The Creepiest Hiring Story We’ve Heard Yet [The Bad Hire Ep. 26]

00:00:00 An employee that I was coerced into hiring followed me home one night. He started speaking in this completely made-up language to us during the interview. This guy's all over the place. Yeah. Wow. That's a bad hire. That is a really bad hire. That is a bad hire. 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.

00:00:41 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. Good to have you guys back. The show with the best stories meets the most unfortunate employees. There you go. We tell some great bad hire stories, bad interview stories. We have fun doing it. Welcome, Morgan. Hello, guys. How are you doing, Nathan? Welcome, everybody. All right. Good stuff. All right. You guys know the drill. We're going to tell some wild stories, some different stories we found on the internet, maybe some that were submitted, and that's what we do here.

00:01:21 We tell crazy stories about hiring disasters and sometimes interview disasters. I don't know. I like the interview ones as much as I do the hiring disasters. I like first date flame outs and OG burnouts and all kinds of. We're always looking for the stories. I like the interview ones. Yeah. I feel like maybe just because I've been in a lot of interviews and I've never hired anybody, so I find them more relatable. Yeah. So I can imagine just like, I don't know. There's some crazy interview stories, bad hire stories. So if you're watching, got to submit your stories. We have heard so many stories. I started to, you guys have a better memory for them though, because you'll be like, oh,

00:02:01 remember? Yeah. And I'm like, what? Well, then we see the social media clips a thousand times too of all the stories and stuff. So we've just been getting out there. Social media clips are doing pretty good. So people like the stories. I'm glad. Yeah. There's one of yours, Morgan, like yesterday that blew up, I think. Okay. So it did. Yeah. Nice. It's awesome. All right. What was the story? I don't remember. It was probably, if I had to guess, like off of the last ones that we read, there was the one about the lady's husband who cheated on her. And she's like, I'm just letting you know, I'm not going to pass a background check. And they're like, why? And she was like, because I literally lit our house on fire because my husband cheated on me. And they were like, oh, okay. And then I have no clue if she got hired or not. They didn't say. So maybe that one. I love them. I love them.

00:02:42 Well, we hope you'll submit your stories to us. You know, we've got our contest that'll run this year. The best story that gets sent to us, we'll pick a winner and send out 10,000 bucks. So, you know, submit your story, who knows? And, you know, if you've been in, if you've been hiring, interviewing, you know, everybody's got a story. Most people got more than one. So share it with us. It's good fun. We do it lightheartedly and they don't have to be completely mishaps, you know, like bad hires, even though that's the show title. Yeah. We've had some, there can be, you know, some resounding kind of redemption stories. Those are our favorite ones.

00:03:23 Yeah. Most of the time. Yeah. Yeah. And then there's happy ending. And then there's, you know, it's, there's just good hire stories too. Some people have told some, you know, where they thought somebody was bad. We had one CEO runs a company admit that he was the bad hire one time. Oh, that's right. He was, he was the boss too. Yeah. So send your stories in. We love them. We'll use them and, and maybe you'll win $10,000. Yeah. There you go. All right. So I'll get started. All right. Yeah. Let's do it. Sounds good. Here we go. And I started, I read the first couple of sentences of this and it, it, it, it sounded freaky right off the bat. Oh, great. Like you. All right.

00:04:04 An employee that I was coerced into hiring followed me home one night. Off to a great start. Yeah. Wait a second. I thought, I thought that laptop was good. I was going to say, um, Ken. Wait a second. I swear I turned this off. I had a suspicion. It wasn't mine. Marcus, you tried to warn us. Yeah. It's okay. All right. An employee that I was coerced into hiring followed me home one night. Uh, the, the fellow wondered, uh, in a little after I had entered the gate of the complex. Okay. And started asking the guard a bunch of questions.

00:04:46 I guess it's an apartment complex or something. Uh, he started off asking if any apartments were for sale. Uh, what was the square footage price? And then said that I had given him this address. Mm-hmm. Hmm. I had not. Okay. He continued asking if I was living alone, what time I usually reached home. Okay. It's getting worse. Yeah. That's weird. All right. The guard told him that he had just, uh, that he had just recently taken up employment. So didn't know anything about the residence. That shouldn't be why he didn't tell him. He should never tell him. Yeah. Right. Come back later. I'll give you all the insight. He was lying. He just didn't trust it. Okay. He was lying. He just didn't trust any man who asked such questions about a young woman.

