The Employee Who Disappeared Without a Trace [The Bad Hire Ep. 35]

00:00:00 The person on camera was a video loop. The real hire was overseas doing the actual work for a fraction of the salary. Apparently he had enough complaints sitting on his desk to fill an entire banker's box. No, what? Really? She snuck up behind me and tickled me. Oh gosh, that's my nightmare. Oh, why? 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

00:00:42 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 back to The Bad Hire, the show with the best stories about the worst employees. I'm back today with Morgan and Nathan. What's up, guys? What's up, guys? Good morning, everybody. Yeah. So, it's been a while since... It's been a couple weeks since you've been around, Nathan. Yeah, I was here three, four weeks ago. Maybe more than that. I think I came beginning of April. Now it's mid-May. Has it been that long? So, yeah. All right. You guys know the drill. We've got stories that have been submitted to us, either online or producers met with

00:01:27 them, and we've done... It looks like we might have video or something today. But we dive into some of the weirdest, the wildest, the most unusual, you know, kind of hiring stories where maybe someone's blown up on the first day, OG flames out at the end, or, you know, whatever it is. A lot of the first day. Yeah. From all over. Job sites, offices. I don't know. Yeah. And we've even had some where they were on an airplane and flamed out while they were in the airs. Yeah. Literally. Yeah. Don't forget, we're running a $10,000 contest. So, we're looking for the best story of the year. Submit your story online at thebadhire.com or reach out to us and submit it and get a

00:02:07 chance to win $10,000. We'd love to have your story. We'd love to read it. We'd love to have a segment of you telling the story if you'd like to do that. So, yeah. Come shoot your shot. Win the $10,000. Yeah. We've had some good stories lately and we've had a lot of the call-ins of like people calling, connecting with our team, telling their story in person. We've got like a couple of the clips today. Oh, really? We've had like a huge surge in those. Yeah, we have. So, if you don't have time to actually come into Charlotte, into our office, and if you don't want to just only write in a story, you can actually like book a call with us and tell us your story just over video and then we'll play on the show. And so, we've had like a bunch of those lately. So, I think we have like two lined up today after this.

00:02:48 Yeah, we do. So, yeah. Yeah, very cool. Well, I'm excited about that. I love when they tell their own stories. I love those segments. I love responding to them. I think I'd rather, well, I kind of like them both. Yeah. Hey, Tess. Why don't you tell Tess in the chat? All right. What's up, Tess? Tess. How are you guys doing? Oh, she has all of her certifications in the chat. Yeah, she got that SHRM certification. Let's go. I'd love to see it. That was great. What's up, Tess? That's awesome. All right. So, we ready? Yeah, let's do it. All right, let's go. So, I'll start. So, this was an anonymous story submitted to us. So, we won't say who it is, but we'll read the story. Okay. So, here it goes. So, I work for a well-established title company that's been around for over 100 years.

00:03:32 We're talking deep roots in the community. Lawyers, politicians, farmers, small business owners. We know most our clients by name and have spent decades building those relationships. So, the person sitting at the front desk matters a lot. They're the first face anyone sees when they walk through the door. Yep. We hire a new receptionist. Bubbly, personable, seemed like a great fit at first, but it didn't take long for things to get unthinkable. Yikes. It started with what seemed like harmless flirting with some of the older male clients. Oh, wow. Here we go. But it escalated pretty quickly into comments that had absolutely no place in a professional

00:04:17 setting. Yikes. She also had a habit of giving clients unsolicited nicknames. One of our wealthiest and most loyal clients, a man who's just gotten new, a man who had just gotten new veneers, she started calling him Sparkles. Chompers? Oh, gosh. Chompers is like an insult. Sparkles is not much better. So, apparently he was not amused. Was that a flirtatious comment? I guess, uh, a Sparkles. I guess, uh, I would be. So, this is starting to spin. He was not amused. We were mortified. Okay. There were also, you ever, have you ever had someone, somebody who like connects, like,

00:04:59 is like overly, like super friendly? Yeah. It gets to be weird. It comes across a little weird. Yeah. Do this, to come up with these nicknames and start engaging people. Yeah, Sparkles. You're like, man, this is, you know, you're, you're like, you're all up in their purse somehow. You know, it's in your personal space, but it's, I don't know, it's not physical. It's just the way they talk. You're like, yeah. It's just ick and uncomfortable. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like this is what's happening. I love it too much. The final straw, um, wait, there, uh, there were also some situations I won't get too much detail about, but let's just say the connected parking garage became a point of concern. What does that mean? What? So obvious, what? Yelling out nicknames.

