The Worst Fake Résumé We’ve Ever Seen [The Bad Hire Ep. 41]

00:00:00 Turns out he's fast asleep at his desk in plain view. Oh my gosh. So Bob was fired. Storms into the office, pulls out his laptop, throws it on the floor, and walks straight out the door. 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.

00:00:40 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 from the wild world of work. I'm joined today by Morga and Morgan. Morgan. Morgan. Morgan. Morgan and Emma. Hey, guys. How you doing? Good. How are you? Good to have you back. What you guys been up to? Oh, you know, the usual. The usual? Yeah. All right. Well, you know the drill. Every week we dive into the wildest and the weirdest, and some of these are kind of jaw-droppings, hiring fails, stories of employees, managers, everything else across offices, job sites, any organization,

00:01:23 really, all over the country. And so we just jump into their stories and listen to some crazy stuff that HR leaders have to deal with. And don't forget, we're running a $10,000 contest. So send us your best story, and you could win $10,000. I do want to point out this episode is all submissions. Oh, nice. So it's either a guest clip, or it was a story that was submitted to us through the form on our website. Okay, great. Love that. Keep submitting the stories. Get a chance to win $10,000. And, you know, these are the, I think it's kind of very cool when someone writes the story specifically for the show. I think that's kind of, I don't know, I just love it.

00:02:04 I think it's kind of much more authentic. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So you ready to get going? Yeah. All right, let's roll. So this is a submitted story. It's anonymous. Otherwise, we'll credit someone for the story. But this is anonymous. They submitted the story. I think they tell us who they are, but they say, keep me anonymous. So they can still win the $10,000. So if you're worried about outing yourself by telling a story, you can submit it just like this one anonymously. And we'll keep your name out of it. But you still can win. You still get on the show. You still, your story can get on the show. You still win $10,000 if it's the best story of the year. So here's the story. So I worked in IT for a culinary firm that ran about five restaurants and catering operations under one parent company.

00:02:51 We hire a new cook. Let's call him Bob. For a small restaurant, we'll call The Taste. Okay. So we got The Taste restaurant and The Bob. Right. He's coming in to eventually work up to a sous chef. Hope I said that right. Yes. Bob comes to us highly recommended. Resume looked great. References checked out. And another employee at the company even vouched for him personally. So HR team sold out on this guy. First day, the first day Bob is shown around the kitchen and then left to settle in while everyone else gets back to work. We're told he's trained. Knows his way around the kitchen. And just needs to learn our recipes.

00:03:33 His first move is to excuse himself. And when someone goes to find him, he's in the pantry reorganizing cans and dried fruit. Completely rearranging it from how the actual chef likes it. It's mildly annoying, but not unusual. Everyone thinks they know a better system. At this point, he's just training under the main chef. Yeah. You know. Yeah. I think it's first day. He's in there. Okay. Okay. First day I'm reorganizing. So he spends his entire first day doing this. Reorganizing everything. Touching equipment. Yeah. Never once cooking or prepping anything. So day two, he's paired with one of the fastest prep cooks to work through some recipes.

00:04:14 And he's slow. Painfully slow. Still not necessarily a red flag on its own. Yeah. Could be just slow. But given how strong his references were, we were expecting like more from this guy. So they put him on the line to see how he plates dishes. All right. And that's when people start noticing his knife work and his technique. Just, they just look off. Okay. So a week goes by and he's not improving. Something isn't adding up. So the actual chefs pull him aside and run him through a few basic tests that HR had apparently skipped during the hiring. Yikes. They hand him vegetables to chop. His grip on the knife is wrong.

00:04:56 His technique is wrong. They give him a simple prep task and watch closely. Turns out he doesn't know basic food safety standards either. Oh gosh. But he had someone vouch for him. Yeah. No kidding. They have him put on a single service dish. They have him put out a single service dish. He messes up the prep and scorches the pan. So the last test, they hand him a pan and a piece of dry toast and ask him to flip it. It's some basic line cook stuff. Someone you could learn, something you could learn from a YouTube video in an afternoon. Let alone after the years of experience listed on his resume, he could not flip the toast. Dang. So HR gets pulled in and finally takes a real look into his background.

