My fiancé works for a UK charity. Recently, a senior policy officer job came up within the charity that involved advising MPs on policy and helping draft legislation for presentation to parliament (the charity is related to poverty relief – sorry, I won't name it while he still works there). Some of the people in the external affais department mentioned to him that he'd be a shoe-in for the role (he's gone above and beyond in submitting evidence for policy changes to their team, which he isn't contractually required to do), so he decided to throw his hat into the ring. He was turned down by HR, and was a little disappointed, but also he knew they'd had a lot of applications, and assumed they'd decided to shortlist people with more political/legislative experience without discussing it with the team.
NOPE. On Friday they announced that the role had been filled. By the CEO's 19 year old goddaughter. She dropped out of a third rate UK uni because she couldn't hack it, and was looking for her job. Her only work experience was a 3 month internship in the admin department of the same charity. She has no knowledge or experience of the day to day work of the charity, the legal knowledge, or of drafting political legislation. She's the one that apparently the charity thought would be best to spearhead their effort to advise parliament on UK poverty relief. They claim to be committed to ending poverty in the UK, but I guess making sure your goddaughter has a high paying job is more important.
When my fiancé told me, I assumed this was illegal behaviour and that there would be someone we could report them to, but apparently not?? Apparently that's just fine?? Wild.
(This is not the first shitty thing the charity has done, just the final straw for my fiancé. They've also forced him into taking on more senior responsibilities while refusing to promote him officially so no pay rise, they announced employees will have to start working on Christmas and bank holidays, they announced that they're planning to extend working hours to include evenings and weekends (it is currently 9-5), they stated that employees working from home who have children are only entitled to half a day's wages unless they can prove they have childcare in place for the whole day (saying “I have a stay at home spouse” is 'not enough proof'), last year they didn't let my fiancé take any holiday for months on end between being short-staffed and having compulsory conferences where they don't let anyone take holiday for a week either side, and they responded to everyone's complaints by giving them 'team building days to help morale' — even though one complaint was that there are too many team building days, as every time they have a team building day their workload metrics aren't changed and they're just expected to do 5 days work in 4 days. All while paying about 5k less per annum than other equivalent charities for the same job. My fiancé is understandably job hunting now.)
(Eta: also forgot that they recognised he was performing at 120% of his expected capacity and instead of rewarding him they… told him his new expected capacity was now 120% of everyone else's. So now he's expected to do more work for the same amount of money. He's now deliberately trying to work at about 90% of his capacity to bring it back down.)