At what point is it unreasonable for a previous employer to continue asking questions of you?  I was gone for over 4 months and I still receive questions.

I feel as though I am a reasonable person and tried to everything right by my previous employer.  In fact I even gave them over a months notice that I would be leaving the company.  In all the time I was a manager people only gave me a couple of weeks notice and then I had to scramble to back-fill that individual.  Also, I never remember calling anyone after they left the company to ask how something was done, that was what I had to figure out before the individual left.

In the end though, I always try to exceed people’s expectations and I did continue to provide answers to some of their questions as time allowed in the evenings.  Mostly because it is in my nature to be helpful and I didn’t really see any reason to burn bridges of the people I worked with for 7 years over a couple of questions here and there (I can say all of this now as I haven’t had a question for 3 months).

For a longer read, I will give you more of the back-story as I have not really talked about why I ended up looking for a new job.  It isn’t that I have anything bad to say about my previous employer and in fact I enjoyed everyone I worked with and had a great time learning along the way.

Over a year ago the company I used to work for announced it was going to be merging with another company.  It was an exciting time for the company but also left a lot of people worried about what was going to happen.  Honestly, I was never really that worried, I figured I would get an offer to stay at the company doing what I was doing or I would go somewhere else.  In the meantime, before the deal could close there was going to be a lot of work done as I worked in Finance and needed to assist all 3 companies involved.  Budget models needed to be created and vetted out before too long so it wouldn’t be done last-minute.

Information was very slow to come from our company about what the future was as far as Corporate location and the big unknown… Jobs.

As I suspected, I was offered a similar position to what I had with increased responsibilities but that would require me to move out-of-state and away from my family that lives here in the Midwest (this happened about 3 months after the announcement).  I didn’t really like that option and at the time that was the only option they had available for me.  I was completely up front with them and said at this time I did not want to move but I realized that my job would no longer be in Minnesota after the company merged.  At that point I made sure they knew I was going to start reaching out to other companies and told them I would continue to be open and honest about what I was thinking.  They confirmed my thoughts on my current position by saying they are sorry I wouldn’t take the offer.  Also, they wanted me to know that my job wasn’t going away on day one and they would try to find something else before then.

About 4 months after the offer I went back to the same individuals and told them that I had found another job and was giving them my month notice with a couple of conditions attached.  The reason for the conditions was mostly because I knew it would be helpful to them if I stayed until January and in turn that could help me so I could spend a week watching my 2 young girls and working here and there that week.

Looking back how the whole process went, I think the lack of communication was the biggest downfall from what I could observe.  There was too much unknown for people and some of the people willing to stick it out were asked to leave at a later day due to synergies.  It didn’t help that on top of that a good handful of the upper management were not sticking with the merged company (where most people were going) and were either retiring or going with the new company.

Another question for anyone that has made it this far… Have you had an experience with a company merging of equal size and or spinning off a portion of a company, if so how did it go?