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Do I tell the employer I’m backing out of the offer because I had a poor onboarding experience?

I work in mental health as a licensed therapist. I was offered a job in a partial care facility beginning of September and anticipated start date was Oct 3rd. Onboarding has been extremely problematic. Background checks had several errors and needed to be resubmitted. Fingerprints completed 3 weeks ago never arrived to the employer. I was required to complete a physical, drug screen, and TB test at a clinic assigned by the employer. First clinic I was sent to didn’t perform preemployment services. Second clinic I was assigned to had me wait 1.5 hours and forgot to do the physical. They also managed to botch the drug screen and even the TB test. Assigned to a third clinic and when I arrived the paperwork HR had me print out was incorrect so I was sent home. Finally went back and completed everything again. Mind you this isn’t like an easy…


I work in mental health as a licensed therapist. I was offered a job in a partial care facility beginning of September and anticipated start date was Oct 3rd.

Onboarding has been extremely problematic. Background checks had several errors and needed to be resubmitted. Fingerprints completed 3 weeks ago never arrived to the employer. I was required to complete a physical, drug screen, and TB test at a clinic assigned by the employer. First clinic I was sent to didn’t perform preemployment services. Second clinic I was assigned to had me wait 1.5 hours and forgot to do the physical. They also managed to botch the drug screen and even the TB test. Assigned to a third clinic and when I arrived the paperwork HR had me print out was incorrect so I was sent home. Finally went back and completed everything again. Mind you this isn’t like an easy in-and-out thing, these clinics are not close and I have waited a very long time. It has been really inconvenient.

Well, shorty after I went back to the clinic and repeated all the exams I learned my parent was diagnosed with terminal metastatic pancreatic cancer. They are already far into the advanced stages of the disease and things are changing fast. I’ve informed this employer that my parent has an end stage terminal illness and requested an extension to my start date to figure things out and help my parents. The day after the extension was granted I received an email from HR saying I need to return to the clinic and redo the exams because they somehow got fucked up again. I was disappointed they would ask me to return to the clinic for the what 4th, 5th time right after I shared I was going through this and needed time. This onboarding process has really been an unnecessarily arduous experience. I’ve always had to get physicals, drug screens, fingerprints, etc but I never faced repeated issues like I have with this employer.

My parent’s cancer is ready everywhere and they are deteriorating rapidly. I am now one of the caretakers so I’ve decided to keep my part time and food delivery gig to make ends meet this month. Starting an inflexible full time job far from my parents would not be feasible so I’m not gonna move forward with this. I want to respond to them letting them know I’m backing out of the offer but I want to mention how awful this onboarding experience was for me so they maybe don’t do this to other candidates. Is it worth it?

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