She Got Her Husband on the Company Trip to Italy… as an Intern [The Bad Hire Ep. 55]

00:00:00 I called the police. After about four days on the job, he's fired and in jail for stealing from guest rooms. I want you to really hear this. He wants to know why I can't have one of them drop him off in Raleigh on the way. 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.

00:00:42 They're cautionary tales about lessons learned the hard way. Let's get started. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to The Bad Hire, the show with the best stories about the wild world of work. I'm joined today by Morgan and Emma. Welcome. Hi. Hi, guys. The Wilson shall, too, have been united together. I know. We were talking about this yesterday. It's been weeks, I think. I know. You can't separate us. Yeah. I know. Yeah. Well, you guys know the drill. Every week we dive into some of the wildest, the weirdest, and some actually shocking stories of hiring fails, you know, OG blowups. Just kind of flame out of employees.

00:01:23 It's really just pointing out, geez, how tough HR and recruiting really is and some of the stuff they have to deal with. Sure. Sure. But we do it from organizations all over the country. We've had, I don't know, countless stories this year. Probably. I don't know. How many? Do you know how many stories we had this year that we've told? It's got to be three, four hundred. Oh, I don't know. Is it that many, you think? Yeah, probably. Probably. I mean, four stories per person, almost per episode. Yeah. For a lot of it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we're doing good. But let's get started. I'll start us off. We hired someone to help load HVAC units onto trucks, which is, in fairness, you know, that's just the entire job.

00:02:08 The posting said, loading and moving HVAC equipment. In the first line, you know. So, the guy comes in, he nods along in the interview, like someone who fully understands he'll be moving HVAC equipment. Okay. 20 minutes into his first shift, I ask him to help another guy move a furnace off a pallet. And he looks at me, he looks at it, looks at me and tells me he can't do that because it violates OSHA regulations. Okay. Okay. I asked him, what regulation are you talking about? He says he doesn't know the number, but he's pretty sure that it's one of them. So, I explained that two people lifting a furnace with a hand truck is not only completely legal, it's the actual job description that he signed up for.

00:02:56 Oh, gosh. He says he's not comfortable with the liability. At that point, I'm not even mad. I'm generally fascinated. I ask him what he thought the job was going to be doing, if not moving HVAC equipment. He says he figured there'd be some paperwork involved. And that's it? Yeah. There was a clipboard. That was the paperwork. Why even apply? I walk him to the front office myself and nobody pushes back because there's nothing to push back on. If you can't do the lifting job, you can't do a lifting job while refusing to lift things. Why are you there? Yeah. Citing a regulation.

00:03:37 You can't name. 20 minutes after reading a job description that told you this was the job. So the job description says you'll be moving HVAC, moving and loading HVAC equipment. And he thought he was going to be doing paperwork. So he clocks out, takes his safety vest off in the parking lot, folds it neatly and leaves it on the hood of his car like a very small, confused resignation letter. You think people just don't read? I don't know. I think they get excited about getting the job and they could care less. Like they haven't really just applying, you know. I guess. My brother's a mechanic.

00:04:17 Or he found out HVACs were heavy. My brother's a mechanic and I can't imagine him getting a job as a mechanic and then being like, yeah, go work on that car. And him being like, no, I think I'm going to just do paperwork. Yeah. I just do the checkouts. I don't know about this guy, but like I'm not applying for a job that I don't want to do. If I read the job description and it sounds like, no, thank you. I'm not applying. Oh, it's lifting heavy equipment. Yeah. No thanks. I don't want to do that, but I'll apply. Yeah. Just to see if I get it. Maybe he's just mass applying to jobs. I feel like that's a really common thing now. And I feel like also people are like using AI agents to apply to jobs for them.

00:05:00 Like I know people who are building software that like auto applied to hundreds of jobs for them before. That's crazy. I feel so bad for recruiters now and what they're covered up in. Some recruiters are now AI agents themselves as well. Well, yeah, they respond to the over AI atom with AI to look through them. It was things like crazy. Yeah. And recruiters are trying to fill jobs that don't even exist now too. So I don't know. There's two sides to that story, but yeah. 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.

00:05:43 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. All right. So here's another one that we've got. It's, okay, so we have a supplier appreciation trip to Italy every year. How do we become a supplier to this company, right?

00:06:27 We have a supplier appreciation trip to Italy every year. Okay. One of our employees handled part of our supplier relationships, and not the biggest of accounts, but real good accounts, and she was not on the invite list. So she decided to try to invite herself. She contacted the supplier's events team directly, presenting herself in a way that implied her attendance had simply been overlooked and needed correcting. So she stopped just short of an outright lie, but it got close. It worked, and they added her to the trip to Italy. Nice. Nice. She just grew back a little apart. You don't got to hate on her.

