Barbara Corcoran says she was fired before the first season of ‘Shark Tank’—she got her job back with a simple email

Barbara Corcoran experienced every professional’s worst nightmare: She landed her dream job, only to have the offer rescinded.

Before the first season of ABC’s “Shark Tank” aired in 2009, a producer’s secretary reached out to Corcoran and asked the real estate tycoon to be an investor on the show. She “signed the contract without looking at it [and] mailed it right back overnight,” Corcoran said on a recent episode of Barstool’s “Chicks in the Office” podcast.

The euphoria didn’t last long. Two weeks after she landed the gig, and a week before the show was set to film, Corcoran said she got a call informing her the producers decided to go with a different female investor.

But Corcoran didn’t take the rejection without protest.

“I was embarrassed. I told all my friends, ‘I’m going to Hollywood,’” Corcoran, 74, said. “So I sat down and wrote an email right to them and said, ‘You’ve made a mistake.’”

Corcoran said she kept the email short, demanding that the producers “invite both women out to compete for the seat.” The producers agreed, and she landed the job, she said. She has been an investor on “Shark Tank” for 14 seasons now.

It’s unusual for job offers to get rescinded after you’ve signed on the dotted line, but not impossible. Last summer, amid fears of a looming recession, large companies like Coinbase, Twitter and Redfin took back job offers before a number of employees could log on for their first days.

It was primarily a reaction to inflation, co-founder and CEO of the recruiting company WizeHire Sid Upadhyay told CNBC Make It last June.

“The broader economic environment has shifted so much,” Upadhyay said at the time, adding that tech companies went from being “incentivized to grow at all costs” to focusing on “resiliency” practically overnight.

Corcoran’s method might not be the most reliable way to re-secure a job: An assertive email likely won’t thaw a hiring freeze. Upadhyay recommended asking your network for job leads, revisiting other job offers and getting in touch with former employers.

You could even seek legal advice if you feel your offer was rescinded for a discriminatory reason, he said.

Corcoran prefers doing the firing herself, she recently told the business podcast “The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett.” Before selling and leaving her real estate firm The Corcoran Group in 2001, she particularly liked firing employees on Fridays, often without explanation, she said.

She enjoyed the activity because it meant culling poor performers and “chronic complainers” from her company’s ranks, she clarified — but still received some public backlash for her comments.

Disclosure: CNBC owns the exclusive off-network cable rights to “Shark Tank.”

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