00:05:29 However, we could not just. Yeah. Okay. That makes it worse. Yeah. It's getting worse. However, we could, uh, we could not just confront him because of social class issues. The guard promptly informed me about this the next day. He had gotten to, uh, the fool had forgotten to take off his employee lanyard. Oh my gosh. Isn't this a common theme in these? Yes. So I could easily figure out who he was. Always wearing a key identifying thing. Right. That day, once all the team had come in, I walked to his seat and asked him in my loudest indoor voice, what were you doing at my apartment complex yesterday? I heard you ask personal questions about me. What do you want to know? Long story short, he was off my team.

00:06:10 The company retained him though, but they just transferred him. So he stayed. Wow. I would have filed a restraining order. I wouldn't be asking him, why were you stalking me? I'd be like, no, I'm going to file a restraining order. So that was, they call that when you like bounce a bad employee around, like you just send them somewhere else. Oh gosh. Transfer. I don't know. Creeper's transfer. I don't know. Creeper's transfer. I was going to say. Well, at least she called him out in front of everybody. I mean, that's, that's one good step, I guess. But wow. That's not good at all. Yeah. I just like what, what's going through his head? Like what does he think is going to happen? I mean, I guess he's a criminal. That's like one of us committing a crime with a bad hire shirt on. Like you got to know people are going to trace it back to you.

00:06:53 It says, my name is Nathan. Yeah. Exactly. Just like everyone that I go. Here's their website and the phone number. Yeah. Easy to go. Easy to go. Yeah. Well, that's crazy. V-chex bandit masks coming soon. Yeah. Yeah. She's trying to swag it up. Yeah. Trying to sell apparel here. Yeah. Sorry, Nathan. My story. Okay. You guys ready? Mm-hmm. Let's see. I once interviewed a candidate who opened the conversation with this line. I'm probably the smartest person that you will ever meet. Oh. In fact, I'm so smart that I invented my own language. And I will be conducting the rest of this interview in this language.

00:07:35 Oh, God. And then he actually did it. So, he started speaking in this completely made-up language to us during the interview. At that point, we were so stunned that we decided just to go with it. I told you I like interview stories. Yeah. We kept him and he was talking and we were bringing people from around the office to come listen to him for hours. Gosh. People would walk in, stand there for a minute and hear him speaking the invented language. And they would just look at each other like, what is actually happening right now? We laughed about this interview for a few months. And the funny thing is that was not a joke. The guy was completely serious. Honestly, as a Tolkien fan, Lord of the Rings, I had to respect the effort. Creating an entire language is a lot of work.

00:08:17 But did he at least explain like what each word meant? Like we're having an answer key? He probably did explain, but in the other language. So, they didn't pick it up. Oh, gosh. But when you spend enough time doing tech interviews, you meet some incredibly interesting people. Moments like this also remind me of something important. In any interaction, this might be the only chance that we ever have to show somebody in our lives some kindness, compassion, empathy, and some real attention. Because you never know what people are actually going through. So, I try to remember that. I try to make sure that at least for that one moment, that person sitting across from me knows that someone in the world actually cared about them. I'll be honest. I don't always succeed, but I try. For this language guy, once we eventually understood what we could use of his skills, it was clear that it wasn't a good fit for this team.

00:09:05 So, we had to tell him no. But we did refer him to some video game developers that we knew. I figured that there was a place like that that actually might appreciate some of his skills, including inventing your own language. And who knows? Maybe that was exactly the right skill for that job. Anyways, it became kind of wholesome at the end. It kind of laughed at the end. When they said they're leading with kindness, they were like, let's have the whole entire company come in there to watch him so we can make fun of him later. That wasn't to make fun of him. That was just to like, check this out. Oh, look at him. Check this out. Everybody's standing in wonder. Yeah. So, I thought that was kind of nice. You know, I mean, yeah, like you said, first they were like, hey, everybody, let's all point and laugh at this guy. Yeah. And they're like, let's show him some kindness. Yeah. That's pretty cool, actually.

