7 DUIs… and He Still Wanted the Job [The Bad Hire Ep. 22]

00:00:00 Seven DUIs. Wow. Stop using cocaine. What? What? Stop using cocaine. That was what the doctor said? Six in ten people wouldn't tell their employer if they got arrested. Six in ten. They say, this dude worked here for less than a week. He stopped showing up for work and ghosted us. This is The Bad Hire, the show with the best stories about the worst employees. We fired him, of course. People are crazy. It's like an HR nightmare. Right? One bad hire stole all of it. Crazy stuff. She got what she deserved. Oh. I'm your host, Ken Monroe, and every week we dive into real-life stories from the wild world

00:00:40 of work and what can happen when the wrong person gets the job. These stories aren't just crazy. They're cautionary tales about lessons learned the hard way. Let's get started. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast where the best stories and the worst kind of employees can collide. But we appreciate you being here. Listen, we're running a $10,000 contest. Don't forget that. Send us your very best story to TheBadHire.com. Funniest, craziest, most outrageous story. The best story. Could be the most heartwarming redemption story there is.

00:01:22 Whatever it is, if you've got a great hiring story and we know everybody has a story, get it to us somehow. You can submit it to us on our website, TheBadHire.com. You can send us an email. You can reach out to us. And we will schedule time to do a segment, let you video the segment, and then potentially even get you on the show as a co-host like William today. So I appreciate it. Today I'm joined by Nathan, who you've seen before, and William Capps. He's a human resource manager from Charlotte, North Carolina, and is also kind of excellent. He's one of the clients at B-Checks, has been for a very long time.

00:02:05 So William, we're so glad you're here. Thanks for being here. Some of the stories, they're just bad hires. They're bad at their job, whatever it is. They're bad people. But how in the world do they get hired to be with them? Our favorite stories are the ones that have kind of a redemption arc, where it's like they went through this, they actually ended up getting fired, and then they had some kind of redemption. What if it's going to rehab, or they got a place in the right job where they could find what they actually were passionate about, something like that. Yeah, there was one great story where the leader, the HR leader kept up with the person. Yeah. Right? And, hey, I got to let you go. Right? Yeah. I mean, you burn up all your chances here, and the dude turns his life around.

00:02:47 Exactly. He ends up getting married, having a couple kids, having a great career after that, and the guy kept up with him afterwards. To your point, he was humid. It hurt him to do it. It hurt him to let him go, but he had to. They're bad hire at 23, but then at 27, they turn it around. And so we hear those type of stories, too. Which we, that's what we're rooting for. Because our whole heart behind the whole show is not just to point and laugh and be like, wow, what's such bad hires is more kind of some warning stories of people who are in hiring and what red flags to look out for. And also, hey, when it does go really, really badly, what do you do? How do you handle it? And how do you turn it around, more or less? And so those are some of the themes you might pick up on the show.

00:03:29 Yeah, and just use a better background check service. My big story with that difference between one service and the other was, I mean, a guy with, a guy who had three sets of convictions and nothing showed up on the service they had. We need good benefits brokers. We need good service buyers. If we have that, we look good. Yeah, for sure. If we don't have that, we look horrible. Yeah, and one thing we haven't mentioned yet, I guess we can start the show now. We've been, well, we're rolling. Yeah, we're good. But I mentioned this to you earlier, but you are the first official BeachX customer to be on the show. And you've been using BeachX for how many years now? Since 2013.

00:04:10 Yeah, so you've been with us for a while. And so we're honored to have you into the office as our first BeachX client. Well, it's cool to kind of see the, is, and I always, I always see the people that I do business with. It's kind of neat to come and, oh, wow, I've been doing business with these guys for years. I actually get kind of their office. But, you know, I mean, most, for example, most workers' comp providers I use, I've never been to their office. I would meet their risk consultants. Yeah. That's about it. And they'll come by once or twice a year, maybe three times if things are doing well. But that's a lot of people, Blue Cross or any other health insurance company. I've never met the first person with United Healthcare, Blue Cross, Aetna. Just meet my insurance rep. And I'm like, you have a connection, but they provide the services.

