Mercy's pre-employment process is excessive, at least for clinicians. For me the application and interview process was 2.5 months. My projected start date was an additional 2.5 months after accepting the job offer due to pre-employment onboarding requirements. Well, a few weeks into the process, I learned what they call "onboarding" is their way of not paying employees for things other employers usually just include in paid employee orientation. Mercy frames it as wanting employees to be able to start their jobs on day one. And because of "at will" employment, they can demand all this work of people pre-employment and then just change their mind about hiring you. And that was my fate. I naively thought there would have to be a legitimate reason to rescind a job offer (for instance, a failed drug screen or background check).
When their onboarding process quickly became much more than it was described to be (e.g., given 72 hours to complete hours of work as if I can just drop my life without notice or pay in order to complete tasks that absolutely could have waited until after I started being paid), I stood up for myself and expressed desire to be compensated in some form for the work. They responded by firing me. After all the time they took from me and the disruption to my life, they refused to dignify my request for a brief discussion about this decision or even just more information about why they came to this decision. I was told I'm still eligible for re-hire.
Now that I've had some time to digest what happened, I believe I dodged a bullet. As a strong female professional, I know it would have been toxic to work for a team where people could be retaliated against for raising reasonable concerns or setting boundaries. I'm mid-career and I've never been disciplined or fired from a job. So it felt a bit like I traveled to the twilight zone, causing me to temporarily questioned my sense of reality. Just bizarre. Although looking back there were some warning signs I overlooked because I was excited about the work.
Mercy is a big organization, so I'd expect how much individual managers take advantage of at-will employment varies considerably among departments. I was supposed to join a surgery team.