00:05:37 It turns out almost everything on his resume completely fabricated. Except for one job. And that one employer recognized his name immediately. Bob had actually been a dishwasher. Wrigley worked his way up to prep cook before quitting. His glowing references were a group of friends running an elaborate cover scheme for each other. His source was, trust me, bro. Don't worry. So they do these references and all these bros get together. Like, you give them my name, I'll give them, and we'll all cover for each other and give everybody glowing references. So we've run into glowing reference schemes before where someone gives like a fake name.

00:06:18 Yeah. You know, to like, this is my manager and it's their, you know, their aunt. Yeah. Right. So each one vouching for the others on command. So Bob was fired. So HR had skipped the knife test and the pan test because his paperwork looked too good to question. And it turns out it wasn't gold. It was just, it was just really, really good fiction. Wow. That's crazy. We actually talked about the coffee cup test earlier today. Yeah. Should have done the knife test right at the front. Yeah. Right at it. The flip test. Yeah. The flip test. Yeah. This is like, um, like this theme we see a lot when someone looks really good on paper or some executive gets involved and kind of fast tracks and break somebody out of the process.

00:07:01 And so they take off, you know, and then they, they just don't do the process. And it just like inherently, it always just comes out, you know, comes back to, to, to haunt them. So, you know, HR, uh, HR skipped the knife test and the pan test because it was, you know, supposed to be awesome, but, uh, he was supposed to be awesome. We hear this on paper. Yeah. Right. Common theme. Yeah. Still important to follow the process. I guess that's, uh, all right. Sure. And I liked that story. That was kind of, it was long. It was good. But it was. A bunch of our submitted stories were very long. Oh, they were? Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot to tell. There's a lot to tell. And I think probably if you're HR, you like, sometimes you just want to be like, Hey, you

00:07:43 don't, we got took or something bad happened, but you need to understand maybe the whole story. Before we dive back into the chaos on the bad hire, this episode is brought to you by B-Checks. Hiring shouldn't feel like rolling the dice. Background checks should come with great tech, seamless integration, and customer service that delivers. That's B-Checks. Lightning fast results, unmatched accuracy, built in fraud prevention. We help you hire the right people. Now, B-Checks plugs into over 100 HRIS and ATS systems. So your background checks run smooth, fast, and backed by top level service. Protect your team. Protect your reputation.

00:08:24 Protect your sanity. Go to B-Checks.io. That's B-C-H-E-X dot I-O. So this one goes back to the early 90s. Oh, this is way back. Oh, I do want to say this person submitted this story. He submitted two different stories, but this one he submitted, he said that he didn't want it to go towards the contest, but he just wanted to share it. Okay. Anyways. Okay, cool. So this is anonymous story too. So that's what you're saying. And so just wanted to share. All right, well, let's see what he's hoping we'll learn from it. So this one goes back to the early 90s. Before the phones, before the internet really existed at homes, my dad ran a small janitorial

00:09:07 company that cleaned a handful of businesses around the city. A car dealership, a couple of banks, a couple of community buildings. All right. A new client comes along. A nonprofit on the bottom floor of an office building. And with the possibility of expanding to other floors down the line, dad and the office manager sit down, negotiate a contract. It's essentially vacuum carpets, empty trash, polished surfaces, handle the bathrooms. Dad starts coming in every weeknight. About a month in, things are going well. He even picks up some extra paid work cleaning the kitchen area. Feels like a good client. Then month two hits and the manager calls him in. She says she's getting complaints that he isn't doing his job.

00:09:49 Dad asks what specifically. Turns out one of the employees left a note asking if dad could water his desk plants while making his rounds. Dad points out that's not in the contract. She tells him, well, it'd only take a few extra moments. That night, he checks the office more carefully. Nearly every desk in this 25 cubicle office has a similar note asking for some little extra favor. Oh my God. Dad does none of them. Yeah. Because none of it is in his contract. Yeah. This goes back and forth for a couple of months. The manager keeps pushing. Dad keeps refusing. And at one point, he threatens to cancel the contract entirely. So she backs off and promises it's not going to happen.

