The Marketing Director Used PTO for Jail Time [The Bad Hire Ep. 13]

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. All right, hi, everyone. Welcome back to The Bad Hire. I've got Ewa and Morgan with us. Welcome. Hi, how are y'all doing?

00:00:40 Hey. Good evening. I'm Van Q. You may have seen, are you? It's cool to be here. I know that we've got that $10,000 contest going on. Are we starting to get some feedback from some of our outreach? Yeah, for sure. We've got a lot of cool stories coming up soon. Okay, very cool. All right, that's good to hear. Well, we are giving away $10,000 for the season, for the best story of the season, so check it out. Watch a couple shows. Figure out how it works. Send us your story. You could end up on the show. Your story could end up on the show. You could win $10,000. So it's all kinds of good things that could happen from you submitting. But we're doing some outreach also to HR pros, talent acquisition people, reminding them, introducing

00:01:25 them to the idea of the show and all that, so it'd be good. All right, so I've got a couple here today, and I think you guys have got a couple of pieces. Yep. All right. The guy who photoshopped his way out of a job. Okay. All right. Oof, this is not starting off great. Okay, this one still cracks me up. We had an applicant send in his driver's license. Expired. No big deal. Mm-hmm. Happens all the time. So we ask him for an updated one, and he sends us the same license back. Oh, okay. Except he had literally photoshopped the expiration date, like badly, like middle school PowerPoint kind of bad. So now we're curious.

00:02:07 So now we're curious. Then his references come in, and every one of them is faked. And then, just to really go for it, his background check shows an active warrant. Oh. It's everything. The entire wheels are coming off this particular one. When we ask about it, he says, oh, no, no, no, that's not real. That was in a different state, and it's all cleared up now. And so to prove it, he sends us a receipt for something he's paid. This thing looked like it was made with a fake government seal from Google Images. So clearly, he puts together a fake receipt that he's paid this off. Did they ever get his real license back?

00:02:48 I don't know. Problem of not. That's when we finally called it quits. The best part, this wasn't even a dream job. Like, he could have just moved on and applied somewhere else. But nope, he doubled down on the Photoshop until the bitter end. My thing, yeah, my thing is, how did he think, if it didn't work with the license the first time, what made him think it was going to work for the rest of them? Maybe they didn't confront him. Like, they just like, I don't know. You just keep stringing them along. Yeah. Now what? I don't know. The fake references, I think I would have tapped out then. You didn't have to. Yeah. I feel like, why even. You didn't have to confront me on the background check. Yeah. I don't know why they even took a step further. Maybe they were just curious. Yeah. They're, you know, we talk about this all the time.

00:03:28 Yeah. Those Reddit, those whole Reddit streams. Yeah. You know, where they're just talking about how to do it. Yeah. You see them. Oh, true. Photoshop your degree. People Photoshop their degrees all the time. That's crazy. I think we had one one time where we verified the degree, found out it wasn't real. And one of our verifiers noticed that the, it was from like 15 years ago, but the president who signed the degree was the current president of the university. Oh my gosh. So, who was the president who was supposed to sign up 15 years ago? Yeah. This person's been there like two years. Y'all are too lousy to do a Google search, like, for 15 years? It's really bad. Really bad when you can't even fake.

00:04:10 Yeah. You know, fake that good. So. What's funny to me is how confident they are in thinking they're not going to get it. Right. Well, they did a lot of congratulations. Like, oh no, I got this. All right. So, the marketing director who took PTO for jail time. Oh. Hmm. Why? Why? Take PTO? Okay. This one's wild. So, at one point of my old job, the marketing team had a, the marketing team. I don't understand. The marketing team? Okay. I get it. It had a pool of cars, of company cars, you know, for client meetings, events, you know,

00:04:50 all that. Every once in a while, management would get a random parking ticket in the mail. You know, it's no big deal. Stuff happens. Right? But one day, a ticket shows up. It's for the weekend. And that's when everyone goes, hold up. Who's driving the company cars on a Saturday? Literally. What? Driving all the way there just to use the company car. Maybe they just took it home with them. Driving all the way to work on Saturday to use the company car. You're driving the Ford, the company's Ford Taurus. Yeah, literally. And it's nicer than your car. Maybe they don't have a car. Oh, my God. I didn't even think about that. I was like, I didn't leave with it on Friday. I came and got it on Saturday.

