The Bad Hire Podcast / He Asked for Friday Off in His First Week… to Go to Disney [Ep. 57]

He