00:04:52 I've never met you. It's kind of neat. I was told that you went somewhere else. When we first started a business with you, it was at a different company. And then you, when you moved, I have continued to insist use these people. So, I was that. I liked the real. And the thing was, the first company, I bent the rules. In construction, I had some, my construction days, I had my old files. There are some people that are going to be. Let me put them in and see what BIB shows me. What's BIB back then? They found everything. Oh, right. Because some sales marketing person reached out to me. Well, let me put this to the test. And everything showed up. In this case, there's a guy with my earnings, seven DUIs.

00:05:35 Wow. In South Carolina, you hit your fifth, it's a felony. You will do a year. You're sixth, you'll do three years. I don't know if you do it for seven, but he was awaiting trial. And the guy couldn't stay out of trouble. Every time he's out, within a year, he's charged. So, I put him in and lit up. I'm like, great, they found it. If I can test them and they pass the test, it probably is a little abuse of what we're supposed to do with it. But I've got responsibilities. Yeah. I've got to make sure that we keep our people safe. I have my Cray certification, civilian response to at-to-shooter events. And these things, being able to screen out problems can save your companies by online,

00:06:16 but it can save your employees. We had an employee who was killed in December 24, an off-site at a shooter incident in Rock Hill. So, to say it's a hypothetical thing. Wow. It was a vape shop. The guy was 28 years old, living with this rich kid in Columbia, drove 80 miles in the hour, walks in his vape shop. Supervisor, there was his wife shopping. He opens fire, kills one of the two employees, and runs out of the back. Then he points at Supervisor's wife, who jumps in front of his wife. Gosh. Wow. That's the last thing he did. And the very last thought was, I'm going to do this. I mean, that's a tragic story, but think about it. You really did not know how great a guy this was. His last impulse is to do this.

00:06:57 She took seven shots right across the chest from the AR. We learned she was talking to me. Wow. Like I said, I mean, I was a truly amazing person. I just wish I had known. Yeah. Before it happened. But anyway, so these things are not hypothetical. These risks are real. Yeah. I mean, plain and simple. You know, I always, it's rare, but I always say we're in the prevention business, William. And if you're doing it great, right, and you're doing everything right, hopefully nothing ever happens. And it's easy to lose sight of what could. Yeah. And forget. Because, well, everything's great, nothing happened. Well.

00:07:38 But the reality is, if you weren't screening, you know, it would, there'd be a, there'd be a, I believe, there'd be a different, things would be different in a lot of workplaces. You have that scene of Men in Black, earlier in the movie where he says, we got to tell them, no, no, our job is so that they don't know. If we're doing our job, people won't know that their creature's going to destroy the earth because of something. Right. And to be honest, so we are, we are almost the Men in Black we protect. You'll never know what we've done. Yeah. Because we've done it. That's powerful. Because, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll share bad hire stories. And some of it's kind of light, lighthearted, kind of funny, like, oh, this person didn't show up to work on their second day work, something like that.

00:08:19 But then, yeah, we hear the actual really crazy, scary stories about bad background checks that miss something super important. And that's also a huge heart, obviously, behind everything that we do. It's like, hey, this is real life stuff. Like you said, it's, it's not hypothetical. This is actually real. So, so if we're able to be in the business of preventing tragedies and crazy things happening at a school or a business or an office, then, I mean, that's, it's a really powerful mission to go after. And so, yeah, there's kind of a lot of things baked into the podcast and also just what we do on a day-to-day basis, I guess. Before we dive back into the chaos on the bad hire, this episode is brought to you by B-Checks. Hiring shouldn't feel like rolling the dice.

00:08:59 Background checks should come with great tech, seamless integration, and customer service that delivers. That's B-Checks. Lightning fast results, unmatched accuracy, built-in fraud prevention. We help you hire the right people. Now, B-Checks plugs into over 100 HRIS and ATS systems. So your background checks run smooth, fast, and backed by top-level service. Protect your team. Protect your reputation. Protect your sanity. Go to B-Checks.io. That's B-C-H-E-X.io. That's fine until you've got to clean it up, and that's what we do. I mean, I had to pass the trash, and they didn't want to fire him.

