Opinion ID: 167100
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: New hires

Text: 35 Pippin says the RIF itself was pretextual because Burlington hired four new college recruits in the summer of 2000, just a few months after the April RIF, and made two other under-forty engineer hires in an eighteen-month period surrounding the RIF. Pippin says this eliminates the concept of RIF and poses a glaring contradiction in that, in the face of a RIF, Burlington actually hired new engineers. 36 Burlington, however, presented evidence that the offers to these college hires had been extended in November 1999, before any talk of a RIF was in the wind, and that Burlington decided to honor those [offers] and hire those people, because we did not want our reputation as a company to be destroyed on those campuses of which those individuals went to school. 37 As for the two under-forty hires in the eighteen-month period surrounding the April 2000 RIF, Pippin has provided no details about their qualifications or what job functions they assumed, which makes a comparison to Pippin's abilities and treatment nearly impossible. Moreover, at least for the hiring decision made ten months before the RIF, the record is clear that no one at Burlington's San Juan Division knew to anticipate a RIF at that time. The decision to hire a new engineer eight months after a RIF also fails to account for any non-RIF-related terminations or resignations from within the engineer pool, and that decision is fairly remote from the RIF decision. 38 Pippin has presented no evidence, other than his own opinions of how a business should be run, to refute these otherwise legitimate considerations. Indeed, our cases have previously held that leaving out new employees from RIF decisions does not establish pretext. See Fallis v. Kerr-McGee Corp., 944 F.2d 743, 745 (10th Cir. 1991).