“I Don’t Get Mad… I Get Even” — Worst Interview Answer Ever [The Bad Hire Ep. 24]

00:00:00 My philosophy? I don't get mad, I get even. Then at a light, they whip around me in the bike lane, and the woman flips me the bird. She got revenge on him by sabotaging one of his PowerPoint presentations on purpose. 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. I'm your host, Ken Monroe, and every week we dive into real-life stories from the wild world of work and what can happen when the wrong person gets the job.

00:00:42 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 Bad Hire. Happy to be here. The show with the best stories about some of the worst hires ever. Welcome, guys. Hi, guys. I'm joined by Morgan and Corey. Hey. Corey works for the team, does a lot of work for the show. You do all the booking. Yeah. All the people who... This will be good for everybody who you reach out to and are trying to book the guests like some of the ones we're going to see today. Hey, you did all the work of tracking them down, asking them to consider it, getting them booked

00:01:25 on the show, tell them their segment. That's pretty cool. Right. Thanks. Yeah. You'll talk to me first. Yeah. You got to go through him. Yeah. You got to go through Corey to make it on the show. Yeah. Yeah. So, we still got a lot of guests lined up. I mean, we still have folks in the pipeline trying to tell us stories and all that kind of stuff. How many people do we have out there in the pipeline? For sure. Gosh. Yeah, a lot. A lot. Yeah, a lot. Yeah. Yeah, really? Got some work to do. Yeah. We're getting into the... It's like, please don't ask. I have it. Yeah. Or get like three a day, interest a day, I would say. Really? If we're going to ask one? Yeah. So, we're in like the 70s, 80s probably now.

00:02:06 Oh, really? Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Okay. Sorry, Corey. All good. I'm here for it. Yeah. She just bust you, brother. She was just like, like 80 that he's not following up with. No, he's doing great. He is? Oh, yeah. He's doing great. How's he doing? Tell me how he's doing. He's doing great. It's just hard. You know, like you get people who are interested and then you got to keep asking if they're still interested. Yeah. And I know people are really busy and, you know, being an HR professional. What's the biggest... What's the biggest... Like draw... What are they worried about, Corey? When someone's like, hey, I want to... You know, they reach out and say, I might be interested. What are they worried about? I haven't got any. I might be interested. Oh, really? Hey, I'm interested. Yeah. Look at the time.

00:02:46 Yeah. I think the biggest drawback... You were previously, I think, trying to clean him up a little bit for Corey Godwin. Now he's going to get picks. Maybe he's going to get the drawbacks now. I get a lot of no, just straight up. Like no, like professionalism behind it or like, please stop emailing me. Right. Or I get some like, I'm worried about like the anonymity or however you say that word. Right. And being anonymous and not wanting to tell my story, you know, and, you know, I guess air out everybody's drama at the company. Yeah. So we get a lot of those or people just like, how much does it cost? And we're like, it's free. It's just an experience. Oh, really? Yeah. People think it costs money. Yeah. People think it costs money to be on the show for, you know, PR or whatever it might be

00:03:27 because we're so adamant about trying to get people on the show. They think that we must be trying to sell them something. Right. Well, we, you know, we work hard at whatever we do. Yeah, exactly. We just want people on the show. Yeah. All right. Well, charge on guys, knock it out. Um, and if you want to be on the show, uh, we certainly encourage you to, uh, you know, you can respond to one of the emails that we might send out. If you get one from us, you can go to the, uh, our website, the bad hire.com. Um, and you can check it out there. You can submit a forum to say, I want to be on the show. You'll hear from Corey who'll reach out and try to book some time with you to quickly talk for, I don't know. What's it, what's it take Corey? 10, 15 minutes.

00:04:07 Yeah. 15 minutes tops. Tops. And then he just talks about what you may be thinking about, talking about what your story might be like. And then he'll give you the options, um, of like how to submit a story or how to, how to do a video segment, whatever you want to do. And, um, so yeah. And if you win this year, uh, at the end of the year, we'll do it. We'll do a, we'll select the best story. Somebody is going to win 10 grand. So money's will be you. Yeah. So, um, shoot your shot. Yeah. Shoot. Yeah. Really tell a good story. And you know, people, some people, uh, I get a lot of positive feedback about this actually. Yeah. I love it. Uh, I was, I was shocked. People, you know, some of my peers, other CEOs, some HR folks, customers have reached

00:04:52 out or I've run into them. They're like, you know, Hey, I see your thing. It's, you know, it's really great. It's fun. It's entertaining, which is all we're really trying to be. Right. It's just, it's just entertaining. Sure. Sure. Sure. No, I said for sure. So I guess what I'm, what I, the intent is like not to make fun of anybody. Yeah. But the, you know, people at work blowing stuff up is funny. Yeah. And I think it's funny because it's real because we, everybody's experienced somebody just kind of flame it out. And sometimes the person's just flaky.

