than 80% of his employee loss were the LdD employees. Seems most don't really want to work. Add in their lobbying for new members while in the workplace and he said he was tired of it and quit hiring them.

He has none at all now. Per him the workers are more productive, stay longer and the workplace is more pleasant without them. He admits it is frustrating but his business is doing much better (per his financial records) without them.

He does not ask the religion when they apply and those he hires are qualified so it is not a case of hiring those less qualified and discriminating - at least not on that basis.

He's happy, the business is doing well and he does not get "GG'ed at work at all now.

Nice to have a successful business. Happy for your friend.

Usually you can tell if someone is a Mormon, but without asking about religion, there is no way you could help not letting a few Mormons slip by and get hired.

It's a smart business plan.

1. Offer the prospective hire a cup of coffee.

2. Garment check.

3. BYU on resume.

4. Casually ask about number & ages of kids during interview.

5. Casually ask about the number & ages of wives during the interview.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/26/2018 03:09AM by Lot's Wife.

While shaking hands, place your index finger on the inside of the applicant's wrist and say, "what is that?"

If they look puzzled, just play it off.

If they look embarrassed, flummoxed, angry, etc., don't hire them.

Others might profit from his example.

I see a lot of this too here in Utah. It may be because mormons are striving for perfection. The perfect job, the perfect education, the perfect girl, the perfect family. This would obviously disqualify them to do boring work, or work on Sundays, or work in an environment that values hard work over brains.

TBM Mormons have the aspiration of being in management? Get paid a lot and work very little, it's entitlement mentality. We serve in the church and are temple worthy so we get blessed.

But people with more problems and that aren't quite so perfect are satisfied with what they can get. Which is a boring job. Which is what OP's friend is hiring.

She treated us all very well and her exmormons were some of the last to finally leave the company. She quit her company when she lost her last contract a month ago. Medical transcriptionists don't get paid fairly these days and she refused to pay us the less than minimum wage you can earn doing it these days. She was ALWAYS good to me.

I worked for great mormon men at Thiokol, but there were those were were jerks.

But I feel lucky that my boss I've had for almost 20 years treated me SO WELL. Not all mormons are jerks.

cl2, what are you going to do for work now? Do you do medical transcription for others?

I've had 7 offers for medical transcription jobs. I had almost signed a contract for one and backed out. I don't trust the companies any longer.

I'm going to start a job tomorrow doing inspection at the airbag plant in Brigham City (Autoliv). I'm taking a big cut in pay, but it is a job and I want to be working. I'll keep looking while I'm working. My ex, oddly enough, who lives downstairs, is paying the main household bills right now and basically has promised me he would after we retire since I haven't divorced him and taken half his pension and 401K. So I'll be fine.

I would have liked to finish out my "career" still doing MT, but it didn't last quite long enough. I actually still have some contracting work I do, but it has been very slow.

I'll be 62 in July and I may just go ahead and take early SS.

Using roundabout methods to exclude qualified job candidates on the basis of their religion is illegal.

Blatantly illegal. This is an EEOC case waiting to happen.

Watch it, your post might get deleted for stating the obvious in a concise fashion.

I think it would be difficult to prove if the people doing the hiring never ask about, or discuss religion in the interview process.

Yes, I was going to caution the OP's friend, to not tell anyone about this.

Personally, I have not hired people, based only on my gut-reaction to them, and even when I knew the cause of my negative reaction was completely unfair. The reasons of company morale, and the atmosphere of the office are valid reasons, IMO, even if they are seemingly "arbitrary."

My mentor was CEO of a very large company, and he was active in the community, as well. He was also a philanthropist. I admired him greatly! He told me, privately, that I should avoid doing business with Mormons, if possible. His reason was that, as a group, they lacked integrity, and had no conscience about cheating and lying.

I agree that Mormon feel "entitled". Still, our company had jobs that did require intelligence and education, and fewer of the Mormon applicants really qualified. I did hiring in a large company in Silicon Valley, early in my career, and MOST of the Mormon applicants lied on their resumes! My boss, the CEO was a Mormon, and the Mormons thought that religion would give them an edge.

I have found, in my experience, that Mormons aren't as invested in the company they work for. They don't have that sense of loyalty or belonging. They are stand-offish and clannish, and don't really mix with the non-Mormon employees. In Silicon Valley, and here, we would work our heads off, and sometimes on weekends, but we could always see the benefits of it. We would work together, and support each other, willingly. With Mormons, church comes first. With the Mormons I used to work with, it truly was not their families that took them away--it was church obligations--unless they might have been lying about that, too. It was frustrating that the Mormons put themselves "above" the rest of us, and would NOT take their turn at extra duties. We used to joke, saying, "The Mormons have left the building", because they were out the door at precisely 5:00 or before. The rest of us usually stayed until 6 or 7. It was a new company, and business was booming. The rest of us were caught up in the excitement of it all. The Mormons seemed apathetic. I think that's why they didn't stay around very long.