00:10:31 No more of these notes. Right? Then in month five, things take a turn. The manager calls dad in furious saying he missed a desk. He checks it out. It's a disaster. He cleans it, apologized, chalks it up to a one-off. Except it isn't a one-off. Messes start appearing all over the building. Food wrappers hidden in odd spaces. Packaging from razors and batteries showing up where they should. And food disappearing from the kitchen. Oh my gosh. Sounds like a complete mutiny. Yeah. Right? You know where this is going. You just totally know where this is going. Yeah. Yeah. If you're not going to water my plants. Yeah. Right? It all comes to a head when dad gets called in one final time and is marched into a bathroom

00:11:11 that looks like someone had been showering in the sink. Oh. Shaving cream, hair trimmings, a towel. Total chaos. In an office space? Yeah. Dad's had enough. Oh my gosh. What? He hands over his keys, has her sign off that she received them and walks away from the contract entirely. As he should. Two weeks later, he's reading the newspaper and sees a headline. How to live free out of your cubicle. She even living there? I did not get that one. I did not think that's where this was going. No. No wonder it was disgusting. She was trying to have somebody clean up after her. A local journalist had gone undercover. A local journalist had gone undercover as an employee at the exact office, memorized the

00:11:55 cleaning and security schedules, and quasi lived there for two months, sleeping in his cubicle, washing up in the bathroom sink, buying food from a nearby convenience store. He had timed every single one of his movements specifically to avoid running into my father. The paper had called the nonprofit for comment days before running the story. The office manager got reamed by both the building owner and the nonprofit's leadership and was quietly forced into early retirement not long after. A year later, dad ran into her at the grocery store. The moment she saw him, she turned bright red and bolted out the door without buying her groceries. Oh my gosh. Wow. I mean, who could have guessed that's where that was going? This person's been carrying this story for like 30 years.

00:12:36 Yeah. I know. He's like... Who do you tell us to? I don't even want to be in your contest. I just want to share this story. I just want somebody to read it. Some reporter actually can't know. Thank you for sending that in. Yeah, that was awesome. That's really crazy. And here I was. I just had this whole thing like they're going to... This is an employee mutiny. They're just turning their... I totally thought that's where the story was. Yeah. Like, oh, he doesn't want to water our plants. We're just giving more stuff to clean. We're just making his job harder. Make his job harder. Yeah. I thought they were retaliating. It was like, bunch of terrible employees, turns out. That's funny. All right. That's funny. Hey, we got a guest segment coming. This is William. Who interviewed William?

00:13:17 Me did. You did? I did. All right. So, William is a... He's like a seasoned talent acquisition exec. Yes. He's got like two decades of experience, you know, scaling teams, you know, transforming recruiting functions across different technologies with high growth companies. So, that's pretty cool. Big, long, impressive resume. And he's known for building... He's known for building talent acquisition infrastructure from the ground up for companies. So, that's cool. Yeah. His current company... So, lots of experience. Yeah. His current company, he's been running for the past eight years, I believe. Okay. And he did tell me that they have a lot of remote employees is what he told me.

00:14:00 Oh, okay. Lots of experience on that. All right. Well, let's check it out. What's William got to say? I had a scheduled particular screen with a candidate called Phil. One of the details that had caught my attention about Phil was that he listed Santa Clara as hometown, which I had been recently before I moved over here to Arizona. When Phil had joined the video call, I started to make a little bit of small talk. And so, I said, hey, Phil, you know, have you ever been to Stan's Donut Shop? And if you're from Santa Clara, you know about Stan's. It's a local kind of institution, been around for about, I think it's about 50 years, family owned donut and coffee place. Phil smiled and he said, sure, he's a friend of mine. I thought, that's impressive. You know the founder of Stan's Donut.

00:14:43 And so, that had me pause for him because I knew Stan personally, but Phil did. So, I was kind of impressed. So, I said, so you've been to Stan's Donut Shop? I kind of, you know, double-checked it. I thought, okay, well, maybe that's possible. It is a small world. But there was just something kind of in the back of my mind saying, that just doesn't seem right. And then he added, the next sentence was E.I. Camino. At that moment, I'm like, oh, I've got a fake here. I didn't think I was dealing with, really, with a legitimate candidate. And I said, hey, Phil, anybody that's lived in Santa Clara knows it's not E.I. Camino. It's El Camino. And he kept smiling. And then his camera turned off. I'm like, okay, this is how it was going to go. And eventually, he just dropped off. That's like saying you're from La Jolla and then calling it La Jolla.

00:15:26 So, I get this one. Yeah. No, that's crazy. What got me was like, oh, yeah, I know Stan. Have you ever been to Stan's donut shop? Yeah, I know Stan. He's my friend. That's what made me laugh. Or you could just say, yes. Or like in small talk, just say, yes, I've been there. It's a donut shop. Or just say, no, I've never heard of it. Yeah. People lie so compulsively. I mean, you're like, what was, you know, if you say, I mean, what would make you think if I say I know Stan, you're somehow going to get the job? Like, you're like, oh, Stan. Yeah. You just like, it's like you're so primed to just lie about anything that the first thing that comes up, you just lie about. Like, you know, just to be agreeable, to sound cool. I don't know. That's crazy. It makes no total sense.