00:09:42 The economy was sour at the time, so he faked an injury. And that ended up taking time, money. So, you know, that cost us thousands of dollars. And my time, because the supervisor didn't want to make a simple but tough decision. Yeah. Or even call and get our advice, so he put somebody else and ended up taking, you know, we probably had 20, 30 hours at work invested in making the same decision, plus cost that should have been made the first time. And sometimes, if you don't want to work with the person, sometimes you need to ask the question, are they going to work out at all? And what do I have so personal against the other department manager that I'm going to send them this person? Did you hear what he just said?

00:10:22 I missed that last part. He just said, what do I have personally against that other manager that I'm going to send this person to that guy? Yeah. I've asked that. You can deal with that. Right. Right. I mean, he's pretty insightful. Like, I'm just moving him on somewhere else. But, you know, what you're doing to the other manager is like, what do you got personally against the other manager? You would do that to him. Oh, and I've asked that. And they go, I don't, no, man, that's not how it is. I said, no, no. It is what it is. When that person goes over there and causes more problems, they're going to cost a lot more money. They're going to run out more people. And like I said, in that one case, this guy dropped a pretty, his brother had made a huge settlement. And so he says, oh, well, I'm going to claim a back injury.

00:11:03 And that was 20, 30 hours of work that went into that case. Several people were taken for the hearing. It was thrown out in 15 minutes. Is it that easy? You can just say like, oh, my back hurts and just get worker, worker, worker, just fake it? Yeah. Essentially, there's a, what happens, you go in these meetings with negotiations and any type, whether it's workers' comp, professional liability, auto, you're going to have a discussion with you, the justices, the attorney, and they're going to say, what's their likelihood of succeeding? Give me a percentage. 30%. Okay, we're going to authorize you to offer a settlement of 25% of what they're asking for. We'll get 35% to get a release. This one guy drug it out three years, and he did all of that.

00:11:44 He filed discrimination complaint. His white male supervisor discriminated against him, a white male in favor of black male co-workers, which is a little all right. That went through two hearings. He filed for unemployment, filed an appeal. And you play the recording he left on a supervisor's phone. There's a darn 500. The supervisor was cussing and threatening the supervisor. Wow. He has gotten a Delflin dispute check for an ankle injury. He didn't tell us an ankle injury because he didn't want to lose his job. So that's why he comes in and missed several days of work. Throws down the note. We look at two things are added. He said, do you read this? Two things he added to this note, doctor did. Take aspirin as needed.

00:12:24 Stop using cocaine. What? What? Stop using cocaine. That was what the doctor said? Yes. That's good advice. That guy, he filed. Did he file that note with you? Ultimately, he got. Did he file the note with the company? He gave it to us. He threw it down the table. Oh, my God. No way. You were wrong. I have a doctor's diagnosis. You were wrong to fire me. Here's my doctor's note. Did you read this? It's crazy. That's insane. Yeah, I read. Did you really read what the doctor wrote on this note? I never really read the whole thing. Wow. He should stop using cocaine prior to his reading. But bottom line, this guy. That's good advice by the doctor. Solid, solid. Got him. Channel 4 calls in Charleston. I'm hurting this guy. He's had.

00:13:06 He said, y'all fired him wrongfully. I wanted to get a signed release. Because, of course, personally, I'm by the commentator. That's what I told a reporter. I can't talk with you. I wanted to get a signed release. I wanted to show that on the news. Yeah. On the camera. But this guy, for three years, and we figured his cost to the organization was probably a ballpark of $40,000. Yeah. In indirect cost. Wow. For somebody who was fired for absenteeism. Mm-hmm. Because in the workplace, a good indicator of substance abuse the day after they've been paid, that's when they're either late or out. Oh. That's a good indicator. Oh, I never thought about that. Watch your attendance. Yes. If you have somebody's regular stimulus issues. Anyway, that was just a wild case. So you know all about the legal ups and downs and how to navigate all this.

