To start off, yes I have read all the other posts of yours pertaining to this topic but none of the posts seem to apply to people working in positions other than office jobs. I work at Company A. Company A is a fast-food franchise popular for hiring young teenagers with no work experience, in the states. I want to work for Company B. Company B is a fast-paced industrial chain factory.
I have some good references for company B because the big boss is my great cousin, and his brother is the head of the department I want to work in. Unfortunately, the interviewer is on vacation for the next week or so. Which means I won’t have a solid answer about whether or not I will get hired for another week or so. So I can’t submit any sort of notice to company A for a bit.
But I know for a fact that once I do get hired, I will probably start the next Monday coming up afterwards. This will most likely not leave any sort of room for notice. Since company A is typically used to finding replacements for people who just don’t want to come in… I don’t see how they’d have a hard time filling in the shifts I didn’t complete.
But my biggest concerns are that, number one, I am a polite person who will try to never inconvenience anyone for my own benefit. It is literally against my morals to quit without notice. I also need a signature from my employer to apply for student loans, to claim any income I received during my pre-study period. If I quit without warning, I will probably never be allowed back.
So, if I do get hired at Company B, how do I break it to Company A in a way that’ll make it so they don’t hate me. I even told them at the start of summer that I would probably not go back to school and stay here longer than the summer, because they have a huge turnover rate at the end of summer as students go back to school. They hired me under the guise that I would be a long-term employee, rather than a part-time student.
It was probably unclear, but my question simply is this: Should I quit on the spot the day I get hired at Company B, or submit a 2-weeks notice right now and pray I get hired? And how do I do it in a way that doesn’t cause the entire town to hate me.
You should wait until you receive a formal offer from Company B and then tell company B that you can start in two weeks because you need to give your current employer two weeks notice.
Yes, I understand that lots of people quit on the spot in fast food and retail. Heck, when I worked at Kmart and submitted my two weeks notice, they were totally shocked when I showed up for my scheduled next shift because people don’t do that. But, people should.
Here’s the other thing: Company B would expect you to give two weeks notice if you were planning to leave that company, so they should have no problem with you wanting to give two weeks’ notice to your current job. If they do have a problem with it, that’s a red flag that they don’t respect their employees.
Additionally, I don’t think you’re guaranteed a job with Company B because you’re related. In fact, hiring relatives is generally a bad idea. (I say this as someone who had a great experience working for my dad for a summer, but I’ve seen more nightmares than successes.) Relatives at work can make everything awkward.
So, wait until you get the offer. Tell the new company you need to give notice at your current position. (You could probably be fine with one week, considering it’s fast food and turnover is expected.) Good luck.
When I quit food service jobs back in the day, I would tell the manager to not put me on the next schedule after the one they were working on. In one job that actually did schedules in advance, that worked out to a little over two weeks. In a job where the manager slapped the schedule together the night before it started so you would have to call in to see if you were working the next day, that was a few days notice.
The managers I worked for didn’t have an issue with that, so I wanted to throw it out there and see what y’all thought of it.
Yeah, fast food can be slightly different–which is why i said one week would probably be sufficient. But no notice is always rude.
If you started your first day and your employer lost 85% of their business that day, they would not hesitate to let you go. It is not personal. Stuff happens.
Giving notice is a courtesy and not an obligation. It is another “Fear Unicorn” created by HR to make folks reluctant to not follow “their” rules lest they be subject to the consequences. They are the ones caught flatfooted and thus have to play catch up because they “didn’t see it coming”.
As I said, nice to have but not a must have.
If a company asks me what recourse they have to someone leaving, my first suggestion is to pay more attention to the happiness and satisfaction of your people and create a work environment that people don’t quit.
Of course that doesn’t always work either!
So in who’s world is HR the one playing catch up because an employee did not give notice? It’s the manager and co-workers responsible for delivering whatever product or service the company produces who are caught flat-footed, have to cover shifts, etc… You give notice because it’s a polite and respectful societal norm not because HR made it up.