00:05:30 After a little digging, turns out the marketing director took one home, got pulled over, and got a DUI in the company car. Right. The car gets impounded. He goes to jail. And here's the part that broke me. He used his PTO to cover the week he was locked up. What? Well, how did he submit his PTO is what I want to know. What did he put in the notes? When they asked him if he wanted his one phone call. Can I have my phone real quick? Instead of his one phone call, he said, can I please submit my PTO on the app? They'll never know. Yeah. What? That's funny. Like man said, I'll be out of office.

00:06:13 I was going to say. Literally. Man, I'd hate to have to. He even paid the impound fee to get the car back, but he never actually paid the ticket, which is what exposed him in the first place. So he almost got away from it. We say all the time, like six out of ten people will not tell their employer if they're arrested. Right? Yeah. So that's why we say you should be monitoring. That's a great example of this. You should be monitoring. You know, they wouldn't have had to worry about this and wonder where he was that week if they had been monitored and they'd have found out. I know. He was mad. He was like, dang, I got to use my PTO for this? Now I can't take my actual vacation. Literally. I was going to the beach on the summer in LA.

00:06:56 I'm not doing that. This dude was the marketing director and he still managed to run a full-blown campaign for bad decisions. Oh my gosh. Wow. That's insane. Being the director too is crazy. Yeah, for real. Like aren't you supposed to like the standard? Set a great example. Yeah. Maybe that's what gave him the idea that he was entitled to the car. Yeah. I'm the director around here. I can take person. Yeah. Yeah. No one would know. 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.

00:07:40 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 dot I-O. All right. Who's up? Morgan, I think you're next. I think that's me. All right. Um, my first story is titled The Employee with a New Illness Every Time She Got Caught. So before we got security cameras, we went through this weird stretch where money just kept disappearing. Not a ton, just enough to make you question your sanity.

00:08:23 We had a pretty good idea on who it was, but this woman, she was good. Every time she got close to being caught, she'd hit us with a brand new medical crisis. One week, it was migraines. Next week, surgery. Then some mystery illness nobody could even pronounce. At first, everybody felt bad for her until she hit, like, diagnose number five. Then the sympathy tank ran dry. But the real breaking point? A client storms into our office, furious. Says if we don't fire her, they're pulling all their business, and that's when we knew something was way off. So we started digging, and boom. She got a history. Turns out she'd been stealing money and credit card numbers from other employers for years,

00:09:06 and she was never charged, and she never apologized, and she would just pay a little back and move on to the next job. So she was a professional scam artist, pretty much. And we finally let her go, and guess what? Money stopped disappearing immediately. Imagine that. So mystery was solved. But here's the wildest part. She reapplies later. With a resume so fake, it could have been from fan fiction. She listed responsibilities that didn't even exist. One of them was literally my job. Like, ma'am, you do not run the company. So wait. She reapplied to the same company and put her responsibilities from her previous job that

00:09:46 she was fired from. Then she, like, puffed them all up. Why was the fifth diagnosis the last straw? I don't know. Why not the third one or even the fourth one? It took five of them for them to be like, okay, yeah, she's lying. Literally, she went from sick day queen to true crime series real quick. Honestly, the only thing she didn't steal was the security cameras because we wouldn't have bought them yet. So. Right. I don't know. All right. My next one is titled, the guy who lost it all to Clash of Clans. About five years ago, I had this guy working night shift at my gas station.

00:10:29 And honestly, for the first year, he was gold. Showed up early, never complained, played to customers and the kind of employee you wish you could clone. Then one day, things start to change. It all started with a phone game. Clash of Clans. At first, I figured, hey, everyone scrolls on their phone on the night shift. So no big deal. Whatever. But soon, it wasn't just checking his phone. It was a relationship. I'd walk in at 2 a.m. for a spot check. And there he was, leaned over the counter, face lit up by that blue screen glow. Completely locked in on his imaginary army. Customers would walk in for gas, cigarettes, coffee, and he wouldn't even look up. Just mumble, ring them up without eye contact, and go back to the next battle.