00:13:48 That's what it sounds like. Learn a few things. It sounds like you've had some crazy experiences. Yes. The lawyers love it, though. The lawyers make money because they've got to defend this stuff. Yeah. Because you've got to know about all. Did you catch what he just said? A good indicator? Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. It really is. Watch your attendance. The indicator of substance abuse is the day after payroll. They party. I guess, you know, there are different populations in different companies where there's, you know, maybe there's more of a propensity of certain populations to certain types of jobs or something to, I don't know. I don't know if that's true or not. Substance abuse. I mean, I've never caught that, but I haven't dealt with a ton of substance abuse in my organization. There's a handful of times I have that I'm aware of, but there's a handful of times that,

00:14:32 you know, that we've had to deal with it. But it is true. I mean, you know, the whole opioid addiction thing, they really focused disbursement into rural areas where it's more blue collar workers, where guys hurt, get hurt working. They do hard work. They're in pain. And, you know, they start on the opioids. I don't know what gets, that's what gets most people going, but that's the story that I've certainly, I've seen the documentaries on that that suggest that's how they focused. It did seem to start there. You know, I'll be honest with you, I really never occurred to me 15 years ago, when I'm seeing employees shopping prescriptions, it never occurred to me, how does it cut this off? And they did. And then they started going to other sources, but then word kind of got, this stuff is

00:15:16 good. So then you see, I think it started 15, 20 years ago with abuse. Largely, I heap old with prescriptions, but I think word got around, this is really cool. And once you got, once you need a prescription, once the street sources came into play, then you didn't need to be, to be injured on the job to get, score some. You could just go. And of course, the lethal stuff, my coroner will tell you in Lancaster County, she's, I think opioid overdoses have, are a tenfold of where they were just a few years ago. Wow. Yeah. And coroner's office is wherever they go. That's wild. But yeah, so that's, that's certainly, it never occurred to me, what would happen if they tightened up? And I guess if I didn't, I guess maybe they're able to think the same thing. What happens when we tighten up on this abuse? So when I talk about general orientations, our policies, I talk about the substance abuse.

00:16:00 I always emphasize there's treatment options, please. Don't be like that guy, a great guy who cared about his mother and overdosed. Yeah. That's a crazy story. I'm curious, you know, one of the, one of the products that we have now is called Chex 365. I was just thinking about that when you were talking about that. Yes, at BeechX and it's, it's a monitoring tool and we're, it's one of the most widely, widely used monitoring tools in the country. Right now we do two things. We're monitoring in the state of North Carolina. Okay. Right first. And we're expanding that to do other types of monitoring. But, you know, our belief is it can be done really well on a state level, not as well

00:16:42 on a national level at this point for anyone who tries to build it. Now we've been doing it for 15 years. We're probably the first company in the country to ever do monitoring. What, what, what that means is if someone gets arrested, you know, we find out pretty soon in the state of North Carolina, we find out the next, that same day or the next day and notify the employer who's doing the monitoring. We also monitor sex offender registries and those types of things for some large membership organizations where we were monitoring 15 million people a night. Right. But when I first focused in on that product, I saw it as two things. One, there's, you know, most people think, oh, someone gets arrested, fire them. And, but I saw it as an early warning sign for employee assistance programs.

00:17:23 It is. You know, there is some risk. If someone did something, you'd be like, that's tough. I can't let them stay. That's showing really risky behavior. There are others that are emblematic of, of issues where they may not, you know, we did some surveys last year that showed us six in 10 people wouldn't tell their employer if they got arrested. Six in 10. And then if you, you ask somebody, hey, would you, um, you know, would you, uh, tell your employer, you know, they're like, if I tell them I'm going to get fired. And the company had an unlicensed illegal box truck, hit my wife's car at a law firm and tried to drive off. I knew exactly who to call. Yeah. Um, and I said, you know, you got somebody who is not supposed to be driving a CDL vehicle.

00:18:08 That's, that's cool insight. Cause you're, you're suggesting the last 10 to 15 years, a lot of risk in just people in cars who are doing driving work and monitoring, whether it's like MVR monitoring, like trying to do some type of driver's license monitoring, which can be, uh, can be pretty expensive because of all the government access fees that are associated with getting MVRs. But in some States they put those driving offenses into the criminal record, into the data, same data. So you can monitor on it and pull it back. And, uh, that's, and so it would be a benefit for you to like, Hey, I just got notified. This person got arrested or ticketed for something. I've had people without licenses who lost license who did not tell me.