00:09:46 I feel like that's the most unique interview I've ever heard of. I love that the storyteller was at least caring about. Yeah. Yeah. I think, like you said, more. I think it's a good rule, though, right? Yeah. If you try interviewing. I mean, some people don't interview well. It's not a great experience for a lot of people. It's super scary, I think, for some. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's some that walk in there, they're just naturals with people and interviews are great. And they, and others who just, you know, will stay in a bad job to avoid an interview. I think referring him to somebody else, too, is like really nice with him. Like a lot of companies won't refer you to somebody else to interview for it normally. Like they didn't have to do that. Like they went out of their way to do that for him. So I thought that was cool. Yeah.

00:10:26 Because you could have a lot of those actual technical skills that they're looking for, but just happen to be maybe a little bit socially awkward and make language. Yeah. Like creating your own language. Yeah. It's a bit socially awkward. He also thought he was the smartest person that they've ever met. He did say that. Maybe it's true. That is also. That's where he started. They probably rubbed you the wrong way. They're like, sir, you're taking my IQ test right now. Yeah. It might actually be true. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe, yeah. You never know. But I thought that was very interesting with his own language. Yeah. So that was really cool. 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. That's B-Checks.

00:11:07 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. What's up, Morgan? All right. What do you have for us today? So, actually, we have a clip to watch from Riverside first. And then I get to tell my fun little story I got. An employee who was almost a director level, just probably one level below a director.

00:11:50 So it was very senior manager. And the allegation was for mischarging of time. That they were on a government contract and they were doing activities that were on company time, which was therefore a mischarging of time to the contractor. And so the investigation ensued and there was evidence that was actually sent to the president of the company. And it came down to me to work on the investigation. When he was called in, and it was actually the, what he had done was contacting a minor, wanted to buy something of hers. So during the course of the investigation, he got up at one point and walked out of the investigation. Also threw away his identification into a shredder and was therefore no longer legally, from a security standpoint, able to be on the property.

00:12:39 He left the property without badging out, piggybacked on someone else. And determination was made by legal and by HR that he would be terminated. And a vice president stepped in and overrode the termination. And literally one year to the date, the internal attorney called me and said, Have you got the television on? No, I don't have the television. He said, Turn it on. And so I turned it on and the FBI was arresting this person for multiple counts. Not for mischarging a time, but for other multiple counts. Oh, gosh. Oh, my gosh. Wow. That's a bad hire. That is a really bad hire. That is a bad hire. That, that.

00:13:20 Could you just get up and walk out during an investigation? Like, I'm done. Just leave? I guess. I mean, you can. It would just typically lead to your firing. Yeah. Yeah. Right? So. He's getting fired anyways. Some senior exec steps in, saves him. I guess saved him. I don't know. Well. She didn't really say that. I guess they did. I guess they, they did keep him. Mm-hmm. And then while he was working there, they were getting. I don't know if it was like a family relation to the. Yeah. To the vice president. Yeah. To like, oh no, this is my nephew. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Did you find the, um, the security in the building and like her understanding of all the rules? Like, like where, did she say where they, where they worked?

00:14:04 No. Did she say like. I don't think. Something, something high level though. Cause there's a security badge. Yeah. Cause you had your own security badge. Yeah. Cause she understood like. They didn't get out. To get out. Yeah. So it's like. You know, we have pretty secure facility, but you don't have the badge out of here. It's like, it's like leaving an apartment complex where the gate opens. You have to like drive right behind somebody. Yeah. It's like that kind of thing. That's pretty crazy. Getting out with somebody else's badge. Yeah. That was wild. That is insane. Maybe they clock in, clock out via their badge scanning too. I don't know. Sometimes companies do that to like track time. Yeah. But who knows? I don't know what the use of him shredding the badge is. And then going like, what's, if you're just going to leave and escape and like never come

00:14:45 back in the way. Yeah. I love her story though. Yeah. It's kind of confused. What is new? She is probably one of her like top kind of moments where like the, yeah. Some VP calls you and says, Hey, turn your TV on right now. That is crazy. That is insane. I don't know. It's like, Oh my God. It's like how we tried to fire. Yeah. And Sam saved him. Yeah. You know, now he's been here. I also love the details. Like, are you watching the TV? He's like, no, I'm not watching the TV. It was the FBI that got him too. It's the FBI, which means like serious. Yeah. Serious crime. Yeah. Not, not too much time. Local crimes aren't serious. But I mean, not time theft for like standing around the water cooler or whatever. Yeah. Oh, wow.

