Originally Posted By: redhat
Thank you all for the advice and the genuine concern. I do appreciate it and value the insights from everyone on here.
Some questions I'm thinking about:
How do I refer to my former boss when asked for references? Do I put "Former Director of Information Systems" with the company name listed?
Is it acceptable to say when asked why I no longer work for XXX company that "the company was moving in new directions and my services were no longer needed"?
General attire and presentation of myself personally are a couple of things mentioned that keep coming back to me. Many days I would wear a polo, nice jeans and dress shoes. Clean clothes of course and I showered every morning, deodorant and some nice cologne. Sometimes I would wear a dress shirt, dress pants and dress shoes, but not all the time. My main reason for this was that there were so many days where I would be running cabling, moving large dirty equipment, in and out of basements/wiring rooms/boiler rooms working on servers, firewalls, messing with patch panels, moving desks to fix broken drops with 4 years of dust and foot debris. It got to the point where I was seriously ruining nice and decently priced clothes.
When dressing nicely and not anticipating tons of manual/dirty labor, I would neatly style my hair (longer but manicured back/to the side) with pomade and have always kept my beard very neatly trimmed and styled nicely. With all of that said, perhaps they thought of me in jeans being dirty that I was a sloppy dirty person. Perhaps they should've hired an actual housekeeper who vacuumed more than once a month, LOL.
1) Just put the title when he was your boss, Director of whatever
2) If asked just give why you got fired You can also answer You don't know. Don't dive into what you think happened and bring up dirty laundry. You can just say what you know for sure happened, but they did bring in 2 cheaper employees that you trained.
If you bring up your theories of appearance , the new employer will think you have victim complex issues and have issues where you are unable to take criticism and unable to clearly reason without thinking people are out to get you. (More on that below).
If they think you got fired for a wacky reason, they're going to read between the lines that this guy can't get along for some reason because they might have a wacky thing in their company too.
So Instead just say you don't know.
3) The things that you bring up on that you think you got fired because of a comment and your physical appearance are only 1 side of the story.
Don't get hung up on what you THINK is an weird and illogical reason to get fired, cause chances are it's not the real reason and it is not possible for you to see the real reasn. I think there's experiments that show that people overly focus on their own appearance. They stress over a haircut or other appearance things; but when tested Others dn't judges the problem so importantly, because everybody has their own problems.
So if you THINK there is some underlying issue, you might want to ask friends or family who know you well if there's anything you need to do to improve yourself, whether it's really physical or if there's something related to personality and attitude. Asking people on the internet who don't know you and only based on what you tell them is just asking a mirror to some degree and just echos back what you feed in.
A lot of times there's going to be some conflict of attitude or politics. If you felt you needed to go to HR, there's obviously some personality or communications conflict there that led to that formal clash.
As you noted, appearance can be fixed. Even an idiot boss would not go go through all the hassle to hire a replacement for some petty issue; because it's a lot of work to hire someone else. If it was just about the appearance, they'd bluntly lay it out that you're going to be fired unless you change this or help you to fix it; it's cheaper and easier to do that then hiring someone else.
So there's something else going on, that you may never know, such as attitude. So it might not be specifically about your dress; but that it's so hard to talk to you even about small talk, without it exploding into a conflict and HR case.
So to play it out:
It it were just about the dress; wouldn't be hinted around like you're assuming. It's cheaper (in time, effort and frustration) to fix it. BUT if your attitude is making it so hard that they feel they can't even talk to you about some issue they have your dress, without it exploding, THEN it's cheaper to just hire someone else with a better personality fit. So it's REALLY about attitude and personality and human parts, and not just the issue itself.
OR maybe you're just overthinking it, and it could be just be about the $.
If you were on good terms with your old boss that got fired, perhaps get together with him if he has any insight, or also see if there is anything you can do to improve yourself.
