iStock/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — A human resources employee was fired after he appeared to mock a prospective job applicant’s English in an email.
Emily Huynh’s father, Minh Huynh, is a Vietnamese immigrant who is still working on his English, so she reads over her father’s emails at the end of the day to help him understand words that tripped him up, she told ABC News.
Emily Huynh, an 18-year-old high school senior, spotted a particularly jarring email earlier this week, in which an HR employee for a delivery service seemed to insult her father’s language skills in an email.
She then shared a screenshot of the email response, sparking a firestorm on Twitter.
Her father had inquired about a job at Dash Delivery LLC in their hometown of Seattle, and according to the screen grab that Emily Huynh later posted, an HR employee responded inappropriately.
“Let me tell you now, if you no speak English, I will send you home,” the employee appeared to write, underlining “if you no speak English.”
On Monday night, Emily Huynh called him out in the tweet she shared with her roughly 300 followers.
“Non-English speakers really have it hard bc my dad just got rejected from this job offer and the email literally stated ‘Let me tell you now, if you no speak English I will send you Home-‘ Wtf.. + all of [the employee’s] emails we’re also very unprofessional & passive aggressive,” Emily wrote in the tweet, with the screen grab of the email attached.
Two days later, the post has been retweeted more than 16,600 times and liked by over 35,000 Twitter users.
“I was so surprised in the amount of people who supported us,” Emily Huynh told ABC News.
Her father is currently jobless, having previously worked as an overnight truck driver, but since this episode went public, Emily Huynh said he’s received “a lot” of other job offers that he is currently evaluating.
Emily Huynh said that her dad is fluent in Vietnamese and Cantonese, and is constantly working to improve his English.
“From a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being proficient, I feel like he’s around 2.5. He knows what you’re saying to him but he doesn’t know how to communicate in words,” she said.
She also shared a picture of a written list of vocabulary words that her dad was working on. She wrote that her dad teaches himself words “daily” and keeps the notebook by his laptop.
The day after she posted the screenshot of the email, Emily Huynh said that she received an apology from the company. She also shared it on her Twitter feed.
In the apology, Dash Delivery LLC apologized and said that the email was “inappropriate and inconsistent with our company’s values.”
“While it is true that communicating effectively in English is an important part of the job in question, the manner in which [the employee in question] communicated with you was highly inappropriate and following our investigation he is no longer employed with the company,” the email states, as seen in the screen grab shared by Emily.
Dash Delivery LLC owner Kevin Bus told ABC News that “as you can imagine it has been an upsetting day.” He noted that he had already contacted the Huynh family and they had accepted his apology, and that the employee was fired Tuesday.
“He was hired on to help us with recruiting and interviews but didn’t have a management role. We hope that everyone who has been affected by this insensitive remark can accept our heartfelt apologies,” Bus said.
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