She Got Fired… Then Her Sister Called to Threaten Us [The Bad Hire Ep. 10]

00:00:00 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 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 to The Bad Hire, episode 10. We're loving it. Good to be back. And we've got Nathan with us.

00:00:41 Hello. How you doing, brother? I'm good. Yeah, good stuff. I'm couch. And Dallin Wertham, he's the CEO of Charter Connect. Yeah, happy to be here. He's back. You were here last time. Yeah. We're knocking him out today. So let's remind everybody, if they didn't listen to the last episode, tell me a little bit about your business, what you're doing, all that kind of fun stuff. Yeah. I think it's really cool. I love what you're doing. I love the mission of the business and the mission of the market you serve. Yeah. So pretty much it's just a market agency that helps charter schools grow. And as we've grown, we've had to start hiring people, bringing people from all walks of life. And it's been a wild ride to be on top of a business that kind of just is like on a rocket

00:01:23 engine. It wants to go. It wants to fly. And we're kind of learning to fly it as we go. And it's been really, really fun. And that's why I think this podcast is so interesting because, man, do I have a few stories. Right? If you've been around a little bit, you've got stories. If you've hired people, you've got interview stories. You've got bad hire stories. You've got good hire term, bad hire stories. I've had them all over the years. Whenever I'm hanging out with my folks that are recruiting and just hiring all the time,

00:02:06 it always turns to, oh, you should hear that story. You know what happened? This guy just melted down on it. So, yes, that's the purpose of the bad hire. So it's pretty cool. So, Don, I love your business, man. It's super cool. Thank you. I love what you've done with it. You know, your background is an airline pilot. Yeah. Yeah. Airline pilot turned entrepreneur. Yeah. Right? That is cool. And then turned marketer, too. You would expect, like, turned engineering something. Well, we should check out down on LinkedIn because it has pretty much your full life story in Bullet Boys. Yeah. And we met you at a conference a couple months ago and we're like, this guy might be, like, the most interesting guy right at the conference.

00:02:48 Yeah. Yeah. Y'all are too crazy. Too nice. Y'all are buttering my bread. But, yeah. No, it's been fun. And, I mean, tons of funny customer service stories in the airline space with delays and whatnot. And so being able to take that and then hiring stories. Yeah. So as a reminder, now, here's what we do every week. We unpack some bad hire stories, whether to interview good hire, turn bad hire, bad hire from the beginning. Whatever it is, we unpack the stories. We go out and source them and try to find them. But what we're really after is creating a pipeline of people sending us stories that are out there in the trenches that are experiencing this kind of stuff and then sending them to us. And so we created a contest.

00:03:29 It's a $10,000 contest. If you send us the best story for this season, we're going to give away $10,000. We're going to give the best story a $10,000 award. And so the stories can be crazy, wild, funny, tragic. There's a range, right? It's not just about fun. Sometimes it's about, like, just understanding the importance of hiring and recruiting and doing due diligence. And, you know, when something bad happens, it's, you know, those are still, those are really bad hire stories. So, but we give away the $10,000. That's our way. And so, you know, you'll see us on LinkedIn. We're running ads on LinkedIn and some other things, trying to get the word out to participate.

00:04:11 Send us your stuff and we'll tell it. And if you send us a story, we'll tell the story. We could invite you onto the show if it's a really cool story. You know, you might even be a, be brought in to be a host for a couple episodes. It'd be fun. You know, we're just looking to engage, chop it up with people who are in. Yeah. Yeah. Just want to chop it up. People are in this business of hiring. You know, that's it. And so I know, you know, you're, you're growing your business and you, you, you just have a career. If you, if by the time you've had a career, you've like, you've either worked alongside a bad hire, you've made a bad hire, whatever. Maybe you've been to bad hire. Yeah. Yeah. That too. So let's get started. So back, uh, yeah, this is one that was provided to me. Um, back when I was a shift leader at a restaurant, we had this high, we had this high school hostess who came in with a serious attitude problem.

00:04:57 She wasn't a terrible worker at first, but anytime I asked her to do something simple, sweeping, wiping down menus, resetting tables, sounds like someone working in a restaurant. Right. So like typical things you would ask. She'd huff and roll her eyes. Like I was singling her out. She'd mutter under breath that I was always picking on her, even though I was just assigning some normal tasks. Right. Hey, I got this job that you, this task that you do at this job regularly. And you've turned it into picking. So, uh, it built up over time and one night it came to a head. She got so loud and belligerent on the floor, the manager had no, no choice but to send her home mid shift.