00:07:08 I can't even lie. I would do the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. I respect the hustle. Yeah. Right? Then she asked to bring a plus one. Now she's pushing it. Oh, gosh. Right? You got it, girl. Just- You were going to- You were in. You were in. You were going to Italy. You were going to Italy, and you flunked. She asked to bring a plus one listed as an intern who needed shadowing experience for professional development. She's good. Does your intern be with you? Wow. The plus one was her husband. Ah, yeah. He does not work for us, has never worked for us, and had no need for shadowing experience and procurement because he works in an entirely unrelated field. They were roommates. The supplier caught the discrepancy when the paperwork didn't match ours, so no intern by

00:07:51 that name existed in any system either company could find. And the whole thing came back to us as an awkward, apologetic phone call we had to make to a valued supplier explaining why one of our employees had manufactured her way onto a trip and invented a job title for her spouse to get him a seat on the plane. Wow. We let her go the week before she got back. Oh, no. We let her go the week before she got back while she was in Italy? As far as I could tell, she was entirely unbothered by how it had unraveled. Well, she got a free trip to Italy. Yeah. I think that was just her main concern. She just wanted to go to Italy. She said she was unbothered. Girl's in Italy. She can't.

00:08:31 Yes. Like, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, this saved me $20,000. Oh, no. I'm fired while I'm in Italy. Yeah. Oh, no. Well, I might be coming. I'm talking to you. No job, but at what cost? We had a trip to Italy. Yeah. And my husband came. Yeah. Did he come? Did he come? I don't know. I don't. I don't understand what. I missed that detail. We let her go the week she got back. I don't know. Yeah. I guess he did. Wow. Hey, the plane ticket for her and her husband probably is more than her unemployment. So. Yeah. She came out. So, uh, here's another, here's another one I thought was good. The person we hired had a resume that said he was security minded.

00:09:16 Okay. Nice. In the interview, he talked about zero trust. All right. Architecture. Like, uh, like it's a, his personal philosophy. So it wasn't just a buzzword for him. Like he really knew what zero, uh, zero trust architecture was like. Two days later, he finds a USB drive in the parking lot. All right. I just know where this is going. He found a, he finds a USB drive in the parking lot on his way in. Finding a stray USB drive isn't in itself a problem. What you do with it is the whole next thing. He plugs, he plugs it directly into his work laptop on our network to see what's on it,

00:09:59 which is the single move that every security training video ever made that ever exists specifically tell you, do not do this. It turns out to be exactly what it looked like. A planted drive. Part of the test, part of a test our company had scheduled months earlier. Oh, look at that. And never gotten around to running until that week. The vendor couldn't have asked for a cleaner result. His laptop phoned home to their test server with about, within about 90 seconds of the drive going in, flagged with the new hire's name attached. Oh my gosh. When I called it, when I called him in, he tries to argue that plugging in unknown device to investigate, it was actually good instinct for a security minded person.

00:10:42 Oh, whatever. I tell him the good instinct is the one where you hand it over to IT in an evidence bag and never let it touch your computer ever. We let him go before this first week was out. The vendor's report cited his laptop as the single successful compromise out of 40 employees tested. And how, how would they, I guess 40 employees turned it in. I use that number in every new hire security training sense. I wouldn't be curious enough that I would find it. Well, I tell you. Especially if you're security minded. I just. Right. Yeah. Well, you know, here we don't even, all, all drives are taken out of computers.

00:11:23 You could, you can't even stick one into it. We just take that so seriously. Yeah. Yeah. Also like. But think about this, Morgan. And they're putting, they're dropping drives around in parking lots to see if someone will pick it up. I mean, literally that was a test. Just like scattering these drives around. That's really crazy. I mean. You would, you would think nobody would. You would think nobody would pick it up. But. I wouldn't even grab it off the ground. I'd be too concerned about how it's on the ground. I know. I would just look at it and be like, oh, USB drive. And then go on about that day. I know. It's like picking up a hair tie and ground it in your hair. Why would you do that? Yes. Like. Yes. Some dirty people out there. For real. For real. Germs. Germs.

00:12:07 We're worried about the safety of our IT architecture. She's got these germy. It's a lot of germs. It's like. A lot of germs. It's like a computer germ. Yeah. No, yeah. You're right. It's exactly what it's like. Exactly. What if there was like bad pictures on there or something? Yeah. Why would you want that on your computer either? Exactly. Why would you want that? Even if I wanted it. I would suspect that's what he was looking for. And he plugged it in. Now that I think about it. Yeah, probably. Cool. Right. Either way. You know. People are stupid. Yeah. Stupid. All right, Morgan. What do you got for us this. All right. This week. My first story.