00:05:41 They're walking back to their car. The final straw came on an early morning when I was on the phone with a client running on no sleep, no coffee, uh, sounds like a typical HR team member. And she snuck up behind me and tickled me. Oh gosh. That's my nightmare. Oh, why? I pulled my boss into the empty office and told him, that was the final straw, and told him she had to go. He fired her about five minutes later and apparently had enough complaints sitting on his desk to fill an entire banker's box. No way. The tickle was just the one that broken. The tickle. Gosh. The tickle was just the one broken. That's a good line.

00:06:22 Yeah, so I was imagining like all the HR, HR documentation and it's like sparkles, tickling. Sparkles, tickling. Some dark stuff. Yeah, it's a little bit too much. I don't know what happened in a parking garage. Yeah, I wonder what happened with a parking garage. It's ominous. No, you don't want to know what happened in a parking garage. Okay, probably not. That's weird. Yeah, that's some bad discernment. It's like the wealthy client that is like their loyal customer or whatever. Hey, sparkles. Yeah. It's a bad call. You get that sometimes with the nicknames or people call you darling or like baby. Honey. Yeah, sweetheart. Sometimes it's second nature to people. Yeah. Yeah. But it's, it's, it's, it's weirdly, it can be weirdly inappropriate.

00:07:02 Yeah. Right. These, when someone leans in too quick, too early, or there's no relationship and they're calling, you know, well, can I get you honey? Yeah. I had a guy at work on my bar that kept calling me sweetie one time and it just made my fiance not very happy. It was like, I don't know this man. Not just that. Yeah. Context is important. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I don't know. I think there's that in a, certainly in a professional environment. Yeah. Getting too familiar really fast. It just doesn't feel right. So yeah, we don't have anybody here like that. That's nice. No, that's very nice. Yep. We all know I don't act like that. So hopefully opposite or whatever that is.

00:07:45 Hey, sparkles. Yeah. Yes. That's not the nickname she gives. Oh. 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.

00:08:25 Protect your reputation. Protect your sanity. Go to bchecks.io. That's B-C-H-E-X dot I-O. All right. So let's go to Riverside because we got, I always say Riverside. Yeah. No one knows. It's a lot. Somebody take a morning call. Let's go to this segment we have. Okay. That is, I don't know who it is. Maybe you guys know. Oh, yeah. This is David. David's great. Okay. I'll send this to him afterwards. He was like super, super nice. I think he's in Chicago. No, no, no. He's in St. Louis. All right. And you're in St. Louis. Love it. We hired a brand new salesperson within the organization who had come on board and came

00:09:09 with great references and background checks seemed to be okay. So we issued our corporate credit cards and got them set up and got them introduced to clients and things like that. In a short period of time, maybe a month, month and a half, this employee all of a sudden kind of went quiet like they were gone. And this is when we were still in office, this pre-pandemic. And so they weren't there and they weren't there on a Monday. They weren't there Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. We had called, reached out to the emergency contact and nothing. We didn't hear anything from anybody. So fast forward to the following week on Monday, the person that we're talking about, their spouse showed up at the office and said, have you seen my husband? You know, I looked in his office a few times, but I'd never gone in there and really looked

00:09:51 through his things. And so I said, well, he's not been here. We've been trying to get ahold of him. And we went to his office and we started looking through everything and she was worried about him. And on the desk, we found maxed out credit card receipts on our corporate credit card. We found receipts at strip clubs. We found lots of things. And then we found a list of like, of escort services on his desk. It was literally like, she looked at me and dropped her bag and started crying. And anyway, like within an hour she left and we never heard anything from him ever again. Never, never one word at all. So he ended up being dismissed for abandonment of the job.

00:10:35 This is, oh, that's crazy. That's insane. That's insane. Oh my gosh. This is that, that, uh, the, the, did he just say escorts? Yep. At strip clubs. Yep. And he found all these receipts while the wife was standing there. Yeah. That's, I feel horrible. Cause she's probably like concerned about him. Like what happened to my husband? Like, and she went to his place of work because like, what happened? Like, was he on the job? Like, was he traveling? Those stories are crazy. Well, that's a whole nother level of crazy. But this, the ones where just people just completely stop showing up and just like, you never hear from them ever. This is so weird. That's so weird to me. And I feel like that happens somewhat often. Yeah. But then there's that whole layer of just like, who knows what they're going off and doing.

