You Thought You Quit Your Job. Your Old Employer Has Other Ideas. (2024)

When you quit a job, you typically assume you’re finished with that work—once you’re gone, your former colleagues will find a way to move on without you. But sometimes an old job isn’t done with you … even when you’re done with it.

Bizarrely, I hear all the time from people who still regularly receive work questions from jobs they’re no longer employed by. A minor question or two in the first few weeks after you leave might not be odd—Where’s the key to file room? Which vendor did you use for X? But some offices send a steady stream of questions to previous employees, sometimes even asking them to perform substantive work long after their final paycheck hits.

Frankly, even minor questions are pushing it. When you leave a job, you should get to be done with it. Some people don’t mind spending a quick minute or two in the name of maintaining goodwill, but no one is happy to regularly receive work questions months after leaving a job they’re no longer being paid for.

Here are some accounts from people still being hounded by their old employers:

• I gave 30 days’ notice. I left a huge manual to cover all of my responsibilities and had daily meetings from the day I gave my notice to the end with the CEO to make sure his needs were met in the manual, his questions were answered, and his concerns were addressed. But I continue to receive calls and emails with questions. I expected this in the first month or two, even the first year as a whole business cycle ran through. Today, I was called to give the location of several documents, which of course had to be answered with, “The last time I saw them, nearly a year and a half ago, I think they were …”

• Someone texted me soon after I left to ask me how to turn on the heat in the office. I was busy and couldn’t text, so I’m assuming they looked on the wall to the switch that said “Heat” with the thermostat right next to it.

• I just got a question from an ex co-worker about where I put a copy of a file on the network drive and it’s now coming up on three years since I left the organization.

• Not only did my former job call, they called me AT MY NEW JOB instead of on my cell. And they weren’t communicating with each other, so I’d have three people calling me about the same report and I’d tell them all the same thing: “It was in the documentation when I left. I haven’t been there for three weeks so I don’t know what happened to it.” I got so frustrated that when the one person called yet again, I very sternly pointed out how unprofessional it was to continue to call me at this number and take me away from my current job. If they really needed to get ahold of me, HR had my cellphone number and they could call me there, but my answer would continue to be that it was in the documentation when I left. He had the nerve to chastise me for not being more willing to help, but at least I never heard from them again.

• My last job continued to contact me for well over a year, but I struggled because the person contacting me was both the new director and a “friend.” I put that in quotes because toward the end I decided my friend wouldn’t do this. Seriously, within 48 hours of my leaving, she sent me an email asking how to unjam the printer.

Particularly galling is that some employers keep reaching out even after firing someone:

• In January, I was fired from my job. I drove to work on a snow day when most of the office chose to stay home, and at 5:45 p.m., the manager called me into his office and said that they were letting me go because I wasn’t a good fit. I had 15 minutes to gather my stuff and leave. I have since moved on and getting let go from that company is probably the best thing to happen to me. It was a toxic work environment, and I was actively looking for other jobs before I was fired.

  The problem is that they keep contacting me. I was responsible for most of the company’s social media, and thus I had the passwords to them. Since January, I have been getting one to two phone calls or emails a month from different employees asking for the passwords. I have politely given them most of what they’ve asked for, but frankly it’s been months since I left and I don’t remember the others. If they had asked for all the passwords during my termination, I would have turned them over without a hesitation …How do I get them to leave me alone?

And if you think that’s bad, sometimes an especially bad manager will even continue trying to give “feedback” to someone who’s been gone for months:

• A few months ago, I finally left a job where my boss was abusive … This week, my former boss reached out with a long, angry email blaming me for a formula error in a spreadsheet that messed up some projections. While I admit that I made the mistake, there should have been verification of the numbers before he made decisions based off of them close to six months after the projections were made. Regardless, after I responded to his message confirming that there was an error in the calculation and identified some places he could look that may allow for adjustments to fill the gap, he sent back a scathing email doing nothing but blaming me for all of the future issues this would cause.

For the record, managers: When an employee leaves, your time with them is over. You don’t get to ask them to do work for you, and you definitely don’t get to criticize or berate them for whatever shortcomings you see in their work after they’re gone.

In all of these situations, it’s easy to think former employees should simply ignore their old colleagues! Often, though, people want to maintain good relations with the previous employer, and worry that refusing to help or not responding at all could sour the relationship and be a problem for future references or networking, as this person describes:

• I recently resigned from a mid-level management position at a large research organization. It was a very amicable transition, and I spent two weeks with the team who would handle the duties I had been managing. I left a detailed transition file with any open items, contact information, links to files, gave a recommendation for who to replace me, updated a position description to accurately reflect my duties, and bid farewell in good spirits and on good terms with all.

  It has been three weeks since I left, and I am still getting daily emails from multiple people from my old job. Most of the questions are things listed in my transition file or on the organization’s CRM system, such as, “Who should I call to get this contract signed?” or “What day did we invoice for the X client?” I have tried to keep pointing them to that file, and asking them to look there first before emailing me at my new job.

  Since my new job includes a lot of interaction with my old organization, I don’t want to seem like I am being callous or lose the goodwill that I earned over the years by telling them to just figure it out for themselves. But at the same time, I find it frustrating that many people still are relying on me to keep them updated on projects that I now have zero involvement in.

However, while it’s true that it’s useful to maintain good relations with a former employer, that doesn’t mean you have to keep working for them after you’ve left! It simply means being polite when you explain that you can’t. Take a few days to respond, since that might motivate them to find the answer on their own and, if nothing else, it will underscore that you’re not a source of fast or easy fixes. Then when you reply, say something short and breezy like, “I’m not sure off the top of my head—check the files I left behind.” If it happens a second time: “I’m swamped with my job. Sorry I can’t help.” After that, you should feel free to ignore any future requests for help.

The other option, of course, is to agree to help for money—the usual thing we exchange for labor. If you’re getting a lot of questions, you could offer to set up a paid consulting agreement. Be cautious about this, though. It’s usually better for your mental health to make a clean break when you leave a job, and it’s not necessarily wise to devote energy to an old job when you’re trying to make a good impression at a new one.

In most cases, though, the better solution is for employers to accept that when employees are gone, they’re truly gone. If they don’t want to lose those workers’ knowledge and expertise, the time to account for that is before they leave—by either working to retain them or ensuring that key processes and knowledge are documented somewhere. The solution to business-critical questions should never be dependent on the goodwill or accessibility of someone the business is no longer paying.