00:16:08 But to lie, you know, Stan. And when he said he knew Stan and it was like 50 years old, I was like, Stan's got to be an old bro. He's got to be like an OG. For real. You know, it'd be in the 70s if he started the business when he was 20. Yeah, for sure. I don't know. I want to go to Stan's donut shop, though, if it's real. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's real. Let's look it up. Why don't you look it up? Okay. We should start making fake, like, places in the area and ask our interviewees if they've been to them before. Yeah. Like, have you been to Sal's, you know, down the street, great, like, country food? Yeah. There it is. North Carolina local place.

00:16:49 Yeah. Let's say it's around 50 years. Let's see. Family-owned institution since 1959. You get to call yourself an institution when you've been around since 59. For real. 1959. That's awesome. Cash only. Oh. No kidding. 2,000 five-star reviews. Yep. That's nice. Let's go Stan. Wow. Stan's donuts. Thank you. In Santa Clara, California. Well, if you're an HR pro, you know, I think in your in talent acquisition, you've sat in so many interviews. Just trying to feed through and get through the BS that you have to deal with. Yeah. I'm sure people could tell, you know, you should comment or, you know, and just let us know, like, the types of what do people lie about the most, you think, in interviews?

00:17:38 I'm curious what the HR pros would say. So, Morgan, what do you got? All right. So, I have a story submitted by Tom. And so, Tom said, so I want to talk about the Peter principle for a second. And that is the idea that people get promoted right up until they reach a level they're completely unequipped to handle. And then they just stay there. I worked with a textbook example of this. And we're going to call him Peter, fittingly enough. Peter starts out managing two direct reports who are genuinely talented. Talented enough that they basically end up managing themselves and managing up to Peter just to keep things running. Even those reports get taken away from him because the whole arrangement isn't working. And Peter gets moved to a new role overseeing our contract with our main software vendor.

00:18:19 This is right as we're rolling out major new systems and major new systems implementation. One of the contracts Peter is responsible for ends up needing to be completely rewritten because he didn't understand the difference between one of our existing software applications and a newer version of the same software. Peter would also regularly ask me to explain the difference between two applications I personally manage. Which is roughly the equivalent of asking someone to explain the difference between a regular Oreo and a double stuffed Oreo. As the implementation moves forward, Peter gets shuffled into yet another role. Basically a catch-all position for things nobody else could figure out where to put him. I'm managing part of the integration project at this point, working with one of my own direct reports, and we deal with Peter only when absolutely necessary.

00:19:05 Then my manager has to leave the country for about six weeks to take care of a sick parent who unfortunately passes away during that time. Peter takes this as his opportunity. He announces that he's completely unprompted, that he is now the manager and my direct reports manager. Peter sets up separate calls with each of us and proceeds to belittle us individually, telling us that we're terrible at our jobs and that we now report to him. As it happens, we've just gone through the workplace training on exactly this kind of behavior, so I reported him immediately to HR. HR investigates and basically tells me, well, we all have to work with people we don't like. Within the next few weeks, two other people separately report Peter to HR for similar behavior. One says he yelled at them and belittled them on calls.

00:19:49 The other reports that Peter made a racial joke. That combination is finally enough for HR to let him go. He still got severance, and he still got his bonus for the year. That's kind of crazy. Wow. They still gave him his bonus for the year. Well, I think this probably, you know, this is a recurring theme here in business, but he just like, they just keep moving him around, trying to find somewhere where he's any good. Yeah. And, you know, and that's, you know, I don't know how he gets there. HR's not responsible for promoting people, right? Yeah. So, and he gets promoted, and then, you know, you're just like, you know, you just get promoted above your capability. Yeah. You know, and maybe that turns you bitter and mad.

00:20:32 Maybe that's the reason. I don't know. You know, that's the reason you become, you know. It's kind of funny, though, that you're. He's angry and, like, firing out at everybody. The report for all of them, though, is, like, his parent dies, and then, like, he's like, oh, I'm your manager now. Yeah. Like, good luck, everybody. Take the manager of the situation. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I think it's good. It's actually, I mean, you get it. It's good advice, or, you know, when somebody comes and says, I don't really like this person. It is true. You know, we all have to work with somebody we don't like. I mean, you know, I'm not going to say who it is for me, but. Right. Then tell us. No. I'm kidding, too, because I love everyone. The, but that is true, that you, sometimes you, some people that aren't your favorite, you have to work with.

