Horsfield Menzies : Blog vs Behaviour – DANIEL RUBIN’S “PEOPLE LIKE US” PROBLEM

By /

Daniel Rubin has already explained why recruitment decisions cannot always be taken at face value.

That is what makes this one interesting.

In “What Influences Your Recruitment Decisions?”, Rubin considers the things sitting underneath hiring decisions that never make it onto the score sheet. Nepotism is obvious enough. Appearance, ethnicity and nationality enter the discussion too. Then he gets to something more slippery: “chemistry”. The candidate feels right. You can imagine working with them. They fit the team. Conversation flows. Nothing sinister has happened and everybody goes home convinced the best person got the job.

Rubin knows why that can be bollocks.

Familiarity is comfortable, and comfortable people tend to choose other comfortable people. The apparently harmless idea of chemistry can conceal unconscious bias, while Rubin’s own phrase, “people like us”, describes the tendency rather beautifully. Keep recruiting people who look, sound, think and behave like the existing group and eventually you have built an organisation in its own image while continuing to congratulate yourself on selecting purely on merit.

It is actually a good article. Rubin understands that discrimination is rarely stupid enough to arrive with a signed confession. Decisions can be genuinely influenced by disability, race, sex or some other characteristic while the person making them sincerely believes they were responding to attitude, personality, fit or another neutral explanation. That is precisely why employers need to look below the surface rather than treating the explanation attached to a decision as the end of the enquiry.

Daniel Rubin understood all of that before he ever knew who I was.

Then Horsfield Menzies became involved in a disability-discrimination claim arising from recruitment.

The theory had acquired a client.

When “Chemistry” Stops Being A Blog Topic

My Cepac claim began with a telephone call from Page Outsourcing on 21 August 2024. I say that during that conversation I was offered an interview at Cepac after the bank holiday, the training salary was discussed and I was asked about the gap in my employment history. I explained that the gap related to my mental health.

A contemporaneous WhatsApp message sent that same day records “Interview next week” and “27k training wage up towards 29”.

That message matters for an extremely mundane reason. I sent it while I still thought I was going to a job interview. There was no Employment Tribunal claim to construct, no solicitor on the other side and no TCAP audience waiting for a scandal. I had no reason to create evidence for a dispute I did not know was coming.

The expected confirmation never arrived. Cepac subsequently denied that an interview had been offered.

There may be an innocent explanation for that. Page could have communicated something badly, I could have misunderstood part of the call, or somebody may simply have made an administrative mistake. The mental-health disclosure might have had absolutely fuck all to do with what followed.

Those possibilities are why courts and tribunals hear evidence.

What makes Rubin’s article relevant is that he already understood why the apparently innocent explanation cannot simply be assumed to be the right one. His own published argument is that hidden influences matter precisely because decision-makers do not necessarily recognise them. A hiring manager can act on familiarity, instinct or “chemistry” without ever consciously deciding to discriminate.

The factual sequence in Cepac should therefore have been intellectually familiar territory to him: candidate progresses, health information enters the recruitment conversation, expected next step disappears, later account conflicts with the candidate’s contemporaneous record.

That is not proof of discrimination.

It is a fucking question.

Rubin knew why questions like that deserve examination.

What happened afterwards is why I have so little admiration for the man behind the article.

The Principle Acquired A Billing Code

There is nothing remarkable about an employment solicitor defending an employer accused of discrimination. Cepac was entitled to dispute my account and Horsfield Menzies was entitled to act for it. Rubin did not make the original recruitment decision, and nobody needs to pretend otherwise.

The point is more revealing than that.

Horsfield Menzies publishes an enormous amount of material presenting its lawyers as thoughtful guides through the moral as well as legal problems of employment. Its website does not merely tell prospective clients that its solicitors know legislation. They talk about diversity, mental health, investigations, victimisation, fair treatment, reasonable adjustments and the sort of organisational culture responsible employers should try to create.

Rubin’s recruitment article belongs squarely in that tradition. Look deeper. Challenge instinct. Understand bias. Resist the attraction of “people like us”.

