Cindy Tan

Director, people & capability management

NTUC LearningHub

At a retail company where I was previously working at, we were constantly recruiting for people who can interact and are forthcoming with customers. I interviewed this great salesperson who would have been one of the top salesperson. We were happy that we found someone like him, so we offered him the job, which he accepted.

In the middle of serving notice with his other employer, he came back to the company because he found out that he had contracted AIDS. He asked, “What do I do?”

So I assumed that he was feeling lost and needed some advice. So we engaged him and advised him to see a doctor, to find out what stage his condition was, et cetera.

Then he asked if he still had a job. So it became a question where as an employer, are we going to hire him? But we were clear – we offered you a position, you have signed the contract, so you will continue to have a job.

While that was good news to him, as an organisation, how were we going to communicate this piece of news internally? We then started a process of asking ourselves all the hard and naive questions: How do we prepare the team? And because he was in a front-line job, would that be appropriate? Would it would be better that we transfer him to do a back-end job?

But before we could find an answer, the salesperson came back to say he would not be able to join our company because he was going to receive treatment out of Singapore, and we voided the contract.

At the end as a HR team, we were quite emotional because this situation could happen to anyone. But this helped us to ask ourselves, as a HR department, what if an existing employee came to us to say that he or she had contracted AIDS. Then as an employer, what would you do?