00:11:17 And like you abandoned his job, abandoned his family. Like who knows? Yeah. It's not going to break on some, just something had to break. Right. Yeah. This guy went through the hiring process. HR team, you know, did their, you know, does their interview. They do their background check. They do their vetting, you know. Yeah. Uh, he clearly, you know, was a professional, you know. I guess so. And then, you know, you hire the guy and then it just, it goes so 180 in the opposite, the opposite direction. Yeah. It is sad. And I, you know, unfortunately I know it's not a, it's probably not a, um, crazy story. Like if you're hanging around with a bunch of talent acquisition folks after working at a bar or hanging out at a, you know, some, you know, trade show or something.

00:12:00 I mean, you're going to hear, you, he's going to say that and you're going to hear 10 people go, oh yeah. Yeah. Bad app. Also, how did it take them so long to find those? New person, use a credit card, blow it up. Yeah. You know, just. How did it take them that long to find those charges? I feel like with our company, like, you know, those ramp proceeds go immediately to our financial director. Imagine if she, like. Their ramp is like, yeah. I mean, literally like when I like just have any subscription come through my card, like she. We're literally on company credit cards. Yeah. All that. She maps out the company credit cards. So imagine that. That kind of stuff would be flagged right away, I feel like. Oh yeah. I mean, Jennifer Martin will be up in here like, what in the world are y'all spending your money on? Yeah. But no. Can't get an extra granola bar.

00:12:40 Yeah. I guess. Without being like crazy. Literally. All right, Nathan, what do you got? Let's hear what I'm saying. All right. I don't think mine's quite as crazy as that. But here's the story that we got today. We hired a remote engineer at our tech company. He interviews great. He's on camera the entire time. He's smart. He's friendly. He's technically sharp. And the first week he's in every meeting. He's contributing. He looks exactly like the guy we hired. The end. That's the whole story. No, I'm just kidding. Okay. So week two. Week two things change. Week two, the camera stops coming on. The webcam is broken, he says. Then his office is too messy. The next week he's at a coffee shop.

00:13:21 There's a different excuse every single time. On the rare occasions that he does appear, his audio sounds off in a way that's kind of hard to put your finger on. And his voice sounds slightly different. Just enough that you kind of start questioning your own memory. So then his code gets kind of strange, gets kind of changed. Sometimes the code is really brilliant. Sometimes it's barely functional because he's an engineer, if you remember. Yeah. The variance is wild enough that our tech lead decides that he wants to do a quick face-to-face zoom. Just a camera check. Nothing formal. There's some resistance from him, but eventually the camera comes on and there he is. He looks just like the guy that we hired. Except our tech lead notices that his mouth is moving slightly out of sync with the audio.

00:14:07 Not lag, but something else. Yeah. So the tech lead says, almost casually, hey, say pineapple. And so the guy says, there's no response. He doesn't say anything. Oh gosh. It's like a reported. And the mouth doesn't move. So three full seconds pass. And then he goes, what? But this mouth's still not moving. It's like, who is speaking? And then the audio went dead. The camera cut off and the zoom call dropped. All like that. So what we pieced together afterwards is that the person on camera was a video loop. The real hire was overseas doing the actual work for a fraction of the salary. Well, the guy that we hired for the job collected the difference in salary. He'd been employed for three weeks and he almost got away with it.

00:14:49 Wow. That's crazy. This is a thing. I mean, it is a thing. Yeah. Outsourcing your work to a contractor underneath you, getting them to do the work. That's crazy. Getting two or three gigs going and getting that done. That's a new one. Instead of when I was starting a business, like, hey man, great. You're feeling very entrepreneurial. You want to hire somebody. Yeah. Awesome. Just straight line to people. You go and get a job, you know, instead of like taking the risk to go start a business and find a client. Yeah. You know, you're like. Start your own agency. Literally. Don't worry, man. That's what you're doing. But they go get a paycheck. Yeah. If I were the overseas guy, I would have been like, hey, they really need you on that call today, bro. I know. He should have given my ads up. Show him for one call. Like, I mean. That's all. Lisa Bowles and his plan. Because it's like, I feel like he could have taken the time to jump on a call or two.

