He Said He Was Kidnapped to Avoid Getting Fired [The Bad Hire Ep. 8]

00:00:00 Ever made a bad hire? Had an interview spiral into chaos? You're not alone. These stories can be hilarious, shocking, and sometimes downright painful. Welcome to The Bad Hire, the podcast that pulls back the curtain on hiring going wrong. I'm your host, Ken Monroe, and I work with companies every day to help them hire smarter and avoid costly mistakes. Each week, we'll dive into real stories from HR leaders and talent pros who've lived through the worst of the worst, from nightmare interviews to first-day disasters. You'll hear it all, because behind every bad hire,

00:00:41 there's a lesson worth learning. Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Bad Hire Podcast. We're happy to have you back for another episode, and I'm here with Emma and Lindsey. You met Lindsey last time. Emma's been on the show a couple times, so we're excited to be here, and I think we've got some cool stories today. I know that I've got one that I've been waiting to share for weeks that I'm looking forward to reading to you. I think it's really cool. But before we begin, just want to remind everyone about our $10,000 contest. Submit your stories at thebadhire.com. If you've got a great bad hire story, submit it to us, and let us take a look at it. Let our producers take a look at it. If we like it, we'll read it on the show, which we'd love to see the amount of stories that we're reading

00:01:25 grow from submissions from you. And so if it's the best story of the season, you'll be selected to win $10,000. So with that, let me get going with this story. I've got two or three. I think what I want to do is, have you got stories for this one? Y'all have stories for this one? Okay. So I think I want to end with that one story you guys know about. So I'll read a couple,

00:02:05 and then we'll come back to that end on that one. Is that cool? Yeah. All right. So I had an employee who'd show up every day in a cardigan and scarf. Cute. Sweating like crazy. Oh, not cute. With a fan blasting on him. He loved bragging about all the supplements and metabolism-boosting drugs he was taking. Then the real chaos started. He got caught driving with no license, no insurance, and in someone else's car. The court banned him from driving for one year. So he just went out,

00:02:46 bought another car, and kept driving anyway. Not long after, he vanished for three days because he'd apparently gone into a coma from all the stuff he was taking. Eventually, we had to fire him for his attitude, not for missing work, because we fired him for his attitude. Constant sick days, and get this, asking me to lie to the court so he could get his license back. Now he's trying to sue for unfair dismissal. Some people just don't quit. This person sounded like complete chaos. Yeah, they don't like cardigans or scarves either. Right. It's like, what did that have to do with these?

00:03:27 It's like the same exact thing. It's like, this person wore cardigans and scarves every day. It was really terrible. It's like, what? Well, I love how he followed that with sweating like crazy with a fan on him at his desk. Why are you, like, why are you... What does it matter? Oh my gosh. I'm really trying to make a statement. Yeah. All right. So, you know, sometimes when you hire people, they just, they just can't get it. You know what I mean? You ever had that? Where, maybe not, but... Oh yeah, we all know. Yeah, yeah. But, you may have, you'll see it sooner or later, someone will come through and hopefully not at, not at B-Checks,

00:04:07 but, you know, you really think they might be able to do it and then they get there and they, for some reason, they can't get the job. They can't do the work. So, so back, back when I worked at a sandwich shop, not me, but somebody submitted this, I, I trained this sweet girl who just didn't quite get it. We explained a hundred times, never mix bleach and ammonia. Cleaned different parts of the bathroom at different times. Simple one. One night, she decides to save time by mixing them together. Next thing I know, she burst into the kitchen,

00:04:48 eyes red, nose bleeding, coughing uncontrollably. We had to call an ambulance for her. Shut the place down early and air it out overnight. I've never worked in a sandwich shop, so I don't know the cleaning, but maybe, maybe people who do understand this is something you don't do. Mix this stuff. You'd, you'd think that would teach her a lesson. Nope. She did it again two months later. This was the same girl who once got sanitizer in her eye but refused to rinse it out because it would ruin her makeup. And, she's just not wrong. Yeah. Mascara, Dave, good mascara is a lot. I mean, just say, I could see that.