00:18:50 I'm a human. And I understand why. Yeah. But like I said, I understand why six in 10 people say, I'm not going to say. We had a tremendous train wreck and, uh, insurance for contractors because what happened was when insurance company found, we had a case, we could use a layer of the law and not to pay it. And suddenly they called a performance bond. It was a guarantee of fixing the work. If it's not done right. The court said really by layer of the law, nobody has this in South Carolina that caused a pain because some company wanted to get out $15 million. And they got out of it. So what's to say insurance companies look at you and say, you're, you kill grandma. You're going to kill grandma. And we're not going to, you know, we're not going to repay it because the person's on license.

00:19:35 Yeah. And you didn't know. Yeah. And, um, you know, that's your fault. That's there within their right to do that. And I said, then who's your company belong to next week. Yeah. That's kind of like some of the big messaging behind checks 365 is like, Hey, if this happened to one of your employees, would you even know? And what we've learned is most companies just don't know. And so when there's a DUI or some kind of criminal offense, it just kind of slips under, under the record. And then they just continue on their job, causing more damage, more potential damage years goes, goes by. And then now we're coming in with the messaging saying like, Hey, if something crazy like this happens, you can know within a day and address it in one way or another, you know?

00:20:17 And one of the preventative measures is, is this getting notification when someone's, you know, lost their license doing driver, you know, didn't necessarily have to be like, um, I don't think it probably necessarily has to be losing their license. They could just have a history of, you know, they've been getting reckless driving tickets and all types of other things and they're still driving for you. Yeah. You know, and that's just what, I mean, again, it's just that the automobile side of, of monitoring not necessarily, um, you know, some of the, some of the drug issues that come across. It's probably the major, um, the issues when we, when I look at monitoring, there's the results of monitoring.

00:20:58 There's auto infractions, ton of them, right? Then you get next is, um, uh, drugs, you know, possession, use, occasionally distribution. Uh, and then the next level is assault and you're going to do those are those three things. Violence. Yeah. Yeah. Assault and violence. And then, you know, then you get all, then you get some other stuff from just being drunk. You know, somebody's drunk or high, they're now tearing up something, you know, doing something lewd in some, you know, different places. Um, you get it all becomes the combo. Yeah. And then, and then of course you get that, that doozy that comes through every once in a while and you're like, you know, that's crazy.

00:21:39 Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, it's, you know, your job, we do, we protect. Let's see. I've got, I've got a story to read. We've got one clip, I think. And William, I know you submitted a story for our contest, which you can recite if you'd like to. It's up to you. Oh, absolutely. It'd be, well, you know. Um, but yeah, we've got a couple more stories. I know you just have a bunch of stories from your life. You probably could have submitted 10 stories. You want to tell that one you sent us? Well, yeah, we can certainly talk about that. Yeah. The company I came into was the, the controller had, um, the former controller was sitting in federal prison. Um, he had gotten hired in spite of a conviction that had happened. The background check service they used, which they were still using when I came into my investigation, like, wait a minute, you know, the background check service is bad.

00:22:20 You're still using them? All right. Wait, they missed it? Yes. They got a, not only do they miss it, they get a garnishment notice for this controller's conviction and the H the operations manager told the HR, my predecessor, just put a restitution to the previous employer for the background, for the offense that your background check didn't show he did. Wow. And, um, she, so she, she listened to the operations manager now on the other next door to her is the presence office. She, uh, if it had been me, I'd have walked the rest and said, we got a problem. She didn't do that. So what did he proceed to do? He starts looting the company and he took a few weeks off to go spend time with his son. I found when I, after he got caught in the background check, actually he was in trial.

00:23:05 He was convicted and waiting to sentence him for another set. So we were the third time. Um, no kidding. And by the way, a little warning to all the criminals out there. Okay. You do, you go to club fed your first time. If it's three strikes, federal white collar, you're going to medium security. Yeah. That's yeah. You're going to be the only person at that table who didn't do a horrible, heinous offense. I wouldn't want to be that person that night. Yeah. Gosh. This is so. This is remarkably similar to a story of, of someone I know who was running a massive scheme to steal from people, old people, right?