00:05:39 I remember thinking, well, that's probably the last straw. About 20 minutes later, it's another one of these return stories. Please tell us one of these return stories. Like where they, they leave and they come back. Like the Batman guy. Yeah, they didn't get it out of the system yet. It's got to be more. About 20 minutes later, the restaurant phone rings. I pick it up, assuming it's a customer placing a takeout order. Instead, a woman's voice comes through, calm but threatening. You better watch your back. When you walk to your car tonight. Oh, wow. Ooh. Scary. That went from wiping menus to seriousness really quick. Yeah. For a second, I froze and then it clicked.

00:06:21 This wasn't some random prank call. I recognized that voice. This was the hostess's older sister. Oh. We called the police right away and filed a report just to be safe. But that night when I left, I made sure someone walked me out of my car. Because honestly, I didn't know if she actually showed up in the parking lot. But after that, I never saw her again. Months later, though, I heard from someone still at the restaurant. Oh, she must have. She must have left. I heard from someone still at the restaurant that she'd actually been rehired. Oh, okay. After I left. Same girl, same attitude, back on the schedule like nothing had ever happened. And the older sister was probably watching at a distance. Probably watching nearby.

00:07:03 Man, there's somebody sitting in the corner booth. Who is that? What is this thing about this retaliation thing? Like they, I don't know. Like you get in trouble. And this rehire thing really speaks to how hard it is to find people. It just does. I guess so. I mean. Even when they're not that great. Yeah. I mean, I got a complainer. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, I feel like that is, it gets so much more dangerous when one person is on their team and they've heard one side of the story. Yeah. And so now they're coming in with all the rage that they have from that one-sided storytelling. And that's even more dangerous than the person that was going crazy because at least

00:07:45 they kind of maybe figured out later on, like, okay, maybe I overreacted. But once you deliver that seed of like vengeance to someone that loves you. It's real bad. Yeah. What do you got? What do you got? Nathan or Dallin? What do you guys? Actually, you go. You go. All right. Cool. So this will be actually a Charter Connect, my company story. Oh, okay. And because, I mean, as a young entrepreneur, we're needing to hire faster than we know how to. And we were trying to figure it out. And maybe later in the episode, if you'd like, I could explain how we've kind of evolutionized our process to avoid this.

00:08:26 But I was, before starting Charter Connect, I was a missionary. And I met someone that was serving with me as another missionary. Like, oh, he's got to be a good guy, right? Because he's out doing volunteer work. And we're down in South America doing some missionary work. And then he goes back to his home country of Guatemala. I go back to my home. And we send messages. We stay close. He actually names one of his kids after me. Oh, wow. And he says, I just want to let you know, I named my youngest son after you. I was like, I didn't, wow, what an honor.

00:09:06 I don't even know what to say. And he reaches out and says, hey, I'm struggling. I would love, you know, if there's anything I could do. I know that you just started this new company. Like, heck yeah. Like, that's why I started this thing in the first place is to help my tribe. So, of course. Like, completely no background check. Like, no, hey, have you been in the, it's been five years since we've spoken. And he hops on this interview with my twin brother who doesn't know him. And he's wearing, he looks like Osama bin Laden, like in a cave. Like, he's got this big old beard and this army jacket. And there's just like goats behind him. Like, I'm like, where are you?

00:09:48 And he's like, I'm in the mountains of Guatemala. Like, this is where I live. And like, the connection was really bad because he's like, he's in a hot spot. And I was like, whoa, this is insane. Like, you're living like a mountain man and not like a house, but like a... Yeah. Some type of VOD shelter. But I'm thinking, okay, you know what? Like, yeah. Like, he's just like all of us. Like, we can't judge him based off of like where he lives or his economic condition. So, kind of just keep moving forward with him. Yeah. We bring him on. And he is just like not showing up for anything. And eventually he says, you know what?

00:10:30 I want to go to a city that's about like eight hour drive. It's called Quetzaltenango. And I want to go there and I want to try to see if I can sell our services to schools here in Guatemala. And I know a few schools there. Like, sure, yeah, whatever. Like, here's, I'll pay your bus fee or whatever. And we don't hear anything from him. And a few weeks later, I get a call from this international number that I don't know. And I'm like, hello? And it's his beautiful sweetheart wife. Right. And says, do you know of our friend, like where he is? I'm like, I know that he went to Quetzaltenango.

00:11:12 She's like, oh, well, stop sending him money because that's where his other girl lives. And we haven't seen him in months. I was like, oh, okay. And then, okay. As soon as the money stops flowing to my friend, that's when he gets on a call. He's like, hey, where's my paycheck? Oh, wow. I'm trying to sell your stuff. Yeah. And so, and then. Well, that's the nice thing about taking a sales job is you can last a while. I just have, I got to build a nice pipeline. Yeah. Build a nice pipeline. It's coming. I just need more. Get away three or four months for that. I'm planting seeds. Like, the harvest comes later. Yeah. And so, yeah. And then when we let him go, he was so confused. He had no idea why.

