Death By Lousy HRM — Chapter XIII

[Chapter I, Chapter II, Chapter III, Chapter IV, Chapter V, Chapter VI , Chapter VII, Chapter VIII, Chapter IX, Chapter X, Chapter XI and Chapter XII in case you missed them.]

With this first news conference behind them, and everyone working hard on their assigned inquiries or analyses, and with the analyst assigned to help her making good progress, Zelda finally had a chance to reflect on all that had happened in such a short period of time.  And there was much to consider.

As the person who had found the body and then broken the code which pointed to, if not the motive for the murder then at least the context within which that motive might be found, Zelda found herself almost looking over her shoulder as she went about her project duties.  Somewhere there was a murdered whom she probably knew and who did know that it was she who had found the body.  There’d been no public mention of coded files or deciphering, no public mention of murder for that matter, but in the small town which is any closed society — and Great Software was exactly that — nothing stayed secret for very long.  So Zelda took to parking her car closer to the building, leaving before it got dark, and generally being more cautious than she was naturally.  And she also found herself mentally measuring each of the referenced hiring managers for the suit of murderer.

The next big issue to surface — raised by Ms. Patel — was that, with so many important open positions to fill, they couldn’t afford to stop making progress with their recruiting.  Someone would need to pick up the open positions for which Mr. Cummins had been the recruiter, really pick up his entire workload, and that would mean either leaving them entirely in the dark about the coded candidates and hiring managers or bringing them into the small circle of Great Software people supporting the police investigation of the murder case.  Ms. Patel felt that, with a murderer who had not yet been caught, someone jumping into Cummins’ position might inadvertently expose him or herself to danger if they saw any of the manual files Cummins had kept.  And because they didn’t know yet if any other recruiters were using similarly illegal or unethical methods, Ms. Patel was loath to assign an existing Great Software recruiter to Mr. Cummins’ workload.

After conferring with DCI Fritz, but with no one else, they agreed that Ms. Patel would take on recruiting for those key open positions personally and would retain an external contract recruiter to work with her on them.  They would use only the electronic files and ATS to manage the sourcing, evaluation and hiring for these key position, and Ms. Patel would say to the relevant hiring managers that she was going to handle this recruiting until the questions surrounding Mr. Cummins’ death had reached closure.  It was during this conversation with DCI Fritz that Ms. Patel realized that those same hiring manager were suspects and that her interactions with them could put her at risk.  With this realization, Ms. Patel, with a similar sense of caution as that which had enveloped Ms. Kahniefmeyer, began figuratively looking over her shoulder.  Meanwhile, DCI Fritz added more officers to the security team monitoring the situation at Great Software’s campus.

Stay Tuned For Chapter XIV