should I hire back a bully?

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

About a year and a half ago, I was forced to lay off multiple employees. I was truly heartbroken to see most of them go. But there were two employees I swore I’d never hire back. They both did fairly decent work, but were bullies who fed off of one another’s bad behavior. They were constantly in my office explaining why they’d said something nasty to one of their coworkers or why they’d ransacked another’s belongings. They were also blatantly disrespectful to me. One was far worse than the other, though.

Now that we’re hiring again, employees have contacted me and asked for their jobs back. I’ve told the particularly awful one that she has to reapply and be considered along with other applicants (though I have no intention of hiring her back). She hasn’t bothered to reapply because she feels she’s entitled to her job back and has decided to text/call me incessantly. Obviously, my answer is still no. I’m on the fence about hiring the other employee back. She hasn’t badgered me to make a hiring decision and has handled the idea of reapplying with far more grace than her colleague. And when she worked for me, she was a lot nicer to others when her unpleasant colleague wasn’t around. My fear is that, if she were to reapply and be hired back, she’d become the new bully. Is this fear justified? Should I take a chance on her … again?

I work in a very tough hiring market and new talent has been tough to come by.

I answer this question — and three others — over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.

Other questions I’m answering there today include:

•  How do I decline a promotion because I’d be managing someone I’m dating?
• My employee is pregnant — what next?
• Is it rude to bold and highlight key parts of an email?