I'd like to ask the OP what sort of company his friend manages. Is it a company with a great future, where employees receive good benefits and a living wage? Is the salary competitive? Is it a company where employees can progress to better opportunities? Is the company an "at will" employer that can fire employees without any reason?

If there is a big turnover at your friend's company, I doubt that Mormons are to blame. I wonder about any employee who stays at a low-paying/low-skilled job without moving on once they've learned a skill. If they do move on, they're the smart ones.

Mother Who Knows mentioned working in Silicon Valley. I worked at a big tech company in Silicon Valley during the 90s boom, when engineers were (and still are) in demand and hopped from company to company, lured by bigger and bigger paychecks and incredible perks. I doubt those engineers were all Mormons. Everyone who works in tech knows there's a huge turnover. It has nothing to do with Mormon employees. Oh, and that huge tech company I worked for was acquired by another huge tech company, and most employees were laid off. That's the norm in Silicon Valley, and perhaps why there's little sense of loyalty.

I dislike the Mormon church, as do others, but let's not get carried away by making blanket statements claiming that Mormons are not good employees. After all, most of us were Mormon employees at one time, and I doubt we were a bunch of disloyal flakes.

An employee who expects to get every Sunday off is going to build resentment among other employees who must pick up the slack. In my younger days, I didn't mind working Sundays but would have appreciated the occasional Sunday off. But some special snowflakes took every single Sunday off so they could go to church. I guess whatever I wanted to do with the day, such as spend it with my family, didn't count.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/25/2018 10:05PM by summer.

If a company is open on Sundays, and Sunday work is required, it should be made clear that working on Sunday is a requirement. If it is a requirement, employees who can't work on Sundays will not get the job. That is the reason for the interview.

If an employee makes it clear that he/she can't work on Sunday, and the employer hires them anyway, it's not the employee's fault if the other employees, who work the Sunday shift, are upset.

Early in my working career, I worked for a business that was open on Sunday. I told the manager up front that I could not work on Sunday. The manager was fine with that and I was hired anyway. I ended up quitting because of unsafe working conditions. I gave my two weeks notice and left. Weeks later my manager called me, practically begging me to return. I was a good employee even though I was a Mormon and took Sundays off to attend church.

My next job required Sunday work. I took the job and skipped church. Then I left the church!

>>it's not the employee's fault if the other employees, who work the Sunday shift, are upset.

As I said, other people have to pick up the slack. And the church-going employee can certainly see others picking up the slack.

I'm all for reasonable accommodations, but there comes a point where an employee is not carrying his or her weight.

OP, your friend is a bigot, who apparently has no clue about how to conduct a job interview.

Substitute "women" or "blacks" or Jews" or "Arabs" or "gays" or even "millennials", and the statements above would sound like every argument ever made for why members of those groups should not be hired. I guess you would have to add for women "I won't hire them because they just get married/pregnant and quit, and they cost too much in maternity coverage". Excluding all members of a class because you are too lazy or incompetent to do your interviewing job properly is (a) bad business practice, and (b) illegal.

I'm glad that, as a BYU grad, I wasn't subjected to that level of bigotry when I had to get a job fresh out of college. Further, I left LDS Inc as soon as I graduated from BYU, and I was quite open about it. That did not keep me from getting hired by a number of very Mormon companies in Utah, for which I am grateful. One time I was at Sunstone, and when I introduced myself and said where I worked, one of the others said "oh, you're the apostate in Building C". It was meant as a joke, but apparently I had something of a reputation. I found that kind of funny. In any case, Mormons were more than willing to hire me, an "out" exMormon. Maybe my experience is not typical, but it was my experience.

I also worked in academia outside of Utah. I was probably on a dozen search committees over the years. Again, I was well known to co-workers as an ex-Mormon. Every time we had a job search, we usually got around 200 applicants, give or take, and there was always a smattering of people with BYU degrees applying. I never heard anybody say, even as a joke, "well, we can toss that one" when they saw the BYU degree. It would be like throwing around the N-word. You simply don't make jokes like that.

As a sidebar, in another department on campus, a faculty member was hired who had a degree from, of all places, BYU-I. He had an MS (I think that was also BYU-I, but i know the BS was. In that particular field, MS was the terminal degree). About 5 years later, he won the outstanding professor award on campus, which is a pretty big deal. He was not only LDS, but a BYU-I grad. I'll admit to some bias against BYU-I grads - I would tend to be dismissive, but whoever did the interviewing and hiring there picked a winner.