Lovely.

But principles become more interesting when there is a price attached to them.

Once Horsfield Menzies was representing Cepac, Rubin’s insight into hidden recruitment bias existed on one side of the screen while his professional obligations to a corporate client existed on the other. There is no contradiction merely in defending the case. The contradiction emerges from what the case eventually became.

Employment Judge T. R. Smith later described the proceedings as a “simple claim”, adding that I was essentially upset because I had not got a job. A breathtakingly dishonest reduction of what was actually pleaded. By then, the Tribunal file stood at approximately 1,941 pages.

The telephone call had not somehow become 1,941 pages complicated.

I had.

The Claimant Became The Case

My correspondence became important. So did my reactions, complaints, medical evidence, attendance, previous litigation, TCAP and posts on X. By the final stages, a substantial part of the documentary exercise concerned not what happened during recruitment, but the behaviour of the person who had asked the Tribunal to decide it.

This was not solely Rubin’s work and I am not going to lazily attribute every tactical decision by Horsfield Menzies to one partner because his name makes a better headline. He was, however, one of the senior lawyers at the firm representing Cepac, was personally involved in the wider dispute and later appeared for the company.

The eventual result was a strike-out based on conduct and a £20,000 costs order.

The recruitment merits never received their completed determination.

There is something grimly efficient about that outcome. The case began with scrutiny directed towards a recruitment process and ended with scrutiny overwhelmingly directed towards the claimant. Whatever happened on 21 August 2024 remained unresolved on the merits, while everybody acquired a very detailed judicial opinion about me.

Rubin’s article tells employers to look beneath the surface of recruitment decisions.

The litigation never finished doing that.

It found another fucking surface.

“People Like Us” Travels Well

The phrase Rubin chose for his article has stayed with me because it works beyond recruitment.

People like us.

He uses it to describe familiarity influencing hiring. People tend to feel more comfortable around others who communicate similarly, share recognisable backgrounds or fit existing cultural expectations. Unless that instinct is consciously challenged, organisations can start treating familiarity as evidence of merit and difference as evidence of risk.

Now put that idea inside litigation.

Employment law has a professional culture of its own. Solicitors understand solicitors. Barristers know how judges expect arguments to be framed. Experienced advocates know the acceptable language of disagreement and the amount of emotion a litigant can display before emotion itself starts becoming evidence about them. The professionals understand the choreography because they perform it for a living.

Then the disabled litigant in person arrives. He is not polished. He is angry. Fuck, he even swears. His correspondence becomes excessive. Distrust of institutions has not appeared from nowhere, and when he believes something has been ignored he tends to push harder rather than wait politely for the machine to rediscover him.

I am not suggesting that every reaction I had during that litigation was admirable. Some of it plainly was not. Nor am I alleging some grand professional conspiracy in which everybody recognised an outsider and secretly agreed to fuck him over.

The point is much simpler.

Rubin had already identified the human tendency to experience familiarity as reassuring and difference as problematic. Yet when the actual difficult outsider appeared opposite his corporate client, that understanding did not seem to produce much curiosity about why the person was reacting as he was. Instead, the reactions themselves became increasingly useful.

The discrimination claimant became the conduct problem. Before long, the complainant had become the difficult individual, while the person who did not behave like the professionals eventually mattered more to the proceedings than the recruitment event he had brought them there to examine.

I find that particularly hard to admire from somebody who had already written the phrase “people like us”.

The Corporate Man Behind The Brochure

Rubin’s Horsfield Menzies profile is refreshingly clear about his professional world. He acts mainly for large corporate clients and advises on strategic employment issues, reorganisations, redundancies, outsourcing and sensitive disputes. The firm also identifies reputation management and investor confidence as important aspects of his work.

Good. That tells us something useful.

Daniel Rubin is a corporate employment lawyer. Businesses pay him to protect their interests when employment problems become legally, commercially or reputationally dangerous. There is nothing shameful about the profession, but there is also no reason to romanticise it into something it is not.

That matters when reading the blog.