00:15:26 All right. So I have a story today from Reddit. And so this person actually posts like all of her, she's an attorney. So she posts all of her like wild legal stories, but she also posts for like bad hires that she has for her firm. So it's like a mix of both, but she kind of starts off the story and she says, I've shared a few wild legal stories before, but this one might be featured the worst hire I've ever seen. Although honestly, the Everglades case might still top it. And that's the one where a guy sued a landowner for not wanting him to, oh, for not warning him that there were alligators in the Everglades after one bit off his hand when he tried to pee on it. Whoa. Wait, what? So that's how she starts the story. So, and she said this one might be close to it. So if that gives you any idea about how we're going to get on this, that, yeah.

00:16:10 And who is this? Who is this? This is an attorney. Okay. Who hires like paralegals and yeah. Interesting. So, but that was a case she was bringing up because she was like this bad hire story might top that story. The Everglades story. Yeah. I want to hear the whole Everglades story too. Yeah. Why would you pee on it? Okay. I digress. I still love stories. But yeah, but today's story is about a paralegal we hired who somehow managed to do worse than that decision. This guy had graduated law school and even passed the bar exam, but the bar refused to license him for what they called professional and ethical reasons. We never found out exactly what those were. And in hindsight, we probably should have tried harder to figure out what that was. From day one, he had a huge chip on his shoulder and about being a paralegal instead of a lawyer.

00:16:52 But despite that, he asked the most basic questions imaginable. And if he'd explain something for the 10th time, he'd say things like, well, how was I supposed to know how work should be prioritized? And when we're talking about choices like a trial next week versus a discovery process that lasts nine months, not exactly a philosophical dilemma. He would be like, I don't know which one to prioritize, the trial or the thing that takes nine months. Like he just was confused. About after two months of training, one of our attorneys gave him a standard task, create a medical chronology, basically a data timeline summarizing four years of medical records for a case. He spent an entire week on it. Every time someone walked by his desk, he'd whisper, shh, I have to concentrate on this med chronology.

00:17:35 Finally, Thursday afternoon, he sends the attorney the finished document. It is one page long, two or three paragraphs. No way. No dates, just a vague summary of four years of treatment. The attorney asks why it's so short and why it isn't, you know, chronological. He gets defensive and says, well, there weren't many records in the file. Then he leaves for the day. The attorney opens the case file to check and all the medical records are gone. She checks a backup drive. They're gone on there too. Then she texts the other cases he'd worked on and those records are gone too. What? IT eventually figured it out. Apparently, instead of summarizing the medical records, he had simply just deleted them.

00:18:18 His apparent plan was if there are no records, there's nothing to summarize. That's true. He's like, work smarter, not harder. The next morning, while IT was still trying to figure out what else he might have deleted, he strolls into the office at 1145 a.m. The office manager asks why he's three hours late and he says, completely serious, oh, I thought I could make my own hours. This guy's all over the place. Yeah. She reminds him there was a staff meeting at 10 a.m. and his response was, oh, I don't read emails in the afternoon. It stresses me out and I only read emails in the morning. Which is an interesting strategy for someone who shows up to work at 1145. How'd this guy get hired? I know. And she said... Too much to sit. She said he did not last.

00:18:59 Interesting strategy for someone who says, I only read them in the morning, but I don't come in until 1145. The fact that this dude passed the bar and then they denied him, like... There's no way he passed the bar. I know. That's right, because he's what? A paralegal or a... He's a paralegal. He's a lawyer? He's a paralegal because he passed the bar, but... I don't know how he was studying when people were walking past his office. That's not what he's doing now. Yeah. He's probably not doing that anymore. So... But I've never seen professional and ethical reasons being a reason somebody didn't get there. You know, a lot of times I think it's... People just... It's not about the skill. They just... They just don't want to... You know, they just don't want to work.

00:19:40 They're just not motivated, you know, easily distracted, whatever it is. Well, like working on a single document and then a week later it's like one page long. That's crazy. You can't really spend a week, right? He was working hard to do a week. So what you did instead was, you know, goof around, probably play around on your computer, your phone, whatever you do, you know, and then you come back, you know, what else would you do? I mean, it's like Spongebob trying to write that one paragraph and then after a week it's just the word the... Yeah. Like writing in cursive. That's him trying to work on his own document. I mean, and deleting medical records is crazy. Like, and the fact that they had to have IT figured all out. And then he did it on purpose. He's like, oh, let me just like sneak past and less chronological things to order.