00:12:48 I don't really know what this is, but I'm going to say it. And maybe you guys will have some insight. An aluminum extrusion factory. Do you guys know what that is? No idea. Okay. All right. Let's Google. All right. My story is about an aluminum extrusion factory. It is not a forgiving place. Hot metal, heavy machinery, and a quality control job where the entire point is paying attention. A new inspector shows up for his first day, and the first thing anyone notices is the smell. The smells of alcohol. Oh, no. At the start of the shift in a factory. There are safe amounts of nervous on a first day, and then there are smelling like a bar before the morning shift starts. So the company does what responsible employers do and sends him to a hospital for a breathalyzer

00:13:28 test. He refuses it. When you refuse a test, you've answered the question. Then the one thing that you could have cleared up. And then he said no. So his explanation was that he had been celebrating his new job with friends before work. So before work, meaning that the same morning, the celebration of getting a job had been so enthusiastic that it overlapped with the job itself. He was fired about 90 minutes, and a good chunk of that was the hospital visit. There's something almost hard to look away from about this one. A man so excited about a new job that he starts celebrating before his first shift and doesn't think to finish the celebration first. The enthusiasm is almost admirable, but the timing was catastrophic. I'm just laughing at kids' face the whole time.

00:14:12 I don't know what these people do, okay? Sorry. These are like stories that we read if you guys are new to the bad hire. I don't know what an aluminum extrusion factory is. Here, I'll tell you. I promise I'm not a dummy. Here, I'll tell you. I've never heard of this before. It is a... Oh no, it's okay. It was just here. Hold on. I don't know what that is. Do you know what it is? It basically, it's like a high pressure, it's like a high pressure, like hydraulic thing to form aluminum into different... Okay. Let's just, let's just, let's just say it would be extremely dangerous to be drunk hanging around it. Yeah. Right? I'm going to get... I'm just taken aback by showing up on your first day.

00:14:55 Like... Okay, but why don't you tell me it different than the night after? Like, they sent him, they sent him to do, they sent him to do a blood alcohol, right? Yeah. That's what it says. So they sent him off to a blood alcohol. It's breathalyzer. Or breathalyzer, yeah. And he refused. So if you refuse, everybody knows the answer to that. Like, if you refuse a breathalyzer, if you get older for drunk driving, you get automatically charged with a DUI. Can you imagine having that done on your first day? It's your first day. Why don't you celebrate at night? Who wants to drink in the morning before you start your shit? Well, he probably just, he probably wasn't. He just kept on going. Whole night, all morning. It's a different type of five o'clock somewhere. Yeah, no kidding. It's 5 a.m. somewhere. I guess. Oh, goodness.

00:15:36 Okay. Well, that's my first story. It's not our first, it's not our first drunk employee story, that's for sure. No, we get a lot of those. Most of the time I feel bad for them too. Yeah, it's actually kind of, sometimes it's, I don't know, I'm sad from it a lot. But also, if you're hanging around friends who want to celebrate you getting a job the morning of to drink with you. Yeah. You're hanging around friends. Change your friends. That's not how you celebrate. Maybe go to breakfast, have a pancake. Like, what are we doing? Drinking. All right. Anyways, my second story is, so a housekeeper at our resort comes to me. Have a pancake. Well, that, yeah. Have a pancake, not a beer. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So, my second story is, so a housekeeper at our resort comes to me and asks if I can bring

00:16:18 her son on as a laundry runner. Low stakes, lots of walking, the kind of job where you learn how a place works. I say yes. Everybody's happy. A family working together. Very sweet. Then he starts showing up with expensive new things. He hasn't been paid yet. That's the detail that keeps nagging at me. He's showing off nice new expensive items before his first paycheck has even come in. I notice this. Other people notice this. A runner who hasn't been paid but is suddenly wearing money is the kind of math anyone can do on a lunch break. Around the same time, guests start reporting money missing from their rooms. I call the police. After about four days on the job, he's fired and in jail for stealing from guest rooms. Four days.

00:16:58 His mother vouched for him. I hired him as a favor to someone I trusted and he lasted for four days before going to jail. What I still can't get past is how completely self-defeating the whole thing was. If you're going to steal from guests, the one job you have in that arrangement is to be quiet about it. Blend in. Give nobody a reason to look twice at you. Certainly don't start wearing the evidence before your first paycheck arrives. He gave the whole thing away by dressing for it. It reminds me of this story we read that one time of the lady that was a cashier at a department store and she started stealing some of the merchandise and then wearing the merchandise that she stole that day. It's like she's like, what was it? Like a really famous department is where I feel like.