00:05:33 Other times they've just had it. Right. And so it's, you know, they, they chose to, to flake out and do whatever. So, but that last lady on the last episode where it was like a personal thing in her life and she burned down her boyfriend's house for cheating on her. And what? Yeah. You don't remember that last episode? She had nothing to do with work. She was a great employee. She just burned her boyfriend's house down because he was cheating. It's like, you just never know. Oh my God. It's pretty reasonable. If you asked me. Yeah. Corey's like, go ahead, girl. You got it. Go for it. Yeah. Oh my God. All right. So submit your stories. Be the, uh, you know, if we select you as the number one story, win 10,000 bucks. Let's get started. So here we go. I got one. Um, during our interviews, we always had a standard interview question.

00:06:19 We asked all candidates, tell me how you handle conflict at work. It's a good question. All right. And this one moment, this one woman was interviewing when asked that question, looked me dead in the eye and says, my philosophy, I don't get mad. I get even. Me and the other interviewer kind of do this nervous little laugh. Like, um, oh, that's, that's a, that's a good one. Yeah. Nice. And she was not joking. And she told us, no, no, I'm not joking. She immediately follows it up with a story about how she got into a beef with an accountant at her last job.

00:06:59 And she got revenge on him by sabotaging one of his PowerPoint presentations on purpose. And when she finished, there was this moment where we both were sitting there thinking, okay, yeah, no, we, we got it. So we thanked her for her time and we walked her out. I stood at the door and watched her get into her car because up until that exact question she had been doing amazing. Now I was sitting there thinking, wow, this person is crushing this interview. And then, you know, right up until she was bragging about getting even with the coworkers. Oh Lord. I don't know. People blow up their interviews. It's the only sounds like the Taylor Swift song.

00:07:40 I think sometimes, I think sometimes interviewers are so good, right? Yeah. They make, I think it's just like part of the craft or something, you know, but they get, they, you know, they get you from being like nervous and being like on point and got every answer and they start making you think they're your friend. Yep. You're comfortable with it. And you're like, yeah, yeah. Oh, let me tell you this story. You're just like straight take. Yeah. I think it's like, it's, I think it's like some magic they run on you in an interview and they get somebody to just finally let it down. I don't know. I think that's pretty cool. Before we dive back into the chaos on the bad hire, this episode is brought to you by

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00:09:02 All right. I had an interview scheduled with a candidate one morning, but I got stuck in traffic. So I'm hurrying to the office, definitely going a little bit over the speed limit, speeding about five or 10 over. While I'm still a couple miles away from when I noticed this person in a blue Nissan riding my bumper, like right on me. Then at a light, they whip around me in the bike lane and the woman flips me the bird. Then I end up behind her the entire rest of the drive. I think we can kind of tell where this is going. Same turns, same route. And then she pulls into our office parking lot. And in that moment, it starts to hit me. Wait, no way. This is the candidate I'm about to meet. No way. Sure enough, she walks into the building and I realize this is a person I'm interviewing.

00:09:47 She didn't see me pulling behind her, but she's sitting in the lobby, totally composed, ready to go. Either playing it off or genuinely oblivious that she just flipped off her interviewer five minutes ago. And here's the most wild part. She killed the interview. Everyone liked her. And she got the job. No way. Oh my gosh. I don't know. I love to blow up the interview stories. I think they're like some of my favorites. Yeah, me too. For sure. Well, props to her for getting the job. Literally, yeah. God, man. She overcame flipping the bird. Literally. She was spot on. I guess at the end, they were like, man, I mean, she's gutsy.

00:10:28 Yeah. What if she saw that the person pull up, you know, like they roll in together? And then she had to have recognized her later. Yeah. Like, oh my God, I flipped this lady off earlier. I would have apologized if I had. Yeah, I wonder if she apologized. Like, first thing she starts is, excuse my baby, I was under so much pressure. Yeah, to get here. To get here. I was so excited about this job. Yeah. Oh my gosh. She had whatever it took. Yeah. Literally. For sure. All right, Corey, you're up. What do you got for us? All righty. So, I once had a candidate tell me she quit her last job because she was in a hostile work

00:11:08 environment. So, I'm thinking, all right, we'll dig into that later. We'll ask follow-ups. We'll call references if we get that far. Spoiler. She didn't get that far. So, because about two questions later, we asked, what's your level of experience with Excel? And she immediately launches into this rant about the tyranny of technology and why does everything have to be done on a computer these days? This is for a computer office job, by the way. And it turns out that despite putting Proficient and Microsoft Office Suite on her resume, she hated computers. She tried to avoid using them whenever possible. And it turns out the hostile work environment was just her employer asking her to use a

00:11:50 computer, a.k.a. to do her job. So, how did I get that far? You just make yourself up on a resume, right? You just totally make up everything. Well, you can't do anything these days without a computer at some capacity, especially like in corporate or a computer job. Like, what did she expect? It's like saying you're planning to be a driver and you don't have a driver's license. Yeah. I don't drive. I don't like it. I want to go into sales, but I don't like speaking the people. Yes. Oh, my gosh. That's hilarious. We do have a video to react to today, too. All right. Oh, you do? All right. Yeah. Cool. We got it all up and cued. I think, who did this segment with her?