00:05:29 You're like, trying to blink it out with, you know, and constantly, she constantly had to be reminded to wear, now this is the one that got me. Of all of that, she constantly had to be reminded to wear gloves while making the sandwiches. Yuck. She eventually was fired. Yeah, that sounds like one of those who just didn't, right? She started out this right. She ever had someone who just doesn't get it? I don't even think about mixing those two things because just ammonia itself doesn't have water. Yeah, I've never, I don't think I've ever worked with either one of them. Oh. Well, maybe bleach. But I, I don't think I would think about putting them together but I think that the whole story of what got me was, can you imagine looking across the counter or someone making your sandwich

00:06:10 and they reach their hand, just their bare hand into like, whatever. Sorry, when did I, you were like, you, you were not a good hire. You were not a good hire. Oh my gosh. All right. So let's, who's next? Lindsay? Yeah. All right. So let's, let's hear it, Lindsay. What's up? All right. So this first story says, back when I was doing interviews, I had a candidate who seemed totally normal, polite, put together, resume in hand. Then in the middle of our conversation, she casually says, technically, I'm not supposed to be in the building. That might cause you to pause. Turns out,

00:06:52 someone on another floor had a restraining order against her and she just passed it off like it was no big deal. Just like she'd forgotten a parking pass. I would probably swipe that person to her left side as well. Swipe left. Swipe left. I think that, I think interview blow up stories must be just listening to recruiters talk and hang out with each other. Very, very colorful. Yeah. Sure. That's probably where a lot of the, more so than even the bad hire, it's so many that didn't get in because they just completely demolished their interview in a bad way. So I'm like, technically, I'm not supposed to be here a lot. There's this girl upstairs

00:07:35 and not supposed to be within 500 feet. Long story. Don't worry, one effect might work. Great, great, grainfully. Hard worker. Hard worker. Oh, wow. All right. Team player. Yeah, for sure. All right. So second story. He says, back when I worked at an electronics retail store, I wasn't technically a manager, but I was respected like one. And there was this guy who'd been there six years. Management loved him because he was tough with customers and a great salesman. The problem was whenever a new hire showed promise, he'd get jealous. He'd actually train them wrong on purpose just so they'd look bad and he could sweep up their sales. He even tried that with me.

00:08:16 The difference was, I double checked everything with other people so his tricks didn't work. Eventually, I just pretended to listen and then did the job the right way. It got so bad that he started feeling, feeding his lies to everyone, new hires, veterans, even managers, just to make himself look better. Finally, during a company-wide meeting, I called him out. He was furious and wanted to fight. A week later, he quit claiming he had landed a better job, but then the truth came out and he came crawling back a year later, broke as ever. Grown man, by the way. Yeah. There's some complex issues there, some inferiority things. Yeah, that's a lot.

00:08:57 You want that bad to be better than everything. I think there are, there are, there are people who sabotage other people. That's crazy to me. I get intimidated by, you know, talent coming in, you know, people with, I'm sorry, the shiny new, like, so you're training them incorrectly and thinking that, Sabotage. Thinking that your supervisor is going to find out about it. It's just weird to me. Yeah. I don't know. I think there are, there are people who are just really bad for culture and they, they sabotage people because it's always just about keeping, you know, instead of continuing

00:09:37 to try to be better than themselves about trying to keep other people from being, from being good and, you know, as a manager, you got to be able to find those people and get them out of your organization because they, that's real. They do that. One of the true bad apples for the whole bunch. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. All right. So last one says, back in the 90s, probably not even born then, I worked IT through a temp agency at this old business center. I replaced a guy, we'll call him Joe, who everyone swore was great. I love when they do that. We'll call them Joe. Joe. Sure. Denise. Fob. But right away, I noticed that things