00:21:15 But, you know, he apparently at some point crossed the line. So, you know, HR had to step in eventually and take care of it. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting story. Yeah, for sure. All right. My next story is submitted anonymously, and they said, so I work for a very large worldwide company, the kind where it takes six months from applying to actually getting an offer letter. We get a new hire in my group, a younger guy, straight out of college. I won't lie. That's always made me a little nervous. Younger hires can be a mixed bag of work ethic or work ethic wise. This one confirmed every fear I had within about a week. After finishing his HR orientation, he shows up for his first day of actual training with me one-on-one since he was only a new hire at the first.

00:22:02 Okay. New hire at the time. Okay. Whatever. First red flag comes before I even say a word. I walk over to his desk and he holds up a finger, tells me to wait. It says he's busy. So, hello. I look at his screen. He's messaging a friend about a party from the night before. Super important stuff, you know? I tell him that's not how it works. He was sitting there messaging a friend about a party from the night before. Yeah. Oh, so he's a frat boy. Exactly. Okay. I tell him that's not how this works and we're training now. He scoffs and closes it. Actually, I trained somebody exactly like this. They ended up getting let go. But it was so hard. You did? Yep. I'm not going to say it was somebody here who worked here who had their son start working here for us.

00:22:43 And I remember training this kid and he literally would not take his eyes off of the phone. And it was the most horrible experience where it's like, do you not understand how disrespectful it is to be? Anyways. So, second red flag. I ask him where his notebook is so he can take notes. He tells me he doesn't take notes. I explain this job takes a minimum of a year to learn properly. He says, no thanks. Day two, he walks up to me at 8 a.m. visibly hungover. It can't be day one. He literally says, no thanks. No thanks. It takes a year. No thanks. Day two, not for me. He walks up to me at 8 a.m. visibly hungover and greets me with, dude, I'm so hungover. Let him know I'm not his dude.

00:23:24 And that's not something we say out loud at work. From there, it just escalates. You guys feel like very much like he's still in the frat house. Literally. He starts disappearing for hours with nobody able to find him. One day, people near his desk start asking if anyone hears snoring. Turns out he's fast asleep at his desk in plain view. Oh my gosh. I flag it to our boss because at this point, how many red flags do you need? Did he even want the job? No. Week three, he shows up with serious front end damage on his brand new truck. No explanation offered. Then my boss finally comes in and sits at the kid's desk for hours waiting for him to show up. Around noon, an alarm starts going off and he crawls out from underneath his own desk from behind the filing cabinet where he had apparently been sleeping for four hours straight while my boss just sat there.

00:24:11 My boss calmly walks him to a conference room. I'm told afterward that they're giving him one more chance. Oh, that sounds like me. That just so does. Literally. I do not hide. I've been sleeping for the last week. Yeah. One more time. I do not hide how I feel about that decision. That sounds like me. Two weeks later, he's a no call, no show. Turns out he was in jail for a hit and run while drunk and it was his third DUI. Oh my gosh. This was a huge, huge miss. But... Like, this is just a miss. Who interviewed this guy? I don't know. I generally do not know how he passed a background check or got security clearance with that on his record. He was eventually fired, but it took far longer than it should have.

00:24:52 I agree. As it always does. Yes. Yes. Wow. Okay. I always say slow to hire, quick to fire, but it's so hard to do quick to fire. And I believe it, but I'm like Mr. Second Chance. Mr. I can coach this person. Yep. You know, years of experiences, like thinking I could coach, you know, I'm going to have some magic touch. This is going to make this person change. Yeah. And it leads to a lot of, it actually leads to a lot of disappointment because you do that because you care about people and you want them to, you want them to be successful. For sure. Sure. Our guest segment today that I'm about to start here soon is from John and we actually heard from him on the last episode.

00:25:36 And so quick little refresher. John is a keynote speaker for over 25 years. He has helped executives and entrepreneurs scale their companies with fast utilizing time tested, scientifically proven systems. So he owns something called the talent genius, which is the talent genius. Yes. Okay. You'll remember him when we pull him up again. Yeah. I'll have his cab open. Oh. Yes. Yeah. There's John. I recommended a salesperson. There was one red flag about a person's, what they were bringing to the table. That was an absolute knockout punch, like an absolute no go. You never move forward when this is the case. However, the temptation to hire this person was so great that they couldn't help themselves.