Sorry to come down on y'all with both feet, but jeez, people deserve better than that. Even Mormons deserve better than that.

You should change your moniker to "The Apostate in Building C."

I agree. This is blatant stereotyping.Most of the Mormons I know are hard workers. If they dont want to work Sundays, they find a Monday-Friday job.If a job requires Sunday work, make it clear in the interview that the perso will be expected to work on the sabbath at least some of the time and will not be given special treatment.

There is no law that forces any employer to hire mormons. DH used a head hunting firm and they came up with good candidates of every faith and no faith. There was never a stand out mormon on the list. My husband hired the best qualified and able candidates and none of them were mormon.

Does that mean all mormons are poor workers? No. Does it mean they are all jerks? No.

But if equal or better candidates are not mormons, there's no need to try to find a mormon candidate who might do the job to an acceptable level.

I wouldn't mind teaching school with a mormon in the next classroom. But one principal brought about eight of them from her previous assignment. They were very clannish and difficult to work with because of their expectations of being idolized and favored by the principal. They sat together at lunch and gossiped about the rest of us and plotted how they would use their pull to get whatever they favored.

I had one major problem with one of them who convinced the principal that I had to be mean to one of my little first grade students. She and the principal laid out a plan for me of isolating and punishing the little girl. They said it worked well for the prior mormon teacher. I tried it for one day and cried on my pillow that night.

The next day I apologized to the little girl and told her I was forced to treat her that way. I said I'd never do it again and asked if she could possibly forgive me. She did and we got along fine after that. I don't think the mormon or the principal were any the wiser.

There is a law that forbids systematically not hiring Mormons (among a longish list of other groups). An organization is not likely to get called on that unless they are large enough that a pattern of discrimination can be determined. Depending on where the company is, it may not be terribly hard to spot a pattern. In Michigan, nobody would notice if Mormons were systematically excluded. It Utah County, it would be pretty obvious and pretty quickly.

I had to deal with the EEOC office at my university on a number of the job searches we conducted. I was told I was responsible to come up with a list of requirements for the position, and I should be careful to be clear and precise about the requirements, and they had to actually be relevant to the job. The EEOC officer reviewed the ad copy, and made suggestions about how to improve it.

The basic rule was, you have to specify the requirements beforehand, and then you will be held to them when you select a candidate. You can't wait until the resumes are received, and decide after the fact what you are looking for and why the chosen candidate best meets your after-the-fact requirements.

That seemed fair enough, and it never was a problem. I had one case where we were looking for a faculty member with a degree in our field, or closely related field, and an established track record of publications, thesis advising, and receiving research grants from either industry of government. We were trying to establish a graduate program, so those were firm requirements.

A woman applied for the position. She had a PhD in a closely related field, but no research track record. The dean really leaned on us to hire her. We objected, but he really pressured us (budget inducements if we did, possible loss of positions if we didn't, that sort of innuendo). I went to the EEOC officer to see what she had to say. Her response was that the woman does not meet your requirements, and not only don't you need to hire her, but if you did, I would insist on an explanation in writing, of why she should be hired, and unless you came up with something really good, I would not sign off on the hire.

The funny thing is, I never got a straight answer from the dean as to why he wanted this woman hired. We were a male-heavy college, but it was a STEM field that was male-heavy in general. We had women on faculty. That did not seem to be the issue. The explanations I got were vague and hem-haw-y and basically made no sense. To this day, I have no idea why we were being pressured to hire her. We did not hire her, BTW. Somebody at the university wanted her on staff for some reason.

SO yeah, the best person for the job should be hired. Systematically excluding all members of particular groups is the lazy way to weed out applicants, and not an effective way to find the best person for the job. It is the easy way.

What I find strange about the OP is that none of the behaviors are exclusively Mormon.

A lot of times we grow accustomed to assigning excuses for halfassery. So and so is Mormon so that is why they act the way they do. So and so gave a Mormon reason for their laziness. The truth of the matter is that excuses are almost never reasons.

I don't think it's happened nor do I think it ever will.

jacob Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> What I find strange about the OP is that none of
> the behaviors are exclusively Mormon.
>
> A lot of times we grow accustomed to assigning
> excuses for halfassery. So and so is Mormon so
> that is why they act the way they do. So and so
> gave a Mormon reason for their laziness. The truth
> of the matter is that excuses are almost never
> reasons.

It reminds me of something I read.

"We can choose to grow or stay injured by justifications."

Many of us were injured by Mormonism. That is a reality. But we also choose to stay injured by it and not grow by alway putting forth the injustices done to us, trying to justify our own less than stellar behavior.