A GOOD employer who cares about its reputation in the work world would give all employees they had to let go in that sort of situation either notice or severance in lieu of notice. For long-time employees, that notice and/or severance should be more generous, but even if you started the day prior, two weeks would be the minimum to maintain a reputation as a decent upstanding employer. Though in the real world, if they announce such layoffs the day after an employee starts, there should have already been a hiring freeze so the employee was never hired in the first place…
What I meant to include is that this argument is a non-starter to me. Are there employees who quit with no notice, and employers who let people go with no notice or severance? Sure, there ARE. But they are not the good ones. Employees and employers alike should strive to do better, both for the general sake of goodwill, as well as for selfish reasons of wanting a good reputation (and references, for employees), and that means giving adequate notice (or severance in lieu, for employers who feel like they can’t give notice for whatever reason). The bar for behavior should never be what the worst of folks do.
Dr. Ross, this is not another deep HR conspiracy. Anon has it right, it’s the department, team, co-workers, supervisor/manager, and company as a whole that is effected. The few things HR is concerned about at term is their function in filling the open position and any necessary administrative paperwork necessary.
And even if it was, remember that “HR” subsidized you during slow periods, or days your productivity was low due to your not feeling well, or because you were still in a learning curve, or because it was the week between Christmas and new years….I doubt the job was totally a one way street
I think quitting without notice is for egregious situations. They are insisting you work in an unsafe situation, they treat you unbelievably badly, they don’t pay you. Otherwise, give some notice. How much depends on your job. One week might be plenty in fast food.
I just want to point out that, while high turnover and employees who just quit showing up may be the norm in fast food, it’s still not appropriate.
LW, this is a classic example of of “just because everyone else does it, doesn’t make it right.” I agree with Evil HR Lady, tell Company B you need to give a notice of at least one week! It would be respectful to Company A and will, ideally, reassure Company B that you’re diligent.
I work in Recruiting and even though our clients often want candidates that can start ASAP we always ask that they allow a 2 week notice. Employers should want a perspective candidate to give a 2 week notice and plan for it from the get go. The best hires are usually already working and they would expect the same of their employees if they needed to leave for some reason. I agree with several who have commented, just because it may be the norm in an industry does not mean it should be.
Nobody has brought up the point that you should always have a running list of references. Quitting without notice is going to make it tough to get s positive reference from that employer.
Also, Evil HR Lady is much more patient than me because reading that letter gave me a headache.
“I am a polite person who will try to never inconvenience anyone for my own benefit. It is literally against my morals to quit without notice.”
Then why are you writing in? You seem to have answered your own question. If it really is against your “morals” you should know what the right thing to do is.
As my father used to say: “just because everybody else is jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge doesn’t mean you should too.”
My stance on giving notice is that it’s a small test of the new employer. If they try to demand I don’t give 2 weeks notice, I’ll know that they don’t care about professional courtesy.
When I started my current job, I wanted to give the old employer 3 weeks notice, because I already had a week’s vacation scheduled, for the 2nd week of the notice period. A couple people told me that I should not tell the new employer that I needed to give 3 weeks, because they might get upset and pull the offer. From my perspective, if they get upset and pull the offer over me doing the professional and courteous thing, I don’t want to work there anyway.
I gave a months notice when I quit McDonalds and worked all of my shifts including some extra covering etc. This is because I was able to (I got a job offer but their start date wasn’t for another 5 weeks due to them also moving office location at the time). I think they were pretty shocked… Upside is whenever I go into my old workplace, I am well received, my old managers etc like to have a brief chat and catch up and I’ve been assured on various occasions that if I ever need a reference they’ll provide a good one. It’s worth giving notice if you’re able to, even of it’s fast food or of you hated the job, and to give as much as you’re able to (unless you know it’s a workplace that pushes people out once they give notice.. Then give 2 weeks and be prepared to exit early of asked)
I gave a one day notice and I would not hesitate to do it again. I had been at a job I loved (beyond loved) for 10 years….then we got new senior management. I was a middle manager and was asked not to take a lunch or any breaks (i.e. bathroom) breaks at all, I worked at the front desk. I worked full time and my team was made up of 4 part timers, they were also told not to leave the desk, not a question of getting someone to cover, just don’t do it AND they wanted me to fire a member of my team without any documentation and they would not tell me why, I pushed back and said I didn’t feel comfortable with that and got a final written warning for insubordination. I texted the HR manager and the CEO and said I would not be back the next day or ever. No one ever reached out to ask why, I just received a letter from them stating I was ineligible for rehire. It was a nightmare.
I worked for 7 days only got payed for one day the comany said they don’t av to pay me the 6 days as i didn’t give notice of leaving and it was in my contract can they do this