00:10:18 didn't add up. One office said Joe told them a computer was dead and needed to be replaced. I fixed it in five minutes with a free antivirus. Turns out, Joe had been taking broken machines home for himself. He'd spend entire days fixing computers that didn't need fixing. And when I checked one that he'd wanted to take, I discovered why and what he'd been filling it with. Let's just say very inappropriate downloads. Nice. That was the beginning of his downfall. Later, Joe came back to harass me for his old job when I recorded it. I mean, I gotta stop. I gotta stop. That's the beginning of his downfall. Like, oh yeah, we found all this

00:10:58 stuff on his computers, but that wasn't, we didn't, that wasn't, we didn't get rid of him for that stuff. So when she reported him, police got involved and found out he wanted, he was wanted on other charges, dug into his old computers, found records of his shady dealings and handed them over. The feds showed up the next day, took the machine and Joe went to prison for five years. Wow. Not to sound like poor stereotypical or anything, but like, why does it always start with one day in the IT department? Yeah, I know, right? So, let's, let's stop the profiling right now. This is like a, they could go a whole nother direction with that. We've had a bunch

00:11:40 of stories that start like that. Yeah. Yeah, I think for some reason the Nestling cat story, still, I, when I heard that story, I imagined him being an IT person. We always come back to this. It's our, it's our, Lindsay's our favorite story so far. If it came out that he was, I wouldn't bat an eye last year. Right, no, I wouldn't, I'd be like, oh. Crazy cat story. The IT people are crazy. They are cray-cray. All right. Poor Joe. All right, Anna, what you got? Are you up? All right. What did you discover this week? Me? I really, I would love to see, and I think some of our, some of our advertising on LinkedIn and stuff

00:12:21 like that's going to start going out this week that we're, we're encouraging people to submit and telling people about the show and asking them to submit stories. So I'm, I'm really hopeful we'll start to see more submissions of well, well-written stories. It'd be fun. That's going to be exciting when that, when that, when that starts to ramp up. Yeah, I can't wait to read the thing that people send in because I get to read them before me. Yeah, is it right? You get to read all of them. The selector. Yeah. All right. My first story today is about six years ago, I was managing a McDonald's in a small Ohio town. One high school kid

00:13:01 constantly complained about working Fridays, but that's all I had, so he took the shift. Halfway through the night, he looked off like he'd been like smoking or something. Then during the dinner rush, I catch him flinging a whole tray of burgers at the ceiling. I send him outside to sweep just to get him out of the way. Minutes later, the drive-through girl freaks out. I lean out the window and there he is, stuck in a six-foot drain. He dropped his keys, climbed in, and couldn't get out. Turns out, on his break, he chugged eight beers at a party and came back. We had to haul him out of the drain hole, and I fired him on the spot.

00:13:42 Honestly, he was lucky to walk away alive. Yeah. I'm wondering when he threw burgers to the ceiling why the firing didn't happen then. It's like, hey, bro. Yeah, go sweep, would you? Clearly handling burgers isn't for you in our burger shop. It's really bad. Yeah, it's Friday night. No one wants to work on Friday night. I want to get ready for the midnight rush of people that are carrying farms. left. I don't know. I'm kidding. I don't know what they're doing. Season of the belt. Okay, here's another one. Oh, here we go. Back when I was the IT guy and small insurance got me. I got pulled into one of the strangest firings I've ever seen.

00:14:22 An employee, we'll call him Raymond, was supposed to fly across the country for a big client conference. Tickets book, hotel reserve, meetings lined up. But when the event started, clients called asking where he was. He never checked into the hotel, never answered calls or emails, and vanished for a full week. Finally, after the conference ended, HR reached him. His excuse, he said, and I quote, I couldn't go, I was get, get that. He said, some guys grabbed him outside of a grocery store, held him for a few days, and then just let him go. Oh. When HR asked for a police report, he admitted he never filed one because they didn't really