00:15:32 One thousand percent. And just. Yeah. Don't you feel. Maybe some of our meetings, I guess, are big enough that somebody could throw up a video loop on. And you just wouldn't notice. Like. Yeah. They're kind of listen only. Kind of. Hey, we're pumping on information. Yeah. You know. But most of my team meetings, if someone threw a loop up like that, it would take. It would be like. They're pretty. 40. 30 seconds. Yeah. Wait a second. Hey. He's barely blinked. Yeah. The whole time. Right. Yeah. I was so. The meetings are so interactive. Yeah. I thought it was going to be like an AI version of himself that he had or something. That's what I thought. He's like self-conscious. Yeah. All the time. Because, I mean, I could see people doing that these days, too. Like, I don't know. There's a lot of just like ways that people would try and get away with that kind of stuff

00:16:15 these days. It's just kind of crazy. It's like they put more work into not working than you do. Yeah. It's definitely working. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I, I, it's, it's so interesting because I, I was reading through some of the posts. We had like a really good month last month of views and interactions, all that stuff with, uh, with our content. And I was reading some way for watching the, and I was reading some of the posts and, you know, there was this, uh, there was this one where clearly, uh, it was the one where the guy was saying, here's how to talk to HR. And he was saying, you talk, don't complain, talk compliance. Yeah. You remember that one? Yeah. And go document everything pretty much.

00:16:57 And I was seriously taken back by, because there was a good amount of comments on there about the people talking about HR and the, you know, the view of HR was purely punitive, purely. They only care about the company. Purely, you know, and I was like, wow, that is not my, not my experience. I mean, I get, you know, I'm sure it is in some ways, but for me and talking to, you know, I'm surrounded by HR people all the time. Yeah. And our customers are, there's such a healthy balance between us, true care about an employee and their wellbeing. And it, you know, in, in our business, you know, it's a, it's a voice of, uh, it's almost

00:17:41 like they carry the voice of the employee, you know, advocating for them while at the same time balancing, you know, um, you know, the, the, the compliance and, and making sure, you know, we, we don't get, uh, we don't get sued. It's such an underwasting place. But I think that, I think the comment shocked me a little bit. Yeah. That's the overall stigma, especially amongst 20, 30, maybe 40 year olds who like, they've, you know, never been in management. They're always like, they've been, you know, working for the man or whatever. Right. Trying to work up the amateur early in your career. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And they just go through, you know, layoffs or everything's going great. And then, and then HR turns their back on them. Like, I think that's just the stigma, I guess.

00:18:22 But yeah, like you said, I know that the, what you would hope is that most HR would have that healthy balance where they actually care about the people here and the connection. That's the best part of it. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's my modern experience, you know, um, employee engagement, engagement of employees, culture, all these things in the last, you know, in, in, in modern employment are like certainly becoming more and more and more important in HR leading the way, you know? So I was just kind of taken aback by it. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the overall viewpoint of a lot of, at least younger people, I think, you know, but that's, that's the unfortunate part, but that's what we're working on.

00:19:04 Yeah. In brewing room. It's one of those things where you like, you want to comment, you know, I want to comment. No, I'm not. Okay. Yeah. I'll get myself into this. Yeah. Let's start it. Yeah. All right. Here we go. Morgan, what do you got? Tell us about it. All right. So I run a small team and we bring on a new senior hire fully remote. He interviews great glowing references. We send the offer and he accepts. He starts the following Monday. First two weeks are pretty normal. He's a little slow on Slack, but it's a new job. Lots to learn. You give people grace. Then in week three, he asked for a one-on-one and gets a call with me. He says he wants to be transparent about something. I say, okay. He tells me the same week he started with us. He accepted another full-time job. He'd been working both of them from home simultaneously.

00:19:46 You do both? Yeah. Oh my gosh. Just to see which one he liked better. He was able to test the waters on both of these and then maybe I'll make a decision. We'll try them out. There was a pause. And then he said, good news though. I've decided I want to stay with you guys. He said I, he said it like he was doing me a favor. You guys win. Can I have half my money back? Yeah. You know, it was over the last three weeks. I just looked at him and said, you've been working two full-time jobs at the same time from home for three weeks while we pay you a six-figure salary. And he goes, right, but I'm telling you now and genuinely believing that if him coming clean about it in a week or week three would put him on some kind of high moral ground or something. Yeah. I asked him if the other company knew and he said, definitely not.