00:17:38 I feel like it was something like that. Yeah. And she would come into work the next day wearing the stuff that was mysteriously stolen. Right. But that's what that reminds me of. All right. I just think this is, I just thought your story was funny when the person decided to change the story to tell people how to get away with it. Oh, no. It's like, hey, we're going to steal. Blend in. Just don't show up. Or how about don't steal? Again, have a pancake. Don't steal. Do the right thing. Be a good person. Exactly. That's really. You would think. Yeah. You would think. And also, I want to know what he was showing up with. Was he like, hey, I got a Rolex? When he's like, what our boy? Like, what? Yeah. He's got a new chain on.

00:18:19 I don't want to know what his mother was thinking. Poor. His mom. Because his mom's the one that recruited him. I don't know. He didn't hire my son. Like, I don't know. I just want to. That kind of stinks because she sounds like she was a trustworthy person. Yeah. She'd been there for a long time. And then she's like, my son needs a job. And then. Yeah. That makes me feel better. They do right by her and give him one. And then. Yep. He messes it up. Oh. I hope I didn't. I hope it didn't cost her her job, too. It didn't sound like it. And it makes her look bad. But I don't know. It didn't sound like it. But still. She was wearing a new watch. Yeah. Yeah. All right, Emma. What you got? All right. Let's. Let's go. I have three stories.

00:19:03 Yes. Okay. My last one's pretty long. But the. These ones are. These ones are pretty average. Okay. This one comes from a friend of a Reddit user, which normally I'd be skeptical of. But this is just a story that you cannot make up, which means it's got to be good. Oh, gosh. A tech company in California brings on a new hire. He gets through a full day of onboarding. And by the end of the day. By the end of the day. He has a job. Good outcome. Go home. Get some rest. Come back tomorrow. He walks out of the parking lot. Does a burnout in the parking lot. I'm leaving. Tires spinning. Smoke everywhere. Marks on the pavement. In the parking lot of the company that just hired him on the night of his first day. He apparently assumed nobody would notice or nobody would care, which is a remarkable

00:19:47 assumption to make in a parking lot with cameras. The next morning, he gets a call. And they're letting him go. The reason they gave him in their exact words was, Reckless actions last night in the parking lot. I don't think that's reasonable. No. I don't think that's reasonable to fire somebody over. For doing like a burnout? Yeah. Just doing a burnout. People are going to hate my opinion on this. Probably because of who my family is. My brother is literally a street drifter. Like that's his profession, I guess. But what? I feel like that's just such a stupid reason to let somebody go. He's just excited. He made it through the entire. He's a little boy. He made it through the entire first day without a problem. Signed everything. Met everybody. Did everything right.

00:20:27 And then he got to his car and made a decision that erased all of them before he even made it home. He was like, man, today was a good day. I'm just going to do a burnout. That makes me feel bad for the guy. I agree with you. Yeah. Whatever. No, that's stupid. A burnout gets you fired? That's because a bunch of nerds work there. Yeah. That would have been a great opportunity to just, for a little coaching, be like, we don't do burnouts in our market line. Yeah. So, try not to do that again. Maybe strike one. Maybe just a little warning. I don't know. But obviously qualified. He got the job right on the first day. I know. But to fire him over that? Crazy. That's stupid. No, I don't like that.

00:21:07 Anyway. Whatever. Here's my next one. I run a small cafe, tight crew, a lot of regulars, a place where everyone knows each other and things run on trust. At the one month mark, I'm ready to let two new hires go. Someone on my team pushes back and makes a case for giving them another month. I'm a reasonable person. Fine. One more month. Let me tell you what happens in that month. I'm going. The first one is repeatedly sexist to his trainer. He also ignores health and safety rules, which in food service is about as serious as it gets. And then toward the end of the second month, he sets the microwave on fire in front of other people who work there. At the two month review, I sit down with him expecting at minimum some acknowledgement of

00:21:49 what happened. He refuses to take responsibility for the fire. The fire that occurred in front of witnesses in a building he was employed in involving equipment he had been using. I fire him on the spot. You can set a microwave on fire and still have a conversation about it. You cannot set a microwave on fire and tell me it wasn't you. The other hire, the one we debated keeping, actually improved over that same month, which is the thing that makes you question every NSC you've ever had as a manager. Same start date. One grew into the job and one set it on fire. That one's pretty good. Oh my gosh. That one's pretty funny. Yeah. I don't know.

