Question on Conditional Job Offers

Myranda

Chalky said:

Enforcible in the sense that no court is going to side with the employer when there is no significant loss.  And what would be the cost of getting it to court? And how easy is the defence?  ("I've been under a lot of stress, here is my doctors note, my judgement is untrustworthy, I didn't want to start the job and deny someone else the chance when I know I would fail the probation period, etc") Sure there are odd cases where the employee is so rich it is worth suing them but I suspect that is not the case here.

But maybe the legal eagles on here with Contract/Employment Law backgrounds would disagree?

In British law such cases are about recouping losses. In this case the loss would be the HR persons time printing and mailing the contract. Because the loss would therefore be small it would likely cost the company more to pursue it through the Small Claims court than to just offer the job to the second place candidate. 

As lot of contacts have clauses about penalties for this and that (damaged uniform handed in when you leave for instance) that are hard to enforce to the point of almost no one trying to enforce them... And those often have a provable and quantified loss attached... Not an HR person doing the job they'd already have been doing anyway 

Ro_S

@ OP

update?