Sometimes reading some of the posts on the board reminds me that even exmo's can be as hypocritical as mo's.

It's not a Mormon thing. It's a human thing.

I used to work for a big box store and was surprised to get called into the HR office. Apparently, a priest aged ym had applied to work at the store. I was the recent RM at the time. Unknown to me, I was listed as one of his references. I was shocked because I barely knew anything of this guy, except that he was a member of the ward. I think my greatest interaction was the few times that I handed him the bread/water trays when I was a priest.

So the HR director asked me how well I knew Patrick. I told her that I casually knew him from church.

She then asked me the big question. "Would you consider him to be an honest person?"

I felt compelled to answer "yes" even though I really didn't know him beyond church. I reiterated that I didn't know him that well.

I suppose that my semi-endorsement helped Patrick land the job. He went through the usual training and mentoring. After a month, he started working the garden lawn care department by himself. Suddenly there was an issue.

For 3 nights in a row, the cash box came up short. The first night it was a little short. About $15 was missing. The second night was worse. It jumped to $100. The following night was bad. The in-store detective discreetly went out to shadow Patrick as he worked. He pocketed about $400 in front of a hidden camera and the detective. He was detained and then arrested by the sheriff for theft. Obviously, Patrick was fired.

What was not known about Patrick?

This wasn't his first lapse in judgement. He conveniently left out on his job application that he had been fired from previous employments!

Patrick was tipped off by bragging to co-workers in the break room that he had been ripping off Burger King for quite some time. He wasn't the brightest person.

Fallout

The thief's mother approached my mom after SM. "I hope your proud of your son Messy. He's a real jerk for ratting out my son."

My Mom stood dumbfounded. She had no idea what had happened. The tirade continued.

"He's 18. He's locked up at county because your son conspired with other workers to frame Patrick. Messy knew that Patrick has a small weakness. I hope your going to outer darkness because that's where your kind belongs. Don't ever speak to me or my family again!"

About 3 weeks later, a new ward was created and ward boundaries changed. Curiously, it was drawn as to skew the street that she lived on to a different ward.

You're the one who was treated unfairly by being forced to comment on someone you barely knew.

The thieving mormon got what he had long deserved. His mother deserved worse than she received.

messygoop Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The thief's mother approached my mom after SM. "I
> hope your proud of your son Messy. He's a real
> jerk for ratting out my son."
>
> My Mom stood dumbfounded. She had no idea what had
> happened. The tirade continued.
>
> "He's 18. He's locked up at county because your
> son conspired with other workers to frame Patrick.
> Messy knew that Patrick has a small weakness. I
> hope your going to outer darkness because that's
> where your kind belongs. Don't ever speak to me or
> my family again!"

Narcissistic Personality Disorder is highly heritable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder

Interesting that none of Patrick's priesthood leaders had the magical power of discernment to determine he was a lying thief before passing him on to the next level of magical priesthood power, isn't it? :)

Patrick still needed to learn that, but what about MessyGoop? It's water under the bridge, but perhaps you should have said, "I don't know him that well, I'm afraid."

To the question of, "Is he honest?" you might have said, "I don't know him to be dishonest."

Patrick was not only a thief, but an immature idiot. My criminal law instructor was wont to say, "Remember, you're not dealing with rocket scientists..."

Hiring has to be based on qualifications and if they are a good fit for your business. Of course, rejecting someone based on religion is illegal, however, it's done all the time, just covertly.
Not all Mormons are bad employees or bosses. It's a mixed bag, just like the general public. A lot depends on the area, of course.

I don't work for Mormons.

I was ordered by my TBM Mom to specify that I could not work Sundays when applying for jobs. Well, that went over like a lead balloon. I got zero call-backs from stores that WERE hiring. I applied at about 15 places. Only one gave me an on-the-spot interview and that was Payless shoes. In addition, to stocking shelves, helping customers and running the till, there was an expectation that the manager anticipated trouble.

"We have a restroom that has to be shared by both associates and the public. It must be cleaned regularly." He held up a scrub brush. He asked "Is that a problem Mr. Goop?"

"No. I can keep it clean sir." This was long before church-mandated cleaning church buildings, but I was fresh off the mission and used to cleaning my apartment.

He then looked down to the part of the application where I had written in "I am unable to work on Sundays due to church."

He started making ticking noises. "No no no. Not going to work out."

He became very frank. "I can't make a work schedule that gives you Sundays off because it would be unfair to my existing associates. Everybody has to work the weekends. Sorry Mr. Goop. We can't hire you today."

I walked across the street to a Big Box store. On the application I wrote in big letters that I could work on weekends and holidays. I had a phone message at the end of the day that they wanted to hire me and to report for training.