00:26:22 They couldn't resist because literally every other score was sensational. Their motivation and drive, their ability to connect and relate and develop trust and rapport, the ability to get things done quickly. And so many other of these intangibles that are only accessible if you use a pre-screening hiring assessment, a comprehensive three-dimensional assessment. However, there is one thing, like I said before, that was an absolute showstopper. They have too much ego drive. So they can absolutely be a culture killer. So the person went against my advice, went ahead and hired them. And four days later, he called me up on the phone. He says, John, I should have listened to you.

00:27:03 After four days, the person came to me and said that some of the things that we were asking her to do were, quote unquote, beneath her. So basically, she came in and told the new hiring manager to go pound sand and said that I'm out and quit within four days of being on the job. So we see that there is a direct correlation to typically a lack of longevity or tenure with people that have this strong ego drive because they have very little tolerance. They'll just leave at the drop of a hat. That's a great point. Wow. Well, using an assessment ahead of time, huge believer in that. Right. So, yeah, great, great, great job by John. I guess that's probably some of the stuff he does.

00:27:45 But this is what there's a couple of things in the story that kind of struck me. And first was like the person was gone like in four days. Right. And they were like, it was a culture killer. But the person quit. They didn't fire the person. Right. My gut tells me they would have just helped. They would have just kept going. That person would have just been ugly to work with. But they, you know, asked someone, you know, asked apparently her to do something she didn't want to do. Yeah. So and I think the other is this is this type of person is like the most difficult to get rid of because it's the high performer bad for culture person.

00:28:31 Right. It's like crushing the numbers, especially when they get into a revenue role, crushing numbers, bringing stuff in, winning, you know, being top on the champion board, you know, topping their peers all the time. And I've had these folks work for me and it will test. It will test your commitment to culture because, you know, they're there. Even though they're killing it, they're just they're cancer to everyone within 16 feet of them. You know, I mean, they're just ruining it for everybody. Yeah. There's an incessant competition, the belittling, challenging people all the time, rubbing it in their face. And so it ends up being a culture killer, you know, and but, you know, it's tough to it's tough to get rid of your number one producing person.

00:29:20 I would say, though, for sales, I feel like most of them are ego-driven. That's part of their competitive nature. And I think that's also what does make successful salespeople, too, though. So I feel like it's hard because I feel like that is a main trait, though, that you also look for in some of these salespeople. Is that drive? Ego's connected to pride. Yeah. And you want someone to be that's proud of and wants to excel. Yeah. And those are some of the traits in salespeople for sure you want. I think you're right. And it's individual success because most salespeople are individual. But it's just the overdone, high-scoring, ego-off-the-chart kind of person that gets them to refuse.

00:30:01 I'm not doing that. Yeah. It's below them. When it works below them. Yeah. For sure. All right. So, Emma, what's up? All right. My first story was submitted to us anonymously. A lot of anonymous stories this time. Yeah. Let's get into it. So a few years ago, I hired a guy we'll call John for an accounts payable position. He's going to report directly to me and be our sole AP employee. On paper, he's perfect. Years of experience, knows our software, understands the entire AP process inside and out, and absolutely crushed every interview. Everyone who met him came back with the same feedback.

00:30:41 This guy is great. First day, I give him the full tour, get him set up, hand him a cheat sheet with logins and key contacts, and spend the morning training him. Everything is completely normal. Then around noon, he starts packing up his things. I ask if everything's okay. He tells me he has a VA doctor's appointment, that he mentioned it during the interview process to HR, the recruiter, and my manager. Sorry. I figure someone just forgot to pass that along and tell him no problem. See him tomorrow. He doesn't show up the next day. I call him straight to voicemail. About 30 minutes later, he reaches out over Teams, says he's having some health issues, and asks if he can work from home instead. This is post-pandemic.

00:31:23 Remote work isn't unusual, so I agree and tell him to keep HR posted if it's serious. We continue training remotely for the day. He tells me he's spoken with HR and will be back in office on Friday. Friday, no John. I call again. He answers this time and tells me his grandmother is in hospice and he wants to spend the day saying goodbye to her. I feel awful for him. Offer my condolences and let him know company policy covers three days of bereavement leave. He assures me three days will be plenty and that he'll be back Wednesday. Wednesday, no John. I call again. Now his grandmother has passed away, and on top of that, his father has fallen into a deep depression and John needs additional time to care for him. I tell him I'll need to run anything beyond standard bereavement past HR and my manager before approving it.