00:23:47 The whole financial crimes. He's pending trial. You know, FBI kicks in his door, comes in his house. The whole works right. Hauls him, hauls him away. He gets out on some type of bail and now he's pending trial. Right. So he applies to, I'm not going to say their name, but I'm, they are a, yeah, we all have their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their company that places financial and accounting people on a, uh, uh, in, in, in companies, right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. They're a recruiting firm. Right. Uh, and, uh, do part-time people and all that kind of stuff. And so that's their specialty. Okay. They, he goes there and passes their background check and they place him in a controller, in

00:24:33 a controller's role in another company. Meanwhile, he's trying to defraud. He's, he's literally on trial. His trial is approaching for stealing, you know, well over a million dollars from people. And the background check company missed the fact that he's even on trial. Here's why. Here's why. And this is, we talk about this all the time. Uh, we have, people don't understand that federal courts are different than county courts and they, they hear you and they buy their background check. They're right. Right. And I, and, and I don't blame a lot of even HR, uh, uh, folks who don't know the difference because, you know, background checks get oversold by salespeople all the time, but they just leave out the federal. The federals are hard to do and they're labor intensive. And so companies don't, background checks don't, don't do background checks.

00:25:17 They don't do them. They got to, they got to, it adds to the price of the deal. Right. So it's easier to say, oh yeah, we got a national search in here. You're all good. Yep. They passed, passed background check. Everything's fine. So they don't run the federal search. And you're, you just said a minute ago, the guy was busted three times in federal. So he, any county search, any standard background check, if they didn't add a federal search to it, that guy would come up clean every single time for a lot of people. And it did for your company before you got there, I guess. And you beefed up how they did their screening. Well, you know, it's, it's one thing to somebody's, somebody's not a position to trust. But I think when you put somebody in that role, you better know. It's worth it.

00:25:57 I mean, there was a Charleston King Street shooting. I think I see a link to that. Guy was hiring a restaurant. He just got out of prison for shooting a pastor in an ATM. Pastor Serviah was paralyzed. Man. So he gets, they, the, he was harassing and threatening and intimidating employees. And the HR person from the restaurants said, didn't make a decision. And she finally said one day, okay, I'm going to come here and let him go. And so I can't make it. Told the chef. Let him go. It's one of these nice restaurants on King Street and down in Charleston. A place I couldn't afford to go to for lunch. But there are people in there who could afford lunch that day. When the guy comes back in with a gun and holds the whole place at gunpoint, the chef steps in front of the gun. I said, you're not doing this to these people. So he's killed.

00:26:39 No way. And right, there's a story about, well, they didn't check because they're getting, oh, by the way, in this case, it was so reckless. The HR manager was named awesome, not just the company, not, but they were going after her as well. That's $5 million. But they did a story of the restaurant association present. Well, $35 is too much to pay for all these dishwashers we hire. Yeah. What's a $5 million lawsuit and the fact that you got somebody killed? Wow. Yeah. Okay. So to the point of money. I always say a $40 background check could have saved a life. Yeah. And the liability. I mean, you know, auto policy. And something I've learned is a good benchmark. In my experience, part of my job is managing risk insurance policy.

00:27:22 20 years has been on my plate. For every $4 or $5 they pay out between the settlement, award, legal defense costs, your rates going up a dollar. I had a, 20 years ago, I had a $1 quarter million workers' comp case. It wasn't our fault. It was the fault of the subcontractor, but the way it works is no fault. Your employee, you pay. A hundred dollar break job, almost killed this guy, cost a $1 quarter million. Our renewal was at $200,000. Wow. $200,000. We had to let people go to cut costs. Wow. Yeah. That guy was injured. It wasn't his fault. He almost got killed. And I taught in his case marriage a couple weeks ago, actually. He's in Colorado getting by. But you look at five people, I've got to let you go.

