Job applicants with a bad history are typically screwed. If there's information out there about your negative financial background, your crummy criminal background, or your salacious sexual background, you're going to find it hard to find a job.
Unless you're a CEO.
The president of Oracle, Charles Phillips, who had a mistress take out a billboard about his philandering is being replaced by the disgraced HP CEO Mark Hurd who was accused of sexual harassment and was kicked out of HP a month ago because of misconduct regarding his expenses.
Some reports say Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is tennis buddies with Hurd. Probably all you need today to get a sweet job in Corporate America.
The question is, will it help the company? If there's a doubt, will shareholders, or workers question the choice? But more importantly, will Oracle women rise up and say, "this is unacceptable!"
I asked women who were in the know at Oracle, and the answer was, probably not.
"Oracle is a very competitive and driven culture and people who thrive there long-term have a tendency to 'suck it up' and perform," said one source familiar with the women's culture at Oracle who did not want her name used. "Their women's network operates in a narrow bandwidth of trying to stay politically correct and not rock the boat in a highly political company culture."
Translation: No one is standing up against Hurd's appointment, women or otherwise.
Oracle's CEO Ellison, who has been married four times, has been defending Hurd since he got the boot from HP. So it's not totally surprising that he'd hook up his buddy with a gig.
He sent an email to the New York Times after Hurd was fired saying:
"The H.P. board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago."
Clearly Ellison believes in his buddy. But should the rest of us?
Hurd did do a good job of laying off lots of workers at HP, and he was paid handsomely for it, even upon his tainted departure. This seems to be the norm for so many CEOs -- cut lots of jobs and you'll be laughing all the way to the bank.
Alas, if these guys don't keep control of their penises it could cost the company some loose change. Just last week, one of the biggest janitorial companies in the nation, ABM Industries Inc., settled a suit for nearly $6 million for the sexual transgressions of some of its supervisors.
The next sexual harassment and ethics training sessions at Oracle should be interesting.