00:11:52 Yeah. And so, and my friend, if you're listening to this or watching this, I still care about you, love you. But yeah, man, that was, you did me dirty. Yeah, you did. You did me dirty. Yeah. Yeah. So. That's great. How long ago was that? Ooh, that was at the very beginning of Charter Connect. That was when we were little babies crawling out of our little cribs. It was probably 2022. Yeah. And we started in November of 2021. So. Yeah. Damn. All right. So what about you, Nathan? What'd you got, baby? That was good, man. All right. All right. The disappearing goat man. Like into the middle. I'd be mad. The goat man who ran away to be with another. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So here's what I got. I got two stories. Got time for two stories. Here we go.

00:12:33 A friend of mine in HR at a museum once told me about one of the strangest cases that they've ever dealt with. They had a senior staff member whose specialty at the museum was Alexander Hamilton. Right? At first, it was just a passion for the subject. But over time, it went from passion to something else entirely. He stopped just studying Hamilton and started actually behaving like he was Hamilton. So no one could tell if he thought that he was him reincarnated or if he was really deep in character. And even his emails over time became almost impossible to read because he stopped writing in plain English. He's only using 18th century language taken from Hamilton's letters and writings.

00:13:15 And if someone disagreed with him in a meeting, he'd accuse him of insulting his honor. And he would fire back with period appropriate insults like, sir, how dare you besmirch my honor with such lender? You know, that kind of thing. He even tried to rewrite the museum signage and exhibits to reflect his personal version of Hamilton's story. So not even like, you know, the historical one, regardless of whether or not it was actually historically accurate. So the breaking point came when he challenged a co-worker to a duel. Seriously, like over disagreement. That's very Hamilton. About wordy on one of the exhibits. So that was it. HR had to step in at that point because of the duel.

00:13:55 And then the police were called after the duel. And then after the duel, he was escorted outside of the building. So I guess they never heard back from that out of the other thing again. That's crazy. The character acting is real, I guess. Dang, man. I mean, I feel like they probably should have taken him to the public square for a flogging. Like more like time appropriate. Like, no, you don't actually like that time. Put him in the stockade. Is that what it is when you put the people in the stocks? Yeah, the stocks. Yeah, that's right. Put him in the stocks. Put him in the stocks. It'll be okay after that. It's just funny. The picture of him going on a Microsoft Teams sending emails. Yeah. As Alexander Hamilton.

00:14:36 This is AH. Just checking in. That's right. This is hammy. 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. 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.

00:15:17 Protect your sanity. Go to B-Checks.io. That's B-C-H-E-X.io. Score number two for me. So every HR manager has a hiring horror story of their own. And ours came in when we were desperate to fill a critical role on our team. We'd interviewed dozens and dozens of candidates, but none of them were really the right fit. After weeks of searching, we were starting to lose hope. Then finally, someone came along who seemed to check every box that we needed. They're smart, personable, confident, at least on paper. They're exactly the skill set that we needed. After back-to-back interviews, we were convinced it's like we struck gold.

00:15:58 We made an offer on the spot. And for a moment, everything looked great. But then the background check came back. It was kind of a common theme. Okay. And that's when the bottom fell out. It turns out that they fabricated almost everything. Their qualifications, their experience, all those specific skills that they swore that they had. More than half of what they claimed to be able to do, they couldn't do at all. So it looked like the perfect fit ended up being complete fraud. And just a reminder that sometimes even the best-looking resume is a very creative piece of fiction. Yeah. I think recruiters deal with this all the time. Yeah. Just like... We found them. Lies. Somebody perfect. And nobody's mine. You know, I was telling you not long ago about that thread I read and it was in Reddit.

00:16:46 It was like people telling people how to lie. Yeah. All the liars. Just make it up. Just make it up. And just like people were coming out there and saying, yeah, I told them I did this and none of it was true. And they were like congratulating each other on being so great that it was so wrong of these companies to actually look into this stuff. Yeah. You know, and I was like, wow, what a mentality to have. This is how you defraud the system. Just say that you have the experience. Just make up that you work. It was like cover any gap in your work history. Just make up something. Yeah. Well, it's crazy how you can say one thing and two people can take it totally differently. Like if you say like, hey, like fake it till you make it. One person might be like, okay, like I just need to have confidence and understand that we're all trying to figure that out.

00:17:30 Right. And then other people are like, okay. Oh, you mean fake it. I'm just following. No, we didn't fake it until you make it. We didn't like, you know, have the confidence that you don't. Prep yourself up. I can fake it all day. Yeah. Right. I was like, bro, I was, you know, I was a senior race president. I think you're 22 years old. Yeah. Very accomplished. I'm just doing what my life coach is telling me. Right. You see? It's crazy. Yeah. You're right on. I do think it's like, it is prolific, the amount of, and it happens even you get to like, it gets revealed sometimes when somebody makes it to like a really senior position. There's several CEOs here, you know, popped who like in Charlotte who made it to the top of their organization.