Brochure Rubin is talking about diversity and interrogating hidden bias. Professional Rubin is retained by organisations when the consequences of those principles become expensive. Again, the two roles do not inherently conflict. A good corporate lawyer can advise employers to behave ethically and defend them robustly when allegations later arise.

What interests me is the apparent moral elasticity when the principles point towards the wrong side of the invoice.

Reputation Management

A completed discrimination hearing would have required the recruitment evidence to take centre stage. Witnesses could have been tested, documents examined and the factual conflict resolved. Cepac might have won every point. I might have lost comprehensively. There would at least have been an answer to the allegation the proceedings were created to decide.

Instead, the public result became a devastating account of the claimant’s conduct.

From a reputation-management perspective, you could hardly design a more convenient migration of attention.

I am not claiming Rubin secretly engineered that destination. There is no evidence of some hidden strategy meeting where he drew MAKE THOMPSON THE CASE on a whiteboard and passed the marker around. Inventing such a scene would merely weaken what the actual record already gives us.

I can look at where the case started, look at where it finished and notice which party emerged with the underlying allegation unresolved while the other emerged with his character turned into the public judgment.

Rubin is entitled to regard that as successful representation.

I am entitled to find the morality around it fucking rancid.

Then It Landed In His Own Inbox

My view of Rubin would probably remain ordinary adversarial contempt if his involvement ended with representing Cepac.

It did not.

On 23 March 2025, I sent a detailed private complaint about Senior Associate Sam Butler directly to Angus Menzies, Simon Horsfield and Daniel Rubin. It raised allegations concerning disability-related medical information, contact involving my medical centre, disputed statements made during the litigation, aggressive costs pressure and obstructive correspondence.

A complaint is not proof.

That is why you investigate it.

Rubin was not some junior copied accidentally into a chain beyond his authority. His own biography advertises strategic employment judgment, sensitive disputes, regulatory investigations and reputation management. He was also one of the people controlling Horsfield Menzies.

If the allegations were rubbish, tell me they were rubbish and explain why. Something requiring investigation could have been investigated. If the problem was partly misunderstanding and partly legitimate concern, separate the two and communicate the result. Plenty of professional outcomes were available which did not require believing me simply because I complained.

No investigation outcome was communicated to me.

That is where my assessment of Rubin stops being about the unavoidable compromises of representing a client and starts becoming about character.

He Had The Quiet Version

Before the Rubin articles, before Blog vs Behaviour and before Horsfield Menzies became a recurring TCAP subject, there was an email. The allegations were private. The reputational problem had not escaped the room. Three senior people at the firm had an opportunity to show that all the thoughtful public language about employment standards reflected something more substantial than content marketing.

Rubin, the reputation-management specialist, had a reputational off-ramp sitting in his inbox.

What came back was not a meaningful or constructive investigation outcome but, if memory serves, little more than a couple of lines from Rubin amounting to a flat denial. No engagement with the substance. No apparent attempt to investigate what I had actually raised. Just the door closing.

The complaint did not disappear.

It learned to blog.

There is something almost artistically stupid about that.

The Morality Of Distance

What bothers me most about Daniel Rubin is how good he appears to be at recognising problems from a safe distance.

Recruitment bias? He sees it. Homogeneous thinking? Absolutely. The danger of “chemistry”? Understood. Employers favouring “people like us”? Daniel has an article for that. Put the ethical problem inside somebody else’s organisation and Rubin can diagnose it with clarity. His prose is measured, sensible and modern. He sounds exactly like the kind of employment lawyer a responsible organisation might want advising it.

There is another kind of distance in the Cepac file too. Much of the actual friction came through Sam Butler. Butler was the person in the correspondence, the one pressing positions, dealing with me directly and becoming the visible face of Horsfield Menzies as the relationship deteriorated. Rubin sat further back, senior enough to matter but insulated from much of the dirtier contact by somebody beneath him doing the day-to-day work.

Whether that was deliberate insulation or simply how the file was staffed, the effect was convenient. Rubin could remain the polished partner above the mess while Butler occupied the space between him and the increasingly angry disabled litigant on the other side.