00:12:32 Nathan? Nathan did, yeah. Okay, cool. All right. Let's check her out. Who is it? Do we know? Dosh. I know her last name is Ignacia. I'll have to remember her first name. Well, thank you to her for... She might introduce herself in this. Okay. Very cool. We were hiring for a marketing manager. This marketing manager was supposed to represent the region of North America. I was working for a multi-public Australian company. And this role was really big. Between me and my manager, we were like, okay, we know the nuance of Australian culture, but also North America. How do we figure this out? So we did rely on the agency the first time. I think the theme of this is agencies could only go so far.

00:13:15 As an HR person, you really need to be more involved. We found someone really quick. It was actually someone from Netflix. And this person, like, fit the bill. Perfect. So this person sat right across from me. Really sweet person. Well, his first day didn't show up on time. And so I was tasked to call him, find out where he was. And fortunately, he said that he thought he was supposed to come in, like, two hours later. The manager was upset. I was like, what? Okay, he does come in, like, an hour later, actually. So that was nice. Okay, nine. Great. And so, you know, everything went smoothly from there. First day. Not bad. The next day, he never showed up. So I was tasked to call him again and ask if everything was okay.

00:13:58 On the other end, it kind of sounds, I don't know, like he was drunk, like hung over. I don't know. And he said, I thought I could work from home today. And this is pre-COVID. Okay, work from home today, but you need to come in the next day. By the time it hit Friday, basically, he didn't show up. I called him again and started asking, like, do I really need to show up to the office? Is there any way we can arrange, you know, like a hybrid model where I can come in and out? And I was like, I'm sorry. Unfortunately, you can't. Is everything okay? Like, you seem like something seems wrong. Like, is there anything that we can do to help you? And he hung up. So unfortunately, I had to be the bad guy.

00:14:39 And I basically just said, I called him again. I said, hey, you know, unfortunately, I don't think this is working out. That was a one week nightmare for me and my team. And so we did take a break. Obviously, we were like, we need to debrief. We need to rethink. What did we do wrong? And what do we want to do better? Oh, my gosh. People just think they can, you know, not work at all. We were talking about this yesterday. This so reminds me of, like, the Greg's, the Greg, the guy that does the million drinks. You know what I'm talking about? It's got the drink company. The CEO, he gave, he did a social media clip recently. I mean, he was talking about how he got suckered in by hiring someone because of, you know, the names on the resume.

00:15:21 Yeah. You know, like big brand names. You're like, oh, they worked at Netflix. Yeah. You know? He had a Netflix vibe. Yeah. He was, all he wanted to do was Netflix and chill. Yeah. Literally. That's exactly what he wanted to do. Oh, my gosh. So, yeah, that's, and you also like this for, you know, first, she's like the sweetest person ever. Yeah. He's awesome. Yeah. She's so nice for checking in on him. Like, I would have been like second day. I'd be like, okay, this doesn't work. She's checking on you. Yeah. Like, he knows shut up. Literally. Hey. Multiple days. Hey. You know, I was like, wow, she's the sweetest ever. And then, you know, by the third day when you hear, you know, because they put a lot of time in to that. And, you know, it's got to be that secondhand embarrassment thing the whole time he's acting up.

00:16:07 The recruiters are like, oh, my God. Yeah. They're so embarrassed for him, for themselves. Well, I feel like that pre-COVID hybrid model wasn't very popular either. So, I'm sure, like, back then you were like, what are you, like, what? What are you asking for, dude? Like, I mean, now it's a really common thing. But back then I feel like it was really rare. Yeah. I loved how they, I loved how at the end they, she said they, you know, post-opted and, you know, just looked at it and said, what can we do different? And she's like, don't hear from Netflix. Yeah. Yeah. Netflix people, you're cut. Yeah. It was good stuff. All right. That's it for today, though. So, good stories, man. Yeah. Corey, nice work. Thank you.

00:16:47 Yeah. Don't flip anybody the bird while you're on the way to Jopps interview. Follow the story. That is. Yeah. That's the big moral today. All right. So, that's it from us. Say thanks for listening to The Bad Hire. Please subscribe, rate, review, like, whatever you can do to promote The Bad Hire. We'd love to share our stories, potentially your stories, with as many people as you can because we like to have fun and we want you to enjoy them. And remember, your story could win $10,000. If you submit one, let us know. Submit it. Submit. Go to our website, TheBadHire.com. Corey's going to call you. Talk to me first. Yeah. And he'll talk to you and get you set up to either submit a story or come on into a segment like you saw today.

00:17:30 So, man, good job. Appreciate you guys. Thank you, guys. We'll see you next time.