00:18:17 And then their, their story of their education or their story of their job, their history unravels on them, you know, and, you know, they get caught up much earlier in their career when there wasn't so much at stake. Yeah. And, but then it, they drag it along with them. You know, they can't change the story, you know? So the more successful they become, you know, it just, it must be incredibly taxing to have this kind of, this thing coming up over you, just getting larger and larger in life, knowing I got here on a lie. I mean, when is. Just more rocks in your backpack. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Terrible. Yeah. All right, man. Well, that was good, man. Don't, don't, I'm like, bro, appreciate it. You were fun. That was good stuff. Yeah.

00:18:57 Yeah. No, I'm glad to be here. You were cruising through town and, and I guess you turned it into a, when we said, hey, let's, let's, let's do this thing. You, you like turned it into visiting some of your customers and seeing, and meeting some, some new ones. So we're, we're, I'm glad you made dual use of your time. Yeah. It's, it's cool because all the time we will hear, oh, we'd love to partner. We'd love to partner. We'd love to partner. And people forget that partnering means partnering. Yeah. And, and you guys actually partner, like I said, hey, like we'd love if I can help out anyway. And you're like, sure. Yeah. Come on in. We'd love to show. I'm like, we'll take up on that. Yeah. And then we went out to lunch. It's like, these guys actually mean what they say. Yeah. So it's cool. Yeah.

00:19:37 Glad to be here. We're trying to get some free advertising agency stuff from you. Eventually we're going to ask. Yeah. Because we hear you're really good at it. And so charter schools should absolutely use your company for sure. If they want to grow. Yeah. That's really cool. I, um, I know you care. Right. And, uh, and having a leadership, having leadership that cares about executing for customers. It's like high on the list of things to do. And so, um, uh, you know, just getting to know you personally, I know that you really care about the mission of charter school and, uh, you know, nothing would speak more volumes to them than having somebody running the company, helping them grow that really, really cares about it. So would it be okay if just for maybe like 30 seconds, I just pound through like what

00:20:18 we've learned. Yeah. Go for it. So, um, and I haven't told anyone this. Okay. All right. All right. Top secret stuff. That is no longer top secret. Like this is declassified. Like I'm leaking this right now on this, on this episode. That's awesome. And I'm not saying this is a perfect system. Um, I'm just saying it's what we're doing now. We would just kind of hire whoever. And that was awful in our business. Since then, what we do is we invite people to a first interview and we ask them three questions. We ask them, why are manhole covers round? We give them a really hard calculus problem of the day that they can simply just Google to find the answer. Cause that's what we want to see is just that they're willing to Google.

00:21:00 Yeah. And then we give them like a, an angry client email to answer and how they'd respond. And then after they do that, we give them two books to read. And if they're really interested, they'll read those books and they'll schedule their second interview. And before they even get in our candidate pool, we'll take from whoever, but the most success we've ever had. And here's the big secret is my brother's, uh, air force pilot. We post our job postings on the air force fighter pilot spouse page because they are men and women who are following their husband or wife. They can't really get a job anywhere because they're always moving. They need a remote gig.

00:21:41 They need flexibility. They're taking care of a family. They don't need, you know, 401ks and health insurance. So it's a great fit for us. And, um, they're so intelligent. Most of them have master's degrees. They're so accomplished, but they just are looking for a job because, uh, and the, the reason I say that is not for everyone to go on the fighter pilot spouse page, but just ask yourself, like, you know, just get washed down to that brother. You're not one of a million hands. You're like, dude, I, what did I say that for? But the point is just figure out what do you offer? Like we offer flexibility. We offer a good hourly wage, maybe not an incredible salary, but for someone that's looking for

00:22:21 like a part-time solid, like $40 an hour, like, and I have two hours a day, like, and intelligent people who are integratable, like, so, so whatever you need, try to find that space. Yeah. And, uh, ask yourself, where are the people that I need? Who do they talk to? And then find those spaces. I love the process. You know, when you're, when you're growing a business, it's the people part. It's, it's always important. Yeah. It's, it's always important. But when you are this big instead of this big, it's like mission critical. Yeah. Right. You can't have any misses, right? And everybody affects your culture.

00:23:03 And so what a, what a great way to do it. That's super cool. Thanks for sharing that, dude. That was cool. Take down. All right, man. I enjoyed it. That was good. Well, I hope to see you again soon. Yeah. All right. So we'll talk to you later. Thanks for joining us. Yep. Yep. Yep. Bye.