Then I removed the distance.

On 23 March 2025, the complaint went directly to Rubin, alongside Angus Menzies and Simon Horsfield. The problem was no longer something happening somewhere below him in correspondence being handled by Butler. I had put the alleged conduct of his own firm directly in front of him and asked the people at the top to deal with it.

That should have been the moment when Brochure Rubin became useful.

Instead, what came back was, if memory serves, little more than a flat denial.

That is what makes the distance interesting to me. Rubin appears very comfortable diagnosing ethical problems when they belong to other organisations, and remarkably well protected from them when they begin creeping towards his own desk. First the problem belongs to an employer in a blog post. Then it belongs to a corporate client. Then Butler sits between Rubin and the claimant. Finally the complaint lands directly with Rubin himself.

Each step removes another layer of insulation.

By the time there is nowhere left to put the problem except in front of Daniel Rubin, the impressive moral eyesight becomes considerably harder to detect.

That is the Rubin I dislike. Not a pantomime villain and not some idiot lawyer who fails to understand discrimination. The opposite is more damning.

He appears to understand perfectly well.

He just seems to understand it best from a comfortable fucking distance. And I think Sam understands it, too.

Pragmatism Does Some Heavy Fucking Lifting

There is a particular type of professional morality that works brilliantly at advisory distance. Principles remain crisp while they concern somebody else’s managers, somebody else’s culture and somebody else’s liability. Once the consequences arrive inside the professional’s own commercial relationships, the language changes. Values become legal positions. Ethics become duties to the client. Everything difficult can be filed under adversarial process.

Perhaps that is simply pragmatism. Horsfield Menzies actually markets Rubin as pragmatic.

I think pragmatism is doing some heavy fucking lifting there.

The point is not that a lawyer must sacrifice his client because an opponent invokes one of his old blog posts. It is that published principles tell us something about the standards a person claims to understand. When reality eventually tests those standards, the gap between comprehension and conduct becomes fair material for judgment.

Rubin plainly comprehends the issues.

That is what makes the gap interesting.

What Was The Answer?

Strip away everything that followed and the original recruitment dispute remains almost embarrassingly small.

I say an interview was offered, and the same-day WhatsApp records that expectation. My mental-health history entered the recruitment conversation. After that, the expected confirmation disappeared, while Cepac later denied that the interview had ever been offered.

What happened?

There could be a completely innocent explanation. Page may have misunderstood something, the interview offer could have been conditional, or Cepac might have had an explanation capable of demolishing my case. Perhaps disability played no role whatsoever.

A completed merits hearing could have told us.

We never got one.

Instead, a judicially described simple claim accumulated nearly two thousand pages and ultimately died because the claimant became procedurally unacceptable.

That is why Rubin’s old article now reads differently.

What Influences Your Recruitment Decisions?

Good question, Daniel.

It was good when you wrote it.

It remains good now.

After all the lawyers, bundles, arguments, costs and fucking character judgments, it is still sitting there without a completed answer.

Your client escaped that answer.

I did not escape yours.

People Like Us

Blog vs Behaviour works best when TCAP does not need to invent hypocrisy but simply preserves both versions of the professional at the same time.

So keep Daniel Rubin’s article. Keep “chemistry”, unconscious bias and the warning about “people like us”. Then keep the Cepac record beside it: the recruitment allegation whose merits were never finally determined, the enormous procedural case that grew around the claimant, Rubin’s corporate profile advertising reputation management, and the private complaint delivered to Rubin and the other people controlling Horsfield Menzies.

Keep, too, the absence of any investigation outcome communicated to me.

I do not need Daniel Rubin to confess to anything. An opinion can be formed from what he chose to publish, what he professionally represents and what happened when the problem moved from an employment-law thought piece into his own working life.

Mine is straightforward.

Rubin’s principles look strongest at exactly the distance where they cost him least.

He understood how easy it is for organisations to favour “people like us”.

Perhaps he should have kept reading his own fucking article.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

Sources

Scroll to Top