00:11:13 I pulled him aside and told him, listen, play all you want when it's dead. But when a customer walks in, the game is over that they come first. So he apologized. He swore he'd stop. And next night, same thing. Same glow, same game, same neglect. It was like trying to break up a man in his digital army. Eventually, I had to let him go. I told him straight up, if you can't put the game down, you just can't work here. And I thought that was the end of it. Until a few days later, his mom shows up at the gas station. Yikes. This is so funny. Literally, gas station job. Your mom shows up. Yeah, it's like your mom showing up at school when you're in detention. She looked exhausted, pale, eyes red from crying, and she asked if we can talk privately.

00:11:55 Also, where do you talk privately in a gas station? I just want to know. Oh, okay. She had just gotten out of the hospital after a long stay. And while she was gone, her son had spiraled. Turns out he wasn't just playing Clash of Clans. He was paying for Clash of Clans. Every upgrade, every shortcut was real money. By the time she found out, he had racked up over thousands in credit card debt. Oh my gosh. Thousands of dollars on a phone game. And it was all put on his mom's credit card. That's crazy. I wouldn't even pay for an app on the app store. If it ain't free, I'm not getting it. Literally. Literally. It was all about banking. Literally. I'm on a budget. I'm not paying for all these apps.

00:12:36 I just sat there in silence. Here I was thinking he was lazy, but really he was drowning in an addiction that looked like a hobby. And no one took it seriously until it ruined him. He lost his job, his credit, everything. All over a glowing screen at 2 a.m. And I'll never forget his mom's face that day. Now every time I see an ad for Clash of Clans, I think about him and how some battles you don't fight on a phone. You fight in real life. And I think also his mom had like cancer or something. Oh my gosh. And she was like needing to pay that hospital bill, which is why she was in the hospital. Right. And she couldn't. Addiction's real. Yeah. Yeah. She couldn't pay it. That's why she showed up to the gas station in tears. Those apps, those games are built like to draw you in.

00:13:21 It is like an addiction. Yeah. Like a little dopamine, you know, drain you right to the edge. Now you can't win. Yeah. You know, you got to buy something to get to the next level. Yeah. It's like Fortnite. Yeah. I need V-Bucks. I need them. Please. Yeah. Oh yeah. I don't know. I feel bad for them. I do. I feel bad for them. Yeah. I feel bad for the mom. I mean, imagine like you get out of the hospital. I have a great story. Yeah. You get out of the hospital. From good employee to bad. Yeah. Over a game. Yeah. Yeah. But it happens all the time. You know, good employees go bad because they get into, make bad decisions. Mm-hmm. And a lot of times it is addiction. Mm-hmm. You know.

00:14:03 So, but addiction to a game. I get it. Yeah. I do. You know. Have you guys ever played Gardenscapes? Gardenscapes? Mm-hmm. No, but I know what it is. That is an addictive game. That is like, oh my gosh. There were times where I feel like I got addicted to that game because you get like, so like, I need to get to the next level. And yeah. Yeah. I had NCAA, you know, Madden. Yeah. You know. Mm-hmm. Wow. We used to play that a ton. Mm-hmm. You'd sit up all night playing. Yeah. You know. But I mean, I don't think there are people who sit, you know, probably ruin their ability at work because they sit up all night playing games. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Lots of ways to work. But yeah. The phone lets you take that addiction right into the.

00:14:47 Now, you know, what I do want to know is how this guy who owns these gas stations is just regular. He's rolling around at 2 a.m. Yeah. Yeah. Just, I'm going to get up. Yeah. Or it's like, you know, when you go to. Head over to the gas station. When you go to like a restaurant and the manager comes to your table to make sure the waiter is like checking on you well, he's like making sure everybody's getting sick because it's like, hey, you doing okay? Did he check you out good? Anything I can get you today? At 2 a.m. Yeah. That's crazy. All right, Emma. Oh, Emma. Let's roll. Yeah. I've only got two today. They're relatively short. They're not as interesting as the ones I normally read. Um, no gory details.