00:20:29 I asked if his contract with us was exclusive and he said he was pretty sure it was. He was relaxed the whole time, completely comfortable. Like he was telling me he wanted to just take next Friday off. By the end of the call, he was gone and the other company got a phone call too. A month later, I got a LinkedIn endorsement from him for honesty. I'm about 70% sure that was a joke. Yeah. That's like, I don't know. That's great. It's insane. He's like, no worries, guys. No. Yeah. I chose you. You guys are the winners. You know this isn't just a single occurrence. No. Doubling up all over the place. People are doubling up. They are. This work from home thing. Man, it's driving me crazy. I can't imagine that. I have an interview here who had just started a job like a week prior.

00:21:11 And I remember her coming in and I was like, on her LinkedIn, it said she'd just started at this new place. I know exactly what you're talking about. You know who I'm talking about? I do. She'd just started at a place like a week prior. And she came in, met everybody, like was like. Went through multiple rounds of interviews. Yes. Multiple rounds of interviews. And then all of us just kind of started to notice, like looked on her LinkedIn one day for some reason, because she was really nice, a great candidate. And I was like, oh, she just started at this other place. She's like, so excited about my new opportunity. Yeah. She was like going on about how great this company was. Yes. What did she do? She posted a whole post of like how grateful she was for the new opportunity, this new place, and how excited she was. And then meanwhile, she was interviewing here. How did she have time to come for multiple rounds of interviews?

00:21:53 Yeah. Like. That's wild. I don't know. I don't know how people have. Like. I have one job. Yeah. And it takes all my time. Yeah. Like how are people, like how easy are these people's jobs that they're doubling, tripling up? I don't know. I have no clue. I mean. That's wild. Well, you know, with that, you just, when they work from home, you lose, there's a level of control that you lose. Yeah. And a level of accountability, you know, and you got to build that into your culture and your systems and everything else. To try to, to try to, um, try to create that. But I'm sure. Yeah. You know. I, you know, especially when you go, when you allow the, the, then asynchronous where you just work, you know, so you can work at night, you can work at day, you know, just as long as it's.

00:22:37 And then that's gotta be hugely enticing. I mean, you go on Reddit, you know it. Yeah. Yeah. They're like telling you, encouraging you. Yeah. Take, take two jobs. Take three. Yeah. Yeah. You know. I just, I'd be exhausted. Like, I mean, when I get home at the end of my day, I just want to cook and go to sleep. Like, I would, I'm not like, what other job could I find this evening to work on in my side dime or whatever, but. I don't know. Yeah. Man, that's crazy. What, and what gets me is a lot of times it's not, I mean, it's like big, big time payment jobs. Yeah. That's six figure salary right there. Yeah. Six figure guys. Yeah. Yeah. That's what blow it down to. Two or three of them. You know, that's really crazy. And I understand. Yeah. I understand someone had to work multiple jobs because they're trying to make ends.

00:23:20 I mean, totally get it. Yeah. That's different. You know, that's a, that's a grinder. But when you, you know, you're getting paid, you know. And you're lying to the second six figure job. Yeah. You know. Yeah. It was a little bit different than like working a morning job and a night job. Yeah. Yeah. Good places. Yeah. All right, man. Well, I enjoyed you guys today. That was fun. That was cool. Yeah. It was a good episode. Nice shirt. Sweet. Thanks for it. Appreciate you. So thanks for listening to The Bad Hire. We love it. Appreciate you guys tuning in and watching, watching us on social media. We're on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram. I agree with her comment too. Unless the employee is a waitress using terms of endearment in a workplace is a no-no. I do agree with that. That's a good call. Yeah. That's a good, it's a good rule to live by right there. We're about to go live again in a few minutes.

00:24:02 Second show today. Second show. Yeah. So don't forget your story. It could win $10,000. If you submit it, submit it over there at thebadhire.com. And it could be featured on the show. Yeah. And maybe even videoed on the show, the interview we had today. Yeah. Yeah. So that's that. All right. Thanks for listening. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next time. Bye, guys. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.