00:22:30 I don't understand the lack of accountability sometimes with people. You know, I mean, if you set it on fire, it's just easy to have to go. I'm super sorry. Yeah. You know, I didn't. Yeah. Totally shocked me. I did. Clearly, I didn't do it on purpose. I know. It wasn't me. Are they microwaving their food that they're serving? I don't know. That's kind of terrible. Yeah. I don't know. Lighting kitchens like that. I, maybe it's like, you know, I don't know. I hope it's like he's heating up his lunch or something. I really don't even know. Anyway. Okay. My last story is actually a submitted one. One that we've had for a while.

00:23:11 It came from. NC SHRM. Yes. It came from NC SHRM conference that we went to last year. And this lady told us her story via voice memo. And I just transferred the transcript from the voice memo to our sheet. So. Smart. This is a story from. From. This very lovely lady. From this very lovely lady. Okay. This is her story. I'm an HR safety professional with over 30 years of experience. And this is my favorite story to tell. About three years ago, I hired an 18 year old for a millwright position. Never done anything like it before. Zero experience. But we put him through our training programs and sent him out to Colorado for his first

00:23:54 assignment all the way from North Carolina. He goes out with the crew. Everyone flies together and things seem fine. Then he calls me. He's homesick. Full blown panic attack. Can't be away from home. Wants to come back. He's 18. It's his first time away and he is done. So I have to get him a separate ticket home while the rest of the crew stays out on the job. To get him back to North Carolina, he has a connect through Las Vegas. Fine. Except his connecting flight gets canceled. Oh no. Mechanical issues. And the airline puts him up in a hotel for the night and rebooks him for the next morning. He calls me in the middle of the night completely beside himself. Remember there's a time change. So this is the middle of the night for me. He's already feeling guilty about quitting.

00:24:36 He's stranded in Las Vegas at 18 years old and he's convinced that I personally am responsible for what's happening to him at this airport. I tried to explain that the flight cancellation has nothing to do with us, that the airline is taking care of him and that he'll be home in the morning. He seems to hear me. Then he calls back. He's looking out at the tarmac. He can see planes. Lots of planes going everywhere. And he wants to know. I want you to really hear this. He wants to know why I can't have one of them drop him off in Raleigh on the way. I spend over an hour on the phone with this young man explaining how commercial aviation works, that planes are not buses, that they have designated routes and design stops, that

00:25:21 I do not have the power to redirect the flight, that nobody is going to open the door at 30,000 feet and drop him off over North Carolina. He made it home the next morning. 30 years in HR and I have never forgotten that phone. I wouldn't either. That kind of makes me sad. But like, it makes me sad for the kid because is he really that sheltered that he's like never flown before? There's a ton of young people who haven't traveled, you know, and even so, maybe not alone if they had, you know. So, and then the idea of being on your first trip ever, your plane being canceled and you

00:26:04 having to kind of just go through that whole thing of getting a hotel voucher, being put up in a hotel, probably absolutely terrifying to a young person. Like it sounds silly, but then when you really think about it like that, it kind of makes you feel bad for him. Yeah, the whole time you read the story, I was like, I feel really bad for him. He got this like cool job. They invested in him. He's going to get to travel. Yeah. It'll be in a beautiful state, going to be in Colorado. And then, and, and, you know, and then he just gets, he gets homesick, which I'm, you know, if he was going to college, that happens to kids that go to college. Yeah. And go to college and pick up and leave second week, you know.

00:26:45 Yeah. And so I felt bad. Yeah. That's all I have. That was my last one for today. Well, that's it for today. We appreciate, thanks for listening to The Bad Hire. We love telling the stories. We love when you send them in. I think they've gotten better and better throughout the year. That was actually a great one. And what a great way to do it. Just, she just did a voice my mind. We kept forgetting, we kept forgetting that we had it. We were going to send, send it, find a way to get it played on the show. Yeah. So, um, we were going to send it off and have it like kind of edited a little bit. Then I just decided, why don't I just grab the transcript from it? Yeah. Just read it. Just straight read it. So. Well, submit your Bad Hire story.

00:27:26 Uh, now you can go to thebadhire.com and, and do that. And it could be featured on the show. We'll read it. Uh, you could potentially, uh, read it. We could reach out to you and have you, uh, read it on camera. And so we could play and listen to your story and let everybody hear it. But we'd, uh, we'd love to have that for you. So, um, but again, subscribe if you can rate, review, share, uh, uh, on social media. When you see our clips, like them, share them, comment them. We'd love to have you do that. But, uh, but we appreciate you. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. Bye guys. Bye. Bye.