AIBU? What would you think if your manager said this to you? I'll try and explain as best as I can but I'm a bit worried about outing myself on here.
I work in a small open plan office which has 3 different teams, plus our manager. There is 4 of us on my team and our role involves looking at lots of C.V's every day, from people of all walks of life. Whenever we speak about anything, our manager can hear us (and you can bet she's listening!) as she doesn't sit too far away from our desks. We always discuss applications/CV's with each other, not in a nasty or offensive way but sometimes if we're not sure about progressing with a certain application or in a "this person has applied for a cleaning role but has only ever worked as a maintenance assistant, how strange!" kind of way. This doesn't mean that we automatically reject their application btw, but obviously we wonder why they want a change or if they've just applied accidentally.
We do speak to a lot of people who are rude to us, have sworn on the phone etc but we always stay professional whilst speaking to them. Yes, we might have said "they were really rude" after the call has ended but that's in a private office and the applicants obviously can't hear us. We get a lot of people applying for roles who don't bother to read the job description as well and then only realise that it's not suitable when we phone them. For example, a non driver has applied for a position that requires a drivers licence or they've applied for a position at a location which is miles away from where they live and they have no idea where it is, and didn't bother to Google it before applying. It is frustrating and sometimes we just need a bit of a moan, but we never swear, insult them etc. We all know that's unacceptable.
Anyway, to cut a long story short we had our weekly recruitment meeting this morning and our manager told us that we will be having some training next week as "we need to be careful of what we're saying whilst on the phone to applicants and in the office". She said otherwise it can be taken too far and become inappropriate. She also mentioned that we shouldn't discuss where people are from. The only time we've done this is when we've received an overseas application (and we get these a lot). For example, someone from India has applied for a job in Manchester. It's always the same people as well and they obviously don't think we'll notice that their from a different country and have a different phone number or email address. Again we've never insulted them. or made inappropriate comments, just said how strange it is that it keeps on happening.
She didn't explain what she meant by her comments and we didn't have the guts to ask her as I think we were all just taken aback. Surely she should have used examples to back up what she was saying though?! We came out of the meeting feeling really deflated, upset and like we're all basically shit at our jobs. The one comment that stuck out (and we're all in agreement about this) is when she said about us discussing where people are from. We feel that she was insinuating that we are racist as the only time we've mentioned anything is when it's been an overseas application, and this is only because we can't employ anyone who doesn't reside in the UK.
We all felt on edge for the rest of the day and that we couldn't even talk to each other or ask for advice about an application as we knew she was listening. She's not the best manager anyway and has form for making comments but not really explaining herself, but this has knocked us.
What do you think?