00:28:06 Why? Because we didn't manage some risk. Wow. We had to pay out. You know, so it's like, I'm sorry, man. You know what? You go home thinking about that. You should think about it. But, yeah, that's the thing. Because so risk costs money. And once you see your auto go up, once you see your general liability go up, then you realize you could have, it would have been more worth it to spend the $35, $40 for the background check. Exactly. And for the HR practitioner to actually learn how to do these things, understand these things. Well, clearly you figured out something. Because you wouldn't believe the number of times that we get, you know, in B-Checks, the background check company running our sales people, talk to somebody.

00:28:49 And the first thing out of their question is, well, how much is your background check? And that their leading question is pricing. When they do that, they tilt their hand to us and let us know that, one, they don't know about background checks. And they're not an educated buyer. Right? And so, and companies really deserve to have an expert when it comes to their HR leaders should be experts in background checks. Because you noted a difference. You knew that that other company had not done a good check. It came back clear. And you knew to come and build an effective background check in the way it's done. Because background checks are different. And you read it one time, you found it. A lot of HR people, and the person in our place, that kind of is a glorified admin.

00:29:33 Promoted out of a role to a job. Oh, HR is higher. They just do paperwork. They can. But if you're smart, you paid a little bit extra, you get a more qualified person who actually goes to work to protect people. As well as your company. It should be that simple, but often it's not. And, you know, the dollars and cents, there are some things which are commodities. And you buy and sell. The price is only that matters. Or for a company, we made filters. And that essentially was, that's a commodity. Air filters and air filters. I hate to say it. But a background check is not a background check. And I've seen myself. You need to know who you're laying in the door. Exactly.

00:30:13 Yeah. You need to know. You need to know who you're putting behind the wheel. I do a lot of HR, volunteer HR advising for nonprofits. Do you have a car? Do your volunteers work around children? Do your volunteers work with financial assets? You need to get a service. A good service. And if you talk to them, they'll probably negotiate a price with you because they want to be supportive of nonprofits. But none of them, none of them have any awareness of this stuff. Yeah. Yeah. You're having all those same conversations. Yeah. Like I said, you have more stories than we do. I feel like just from your years in HR and hiring and managing and things like that, you've got some heavier stories. Tell that story you got. What's that story? I got anything.

00:30:54 Let's talk about some stories here. Yeah. You have been. Yeah. You have some great stories. I wish I could say I'm the only person who's had these bad stories, but let's. Yeah. Well, yours are yours more minor, more. Your story. But that story with that's like one of the best stories I've heard with the controller who comes in. You, you came into that job after he was there, right? He had destroyed. He had left about a year before. They're still struggling with it. He had trashed their books. Their accounting system was a mess. Yeah. He was just going to help pick up the mess. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I still like the story where the doctor's note was just to stop doing cocaine. That might be the one-liner. It's a good doctor's note. I've got a better one.

00:31:35 Oh, gosh. Oh, Lord. Oh, man. You might have to come back on the show with some more stories. I got one to read. Mine's a little more lighthearted than yours. And then one to react to that. I interviewed this lady, Marcia. Okay. So I'll read this first one. This is the story of the most unique job reference that I've ever heard. I was once recruiting for a very unique and difficult role that requires some specific certifications and licenses. I finally found a candidate who has this one super rare license. It's like one of those credentials where you're thinking this guy's basically a unicorn. It's hard to find, high demand, and it's exactly what the client needs. So everything looks great on paper, which, by the way, it's kind of a common theme around here is everything looks great on paper.

00:32:18 So we do what we always do. We check references before we send somebody over. And the guy lists a reference that's unlike anybody that I've ever seen. It's actually not just some random manager. It's somebody that I personally know really well. So I'm thinking this is interesting. This should be an easy green light. So I call the guy's job reference, and they pick up. And before I can even finish my sentence, they go, oh, my gosh, stop. This can't keep happening. And I pause in confusion. And the guy says, I don't know why on earth this guy keeps referencing or keeps putting me down as his reference. And I'm like, what do you mean? And they say, this dude worked here for less than a week. He didn't know how to do a single thing that he said he knew how to do.