00:20:22 Wow. And everything else he worked on, he deleted too. I once had a business partner who she had, she owed, you know, we brought our business together and I was kind of taking over a company and she owed a lot of money that she didn't disclose. Right. And so apparently before I got there, she just took all these bills that she owed and she just shredded them. Right. Yeah. So she just, she went to a couple of her staff and said, you know, we got to get rid of all this stuff, shred all this stuff. Like if we shred them, you know, no one, no one's going to know. Bankruptcy, Michael Scott style.

00:21:04 Yeah. No, no one's going to know. He's not, you know, can't ever figure out that we owe the money. Yeah. We just shred the bills. The cat track is down. And so she ended up taking a leave and, you know, I did find out. So a couple, a little bit of time goes by. And of course the thing about bills is they just mailed them again. Yeah. Yeah. And now you owe more for your interest. She's taken a leave absence. Some stuff comes up and I'm wondering what happened. Yeah. And so I, you know, I don't go in her office. I go in her office and, you know, the staff have been, her staff who've been kind of covering for her, have been throwing her mail on there.

00:21:45 And I see this huge stack of, you know. Bills. Bills. Yeah. Bills. finances. Let me just leave this bill on my counter. Let me shred it. Kind of like the guy tearing up the records. Just shred them. Makes the bills go away. Have you seen the office episode where he's like, they're in a lot of debt. And so he talks to their financial advisor in their office and he's like, what do I do? And he goes, oh, you need to declare bankruptcy. So he walks out into the middle of the whole office and he goes, I declare bankruptcy. And that's how he

00:22:26 thinks you declare bankruptcy and fix your debt. It's just declaring it to your office. That's it. That's kind of funny. I don't watch the office. Ugh. You like it. Yeah, you would. You would really like it. I don't watch it on TV. I mean, there's some interesting storylines. Yeah. Obviously. We could probably do a whole podcast on bad hires on the office. That's a good idea. That's a good idea. That's a bad hire story. Maybe we could find would we be allowed to play a clip from the office? Clearly we could. TV clips all the time. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what you should do. We could definitely do a whole react series. Yeah. One episode. Yeah. Yeah. One episode series where we react to all the bad hire stories.

00:23:07 We can make it happen. Yeah. Or you can still recurring kind of a recurring segment every once in a while we do. Yeah. We'll find a clip where he declares bankruptcy. Yeah. Yeah. He's like, oh, it's like a get out of jail free car. Yeah. Exactly. Not at all. Yeah. Not how it works. Oh my God. Yeah. Marcus, run the clip. Yeah. Where's our office clip? Yeah. There you go. That's why, um, don't you love when those, uh, podcast hosts have got some, some crew over there. Like you can find this. Yeah. Like, you know, five seconds later, you know, the best ones are like, you can hear the producers laughing in the background, you know? So we have to be funnier. We'll get there. Can you find the video of the crab eating a gusher? And then he like pulls it up and he's like, see that that's a crab eating a gusher. It's

00:23:48 a different time these days. And you're just like, how did his producer find it that quickly? He's like, boom, meeting the gusher. He's super genius. He doesn't find himself. We'll get there. All right, man. Is that it? Yeah. I think so. Yep. Well, that's it for us. Then that's it for us today. Yeah. I hope they put the clip of the office in here. Yeah. Hey, thanks for listening to the Bad Hire and, uh, listen, subscribe, like, share, do all those cool things to help us, uh, to help us grow the show. We'd love to have more listeners. Uh, and because we want to hear more stories. Yes. And don't forget, uh, your story could win $10,000. So do not be afraid to send it to us. Uh, you can make it anonymous if you'd like. We don't have to give your name or anything or even your company.

00:24:30 Just tell the, tell the story and make it a, it could be a bad story, a good story, a redemption story, a fun story, whatever it might be. Um, we, we love them all. Go ahead and send them to us. All right. And if you want to do that, go to thebadhire.com. Appreciate you. Thanks. It was fun.