00:32:10 That's when things shift. He gets defensive. Insists I told him he could take more time if he needed. I clarify that telling him to keep me posted isn't the same as approving unlimited leave. He accuses me of being toxic and hangs up. I walk straight into HR. Which just means I don't agree with what you said. Yeah. I didn't get what I wanted. You're toxic. Yeah. I walk straight into HR's office and lay out everything that's happened. Turns out John never told HR about a VA appointment. Never mentioned any health issues. Never reached out about his grandmother. None of it. HR's read on the situation. He's probably lying. No way. No kidding. No kidding. We schedule an in-

00:32:51 He's probably lying. Did you talk to him? Did you tell anything since he had- Nope. Nope. Probably. We schedule an in-person meeting to sort it all out. About three hours before it happens, the whole thing resolves itself anyway. John storms into the office, pulls out his laptop, throws it on the floor, and walks straight out the door. When HR had asked him for documentation for either the VA appointment or the bereavement leave, his response was apparently, F this. I don't need this job. You don't even pay well. And that was the end of John's career with us. That's insane. I mean- Is this another? I gotta go back. Is this story another one of those where he starts off really good on paper? Mm-hmm. Yeah.

00:33:31 Yeah. Yep. He's perfect. Years of experience. That's what it says. It did say that. It said- He's perfect. Years of experience knows our software. On paper, he's perfect. Years of experience knows our software, understands the entire AP process inside and out. Oh, goodness. Yikes. Yikes. Yikes. Ah. However, it didn't say he lied about his grandma dying. I don't know if his grandma actually died. Yeah. There's- You know, we've had a couple stories like that where they- Well, when he's- They say their family member died and then- When you said that in the story, I was like, oh, no. Yeah. Yeah. Because those stories, I just- Yeah. Yeah. They're so cringe. I know. Like, please, please don't use the- A family member died to get a couple days off work.

00:34:13 Yeah. I know. It's horrible. I hate it. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It's crazy. All right. What do we got? All right. Next we have- We have a guest segment. This is Miss Billie Jean Ring. I spoke with her. She was a wonderful lady. Yeah. She has over 20 years of experience specializing in executive coaching and employee development. She's in San Antonio in Texas. All right. So, yeah. Here's her story. So, Billie Jean does executive coaching and- Executive coaching and employee development. Okay. Love it. I went through an extensive interview process when I was working for higher education at a university. Found the perfect candidate.

00:34:54 When she came into work on day one, she was almost like 45 minutes late. She just walked in late. Really no apology, no sense of, you know, feeling bad for it. She just said, I'm just not used to waking up this early. I was like, oh, this could be trouble. On day two, I start her through the training module for the area. And I go into a meeting sometime mid-morning. I get a message on my phone and it's from the VP of the university. And he said, did you know that your employee is taking a nap? No, I did not know that. So, I had to excuse myself. I went into the area where we work.

00:35:35 This girl was not just asleep at her desk. She was legitimately underneath her desk and she had pulled her chair forward. So, like, the only way you could see her is if you walked past that area, which he had to in order to get to his space. So, day three, she comes in. It's midday. She comes over to me and she asks if it's okay if she takes her lunch break because she was tired. So, I'm like, yeah, sure, go take a lunch break. She goes out to her car and she doesn't come back. Two and a half hours later, somebody else that worked in the area came up to tell me that they found her asleep in her car.

00:36:16 She's a sleepy girl. That's all. She's just tired. The car nap. Oh, my gosh. The lunchtime employee car nap that lasts all day long. I know. Something had been going on. Like, it can't be. I just not used to get. Maybe she'll have, like, narcolepsy or something. I don't like to get up this early. I'm just not used to being up so early. So, now I'm going to sleep for hours during the day. I love Billie Jean, though. Her personality just seems like so much. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. She was such a joy. Yeah. She was such a joy to talk to. I just love talking to her. Does she do? I guess she probably, she has a lot of, like, personalities.