00:32:59 And the second that we asked for a copy of this rare license, he stopped showing up for work and ghosted us. This guy, the reference on the phone said, you're the third person this week who's called me, this guy asking for a reference. And I've told every single one of the same thing, don't hire this guy. But he keeps putting me down as his reference for some reason. So that was this guy's job reference. So it comes back to me as a recruiter, I have to go back to the candidate and pretty much say, hey, your reference didn't call. It didn't really go that well. Your reference didn't really check out, bro. Your reference actually just completely lit you on fire and told us not to hire you. So maybe you want to choose a different reference. And he said, oh, maybe that's why I haven't heard back from any of the companies I've interviewed with lately.

00:33:42 So that was crazy. He just keeps you the same reference over and over again. And he's like, stop calling me. Super better. On someone you worked for for a week. Yeah. What did you expect? Maybe they just expect no one's going to call. He doesn't have a clue. And there's a pattern here. He didn't have a clue. That's why he lost job. He didn't have a clue. That's why he said call so-and-so. And then three more interviews that all didn't go well as his reference. Yeah. Yeah. It happens. Sometimes these people are more transparent than you would think. And they don't even realize it. Yeah. So they're the easy ones. They help you. I guess so. Yeah. So this next story is not my story, but this is actually Marcia or Marcia, who I interviewed with.

00:34:25 Marcia or Marcia? I think it's Marcia. And she told me this story, if you want to play that clip. I've had one candidate that was interviewing for a role when I lived in a small town and interviewed for a production role. I think it was. And they were already working for the organization as a contractor. I think they were working security at the time. And they interviewed. Their parents worked for the organization for the brewery. So the parents worked there. He wanted to get in. And so it was we were getting a lot of pressure from the parents who were production operators to hire their son. You know, we put through the whole interview process and everything. And unfortunately, based off of the interview process, the individual just wasn't going to make the cut because we had they were referral and because they were part of family and stuff that that worked there.

00:35:13 I was asked, you know, not asked, but, you know, the right thing to do is to call him and to, you know, give let him know about the rejection rather than just, you know, the blanket emails that you can send out. And so I called him and I said, you know, this is what happened. Here's some tips for, you know, future. And all of a sudden the phone got really, really quiet. And I was like, are you still there? And then I hear the sobbing in the background. And this gentleman was just crying on the phone. I don't know what to do and, you know, trying to console him and, you know, say, you know, you've got six months to reapply and giving him all these tips on, you know, what things he could do. And that, you know, we still look forward to having him here as a contractor and all these things.

00:35:55 And it got to the point where I got really inconsolable and his mom had to get on the phone and, you know, apologize for him. And so it was really hard. But the worst part is, is that they actually lived two houses from me. It was horrible. It was horrible. Maybe it was to say he never reapplied. I think he just realized it wasn't for him. It was more like his parents wanting him to do it. So what she didn't mention there is that, well, she's mentioned that that guy lived two doors down and ended up living two doors down from her. So she was telling me that small town. She would be like going out to get her mail like the day after this happened and just like awkwardly like, hey, sorry about the other day. Or like going to get her trash cans and she would like keep running into that one guy, which I thought was very awkward.

00:36:38 Well, William, man, we appreciate it. You've been fun. It's been cool. Thanks for coming on. I love it. And I'll share my best story when the camera's off. That might be for the best. I think that might be true for a lot of people. For that piece. That little clip's going to show up in all your stuff. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's for sure. But thanks. Hey, listen, if you haven't yet, submit your stories to us. You should. We'd love to see them. We want to read them. We want to have you on the show through one of the segments. We're building a pipeline of people and we're interviewing people now regularly for the segments. William, thank you. You've been awesome. It's been fun. It's been cool to see the back room.

00:37:19 I've used y'all for how many, for over a decade. Yeah. That's awesome. Without fail, I get to finally see the place where it all happens. Yeah. That's cool. I'm glad you're here. People should come on here just to do that. Yeah. Yeah, they should. Please don't have a tragic story just so you can come on the show. Right. There's plenty without that. You can borrow some online. Yeah, that's right. You got plenty. I love it. Well, we appreciate you guys. We'll see you on the next podcast. Yes.