00:15:27 That's good. That's good. No unaliving, nothing like that. That's good. I'm disappointed, Emma. I know. Do better. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. All right, here we go. Mine also don't have cool titles like y'all's did. Mine's just go straight into it. Okay. I wasn't in HR exactly, but I did training. This one woman was late all the time and got into arguments with everyone. One day I was teaching her something and she looked at me and said, no, this isn't possible. I'm not doing it. I told her I wasn't expecting her to get it on the first try and we were here to practice as much as she wanted. From that moment on, she turned evil on me, would completely ignore me when I would talk to her.

00:16:08 She told everyone ridiculous things about me and they respond like, really? That doesn't sound like them at all. Are you sure? Yeah. You sure you're talking about the right person? One day she called in and said everyone at the store was against her and that she wouldn't be back. What? That's it. Y'all hating on me. That's that. You don't like that I tell lies about other people. Bye, y'all. What? So funny. That's insane. Her mic drop is, I ain't coming back to talk bad about y'all. Yeah, for real. Y'all won't say it again. Oh, please don't leave. Please don't leave. What would we do without you? That's so bad. There are people like that, though. Yeah. It's crazy. Grown people, too.

00:16:49 Grown women, by the way. That's generally who has a job. I know, but still. We find out these are a bunch of 16-year-olds at the Chick-fil-A. Yeah. Yeah. Could be. All right. Here's my last one for today. Okay. In my industry, there's an infamous story about a guy, we'll call him Rob. He was chosen to represent his company at a prestigious week-long gala, five-star hotels, open bars, networking with the top leaders, a huge honor. Rob treated it like a frat party. Oh. He drank nonstop, embarrassed himself by lecturing the very people who had built the systems he

00:17:33 was bragging about. Then he disappeared to his hotel room. The next morning, coworkers found him tied to his bed, not clothed. What? Turns out he called an escort, passed out drunk before anything had happened, and she cleaned him out. Stole his wallet, his clothes, the TV in the hotel room, before tying him up and then leaving. She saw an opportunity and she took it. His company had to pay the hotel for all the missing items, and Rob's career never recovered. Oh. That's brutal. It is crazy how people treat these conferences like they're a weekend party at a college.

00:18:13 It is insane. Yeah. It is. I feel like I've been to some sometimes where I'm like, we are professionals, y'all. What are we doing? Well, you surround, and you see it so often of people who, I don't know. It's like they get away and they think there's a different set of rules apply. Yeah. I don't necessarily, I don't think alcohol is great in these occasions. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I don't, I don't, I don't like to drink when I'm around. Anything like that. Yeah. Just because you just lose a little bit of your senses. You say stuff you wouldn't normally. And I, and in my career, I've seen, I've seen a couple people completely explode their

00:18:57 career because they had too much to drink at a conference. Especially if they're like leading the event, like in, like in this story, like it was supposed to be a huge honor for him. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like that's, and it's not like even, that sounds like not even social drinking, like where you just like have one drink and you're talking, you know, just because it's like a norm around everybody. And this is completely different. This guy was getting belligerently drunk, obviously enough to the point where he hired an escort. Yeah. So. Got to have great policies on that and just really, really encourage people to. I'm sure he got fired. Like there's no way he didn't get fired. Well, I said his career never recovered. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, great, great job. Those were fun. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I thought they were good.

00:19:38 Good to be back. Mm-hmm. For sure. But we'll see you next time. And then remember our $10,000 contest. Submit your stories. We'd love to read them. We want to have more user submitted stories and we want to give away $10,000 to the best one. Where can they submit those stories, Ken? At thebadhire.com. There you go. Absolutely. Go to thebadhire.com. But we'll join you next time or join us next time on The Bad Hire. Thanks. Bye. Thank you. Bye. What?!