00:36:57 I mean, she probably delivers a lot of training. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She's, like, she has, like, a motivational approach. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Good for her. All right. You're rocking today. Me? Yeah. So, you got another one. Brian. I have one more. Yes. This is submitted to us by someone named Brian. So, thank you, Brian, for submitting this story. So, a couple years ago, I trained someone to take over accounts payable when I moved into a different role. He was young, fresh out of college, with an accounting degree, a little shy but personable, and brought in through a temp agency. I tried to train him as much as I could. Sorry. I lost my place.

00:37:38 But I was also being trained for my new position at the same time. And his supervisor had a full plate of her own. We told him constantly to ask questions if he ever felt overwhelmed. He always said he was fine. Three months in, everything seemed solid enough that we offered him the position permanently. And that's when things fell apart. He started watching anime at his desk during work hours. He had one remote... After he got the job? Yeah. He was cool until then. He was like, I totally got it. I bagged it. Yeah. I was like, boink. Yeah. He had one remote day a week that he basically treated as a day off. He was deleting invoice emails out of his shared inbox. He refused to call or email vendors when there were disputes. Wrong quantities, missing items, anything that required a conversation.

00:38:21 Any invoice with a problem that got shoved into a folder, just got shoved into a folder and ignored entirely. Jeez. He started manually changing inventory quantities to match what the invoice said instead of what the receiving team had actually counted, which is exactly backwards from how it's supposed to work. He used the wrong ledgers constantly, despite having an extensive cheat sheet that told him exactly which account every single vendor went to. I personally walked him through employee reimbursements two weeks in a row. The first time I let him do it alone, he got it completely wrong and kept getting it wrong for weeks after that. I spent about four hours just fixing 50 journal entries he had botched. Jeez. He combined purchase orders into single invoices, even though each invoice clearly states which order it belongs to.

00:39:05 He applied credit memos without documenting it anywhere, so nobody could even tell it had happened, until vendors started calling angry because we'd accidentally refunded them twice. Every week, there's a check run that goes to the CFO for approval. He would send it incomplete almost every time, then follow up repeatedly with, sorry, I forgot this one. Oh, and this one too. The record was five separate corrections in a single day. Once his supervisor started paying closer attention, she pulled me in to help review some inventory issues that had been piling up. It took me two weeks just to sort through it. Honestly, it just felt like he put more effort into doing everything wrong than he would have spent just doing the job correctly.

00:39:50 My biggest regret is that I defended him for a while and even offered to take some of his workload back so he could get more training because I didn't want to assume the worst about him. Once I actually started digging into what he'd done, that sympathy disappeared fast. After he left, I took back all of the AP duties on top of my new role, and it took me three months to get everything back into some kind of order. We've since hired someone who's doing a much better job. Good. I sure hope so. For real. Just the damage and the crushing chaos when you choose the wrong person. For real. You know, and how do they work for you for three months and you don't pick up on any of that?

00:40:33 I know. Well, I said he tried to give him the benefit of the doubt first. Like, maybe he just needs more training. But, like, he said before that he had been teaching him reimbursements for two weeks and he got it right every single time. And then when he was asked to do it by himself, he did it wrong every time. Yeah. So, I don't know. Lack of attention and detail. Yeah. Whoever wrote the story, you can tell, is, like, a accountant just the way the story was written. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just like, ticked. Yeah. Made it really easy to follow along, though. So, thank you. Yeah. It was a great story. Yeah. So, that's a lot of long, you know, drawn-out stories today that were good. Yeah, they were. Like, so many of them have, like, good lessons they can take from it, too.

00:41:14 Like, you know, don't skip the process. Don't, you know, just because someone looks good on paper, don't do your testing, your normal stuff. For sure. I don't know. Then just knowing that sometimes HR is just a hard job. It's just a hard job being in human resources. But, hey, thanks for listening to The Bad Hire. Please subscribe to us, rate, review, share. Love it. And don't forget, your story could win $10,000. And we'd love to give it to you if you'll write a great story. If it's the best story of the year, we'll be handing out, I guess, a suitcase full of cash or something, a briefcase full of cash at some point.

00:41:54 I think we should do the big check. All right. You want to do the big check? Yeah, I think we should do the big check. So, submit your Bad Hire story now. You can go to thebadhire.com to do that. And then we'll get you featured on the show. And if you want, you can do a guest segment. One of the folks here will sit down with you and we'll go over and you'll do your stories like you saw today. And those are really cool, too. Get you on the show without having to organize your time to be sitting here at the same time. So, it's a really cool way to get on the show. So, anyway, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. Thanks, guys. Bye. Bye.