00:15:03 do anything to him. The kicker, his phone records showed he'd been making calls all week while he was supposedly missing. We fired him, of course. He threatened to sue, claiming it was illegal to fire someone for being kidnapped. Never heard from him again. Don't they all threaten to sue? Poor Raymond. Poor Raymond. Sorry I wasn't here yesterday, I was kidnapped. So there's, yeah, the stories. The absentee stories are, um, it's so, and it's weird, it's always the same person over and over and over again, and I always have, you know, the stories just get kind of crazier and crazier. The versions. Bet that wasn't his first,

00:15:43 like, absentee story, he's just like, he ran out of grandparents, he ran out of uncles and hands, it all passed away, you know, um, so now, yeah, so, he had to, he had to do that. Oh my gosh. Okay, here's my last one for today. I hired an apprentice, we'll call him Billy, who loved to go out drinking on payday. One Friday morning, he didn't show up. After hours of searching, he finally wandered in reeking of alcohol, claimed he had a flat tire, then got it repaired, but when asked for the receipt, he broke down and admitted he just overslept. He got a warning for life. Wait, is it like normal

00:16:25 to ask for the receipt on something like that? I was like, what? You asked for a receipt on a flat tire? Not a good culture, I think. Fast forward to the very next payday, same thing, doesn't show. This time, he calls in, claiming he's at the hospital getting a wart frozen with liquid nitrogen. The only problem was that the treatment was only available on Tuesdays and it was a Friday. So, not a good by there. They looked into it. Well, what gets me is they looked into it. Hey, when do you get these treatments? Come on. It was so and so. When pressed, he gave the name of the nurse who happened to be the girlfriend of one of his old co-workers standing right

00:17:05 next to the phone. That co-worker confirmed she was home asleep. So, Billy tried to cover it up by pretending to be her on the phone. At that point, the instructor had enough and sent it straight up the chain. I left the company soon after, but let's just say, Billy didn't move for very long. Oh my God. This, Billy the IT guy. It didn't say that he's an apprentice. Oh, an apprentice. No IT guy. All right. Well, thank you for no gory stories this time. You would enjoy this. Yeah, no, it's, yeah. I, I gave you a break. Yeah, you did. All right.

00:17:46 here's, this is a, this is a story I'll tell you guys that, you know, it didn't get submitted, but I, I put it together. This is a story that is a true story that is really been, I think, inspired a lot of why in me when I read, when I, when I became aware of the story and the, at the end here, I'll explain that it, this person has become very well known in our industry because of this person's sister. So, picture a woman named Kathy Sue Weaver living her dream in

00:18:27 sunny Orlando. It's 2001 and Sue's 52 years old. A creative force with a smile that could light up a room. Born in Missouri in 1949, she carved her own path, snagging a degree in interior design, an MBA, and a long time career in banking. But her heart beat for art. So, she left the suits behind, moved to Florida in 1994, and built embroidery concepts from the ground up. Her hands wove magic, state seals for capital buildings, delicate wildlife patterns stitched onto belts. Her home was her haven, filled with the scent

00:19:07 of blooming jasmine from her garden and the hum of her sewing machines. Sue was quiet, she was fierce, and she was living life on her terms until one bad hire stole all of it. She called for a simple air duct cleaning, trusting the company to send someone safe. Instead, they sent a monster right to her door. her door. Early that year, Sue hired Burdines, a well-known Florida store, to clean her home's air ducts. It was a nothing job, the kind you barely think about. You trust a

00:19:47 big-name company to do it right for you, but they didn't. They sent two technicians, unchecked, unvetted. One was Jeffrey Allen Heffling, 38 years old, a man with darkness in his past. At 23, he pleaded no contest to SA-ing and caging a woman in Seminole County. In 1986, while still on probation, he forced his way into another woman's home, hit her with a gun, SA-ed her, robbed her, and made her wash away the evidence. He was handed a life sentence, but by 1998, he was out. Living with

00:20:28 his parents, working as a repairman, and Burdines, they let him walk right into Sue's world. He didn't strike right away. He waited, lurking in the shadows, planning his move. Six months later, Sue's sanctuary became his hunting ground. Heffling didn't act during the first visit. He was patient, chilling, calculated, likely using that duck cleaning job to map out Sue's home, her life. Six months later, on August 27, 2001, he came back. The air grew heavy that day. Sue was essayed, beaten,

00:21:09 and unalived in the place that she felt the safest. Then, to erase his sins, Heffling set her bedroom on fire. Firefighters rushed in, dousing the flames, only to find Sue's body and the wreckage. It could have passed for a tragic fire, but the truth clawed its way out because DNA, left at the scene, screamed Heffling's name. Tying back to his prior crimes, on October 3, 2001, cops grabbed him at a therapy session in Orange County. He played dumb, denying he knew Sue, but the evidence was a noose. In March 2004, he took a

00:21:49 plea deal to avoid death row, admitting to first degree unaliving, essay, arson, and burglary. Now, he's caged for life, where the sun never touches him. One simple background check could have kept Sue alive. One person doing their job right could have stopped this nightmare. So this tragedy cuts deep because it didn't have to happen. If someone, anyone had taken a moment to check Heffling's past, Sue's laughter might still fill her home. That's the weight of what we do. Every recruiter, every HR pro, every talent acquisition warrior who runs those screens, who dig into the details,

00:22:29 they're the ones standing between good people and really sometimes evil that walks among us. Sue's story is like a stark reminder that there's real darkness out there and the work of vetting isn't just paperwork. It's a shield, a lifeline, a way to keep sanctuary sacred, sacred, businesses, nonprofits, those things safe. Her sister, Lucia, didn't just grieve, she fought, she built a legacy to make sure no one else loses their Sue to a bad hire. Sue's death left a hole in the world, but her sister refused

00:23:09 to let it end. With a fire in her heart, she founded the Sue Weaver cause, committing to always using screened employees. She turned her pain into a movement, pushed the home service industry to wake up and prioritize safety. Her relentless work rippled across the field, inspiring companies to tighten their screening, to honor the lives they touch because of her countless homes are safe. Because of her, countless homes are safer today. So, the Sue Weaver story, this story and stories like it, they like hit me right in my soul because, you know, they remind

00:23:49 me of why we do what we do every day while we come to work. As leaders, recruiters, HR pros, talent acquisition folks, you know, your work isn't just a job. I believe it's also a calling. You know, you change and impact business, culture, talent infuses and grows business, helps dreams come true. but you also are out there at the same time protecting people. So, I'm always thankful today that so many companies screen and that there's HR pros and talent acquisition pros out there

00:24:30 who take it very seriously. And this story is like a reminder because I think sometimes you can get where you're in the grind of hiring and it becomes like a duty. Right? And you want to make it efficient, you want to make it fast, you want it to be good but you begin to you need reminders that the work that you're doing is super important. And it's one of the things that I want all of our employees to know is that the work they do is worthy of their best efforts because without it that stuff happens. Sue Weaver

00:25:11 story is a great reminder of that. So that's it for me today. But I've always thought or her story has always made an impression on me. One, her sisters really impacted the screening industry and business across the country. Pushing very, very hard for screening. And I always say we're in the prevention business and so you never know what you prevented because it didn't happen but I'm betting Sue Weaver's death because of her sister's efforts has saved many more lives

00:25:52 than her. So, all right, well that's it for today. We appreciate it. We'd love to hear your stories. Send them in to us. Go to thebadhire.com find our submission page send it on the way. Best story of the season will be selected by our producers and you have a chance to win $10,000 if yours is chosen. So, get on there, take a look, figure out how to submit your story and get it done. We'd appreciate it. Had a good show today. Loved it. Loved your stories. Thank you for being here. It was super awesome. We'll talk to you next time. Bye guys. Thanks for tuning in to The Bad Hire. Don't forget to follow, rate, and share the show. It really helps us grow the podcast. Got a story of

00:26:32 your own? We'd love to hear it. Visit us at thebadhire.com to submit your story or connect with me on LinkedIn at Ken Monroe. Until next time, remember, don't make your next hire the bad hire. The Bad Hire.