Posted on 06/06/2015 5:31:01 AM PDT by Kaslin
Did Internet giant GoDaddy reject an Arizona software engineer’s job application because he was an overweight Christian?
GoDaddy denies the charge. But an attorney for Arizona resident Keith Connolly says his client has rock-solid proof to support the jaw-dropping allegation.
Connolly was recruited for a job with the Internet domain registrar in April 2014. After two telephone interviews and two Skype interviews, he was summoned to GoDaddy’s headquarters in Scottsdale.
By all indications, Connolly said, the interviews went well. But a month later he received a rejection email from GoDaddy’s talent acquisition team.
“We have reviewed your qualifications against the job requirements for our Mobile IOS Developer position and decided there is not a strong enough match to move forward at this time,” the email read in part.
But Connolly says there was an attachment to the email – and that it revealed the true reason he wasn’t hired.
He says the attachment read:
“about keith he’s great for the job in skills but he looks worse for wear do we really want an obeese (sic)christian? is that what our new image requires of us?”
“It was very embarrassing,” Connolly told me. “They should be hiring people based on their skills, not on where they go on Sunday or how round their waistband is.”
GoDaddy spokesman Dan Race responded to the allegations with a terse statement.
“GoDaddy intends to vigorously defend itself against these false allegations, including pursuing legal action for fabricating this claim,” he wrote in an email to Fox News. “We believe the allegations are completely without merit and unequivocally deny them.”
So does GoDaddy believe Connolly faked the email? The spokesman would not answer that question.
Attorney Casey Yontz said the email is authentic and his client wants an apology.
“This is one of the most egregious emails I’ve seen in my career,” he said. “To think they would have the audacity to think that it’s OK to write a thought like that in an email says a lot about what is going on over there.”
Yontz said he had been in contact with GoDaddy’s general counsel for several weeks, asking them to preserve any evidence connected to the alleged email.
“Their reaction to me was that they were either hacked or the email was manufactured,” he said. “I doubt someone is going to hack GoDaddy and target Keith knowing he’s a Christian and fat. And it’s absurd to think this would be manufactured.”
Yontz said his client simply wants an apology. And that’s about all he may get – if that. The statute of limitations for a discrimination complaint has long passed.
So why did Connolly wait nearly a year before taking action?
“He was too embarrassed to talk about it,” Yontz said.
He said he and Connolly are friends and that Connolly casually referenced the email one day when they were talking about GoDaddy.
“I was immediately taken aback and told him he needed to seek legal recourse immediately,” Yontz said. “Keith sat on the email way too long.”
And how would GoDaddy know Connolly was a Christian? Did he show up for the job interview carrying a Bible?
“I didn’t mention my faith at all while I was interviewing,” he told me. “I didn’t have a ‘Jesus Saves’ shirt or giant cross. It was just a standard interview.”
He and Yontz suspect GoDaddy checked out his social networking websites.
Connolly said he was more surprised by the insult about his weight than by the crack about his faith.
“The tech industry has an anti-religion and especially anti-Christian atmosphere,” he told me. “There’s an idea that the hip, modern technologists have to be atheists.”
Attorney Yontz, who is also a Christian, said the alleged email is frustrating.
“It feels like there is this battle that Christianity is facing right now,” he said. “It feels like we’re on the ropes, and seeing this email confirms that – the fact that it was written so freely. This type of discrimination – it’s becoming the norm.”
Remember what happened to the former chief executive officer at Mozilla?
Brandon Eich “chose” to resign after it was revealed that he’d given money to back California’s Proposition 8 – a constitutional amendment that defined marriage as between a man and a woman.
Let’s just say Connolly may have a point about the technology world being a less than tolerant industry.
Yontz said his client is still exploring his legal options. And from the tone and tenor of GoDaddy’s statement, they are too.
Can’t sue. Statute of Limitations has passed.
See, I disagree somewhat with what you say in that I think it’s an aesthetic thing - fat people are considered ugly-looking. Kind of dirty with awful habits. Of course, I’d love to see the photos of people who dislike the looks of fat people!
Depends upon the environment, I think. Urbanite professionals in the northeast and on the west coast seem to really have an aversion. The rest of the country is a little more realistic and less pointed.
Even if the statute of limitations was longer, you have to act pretty quickly to preserve evidence like the original copy of that email on the file servers (doubly true if you are investigating an ex-secretary of state). Sitting on it for a year does nithing good if you want to win the case.
Well, not in every case. I used to work for a heavily male investment firm that simply would not hire attractive younger women, for any reason. The "elder statesman" who owned the firm had simply had enough of the sexual distractions in earlier decades, and just wouldn't allow his trading floor to be disrupted any more. I suspect there are still companies like this today, and it's probably even worse now that HR directors are so often older, minority females who feel threatened.
But your point is certainly true for young, good-looking men - they can usually overwhelm any interview competition. My stepson is a good example - he is rising like a rocket in his company, blowing right past older managers who don't have his looks and charisma (but cost more money...)
In the late ‘70s a purchasing manager at the company (large, multinational) we worked for had an interview with another tech company (large and multinational also).
At the end of the interview, the HR guy for the company said “for a Hispanic, you are pretty sharp.”
I can’t remember if he got an offer or not but he said he’d never work for them. Imagine if that happened today.
I was hired for a job (at 25 yrs old then) that a cranky older woman had also applied for. For a couple of years she told everyone who would listen that the only reason I got the job was because I was young and pretty.
That wasn’t fun for me at all as I then felt even more pressure to prove myself. Bringing physical appearance into the equation can be difficult on both sides.
At least he wasn't a Muslim girl wearing a scarf!
Yeah but you can drag their name through the mud as is happening right now. A little bit of justice.
As most employers pride themselves on being an equal opportunity employer this is an embarrassment for the company.
I hear ya and agree 100%. You just can’t file suit is all. ; )
Worse for the company will be for Christians and fat folks to not do business with them.
Employment at will.
Well as an employer you can, not hire who you want.............as long as you do not violate the the law, which is exactly what go daddy did with their little email addendum. And the best part for go daddy now is if there a is a neat little investigation into their hiring practices and how many overweight or Christian people they do or do not hire. Here in California you may not discriminate, on the other hand all you have to to do is send a polite note of thank you but no thank you. We are humans, we make snap judgements on appearance, that doesn't mean we are right and hiring managers are supposed to be trained to look past their or anyone else's guts. Go Daddy screwed the pooch and I hope they get a nice deep intimate investigation.
Eh, he’s not that fat.
Stuff like this is why Facebelch knows me as Hopalong Ginsberg.
They are still an item...
>>>One of the dirty little secrets of the employment world is what an enormous advantage attractive people have.
I’ve always suspected one of the main reasons for some of the “racism” claimed by minorities is simply because they aren’t pretty by traditional standards. I suspect non-pretty white people are treated much the same.<<<
True, and if you want to wade through the social sciences, there’s plenty of proof that people preferentially choose the attractive over the plain or ugly. I remember one study that seemed solid in which people were asked to choose the most beautiful face, and most selected the face with the highest degree of symmetry, no matter the race or ethnicity of the person pictured.
The same thing goes for height, by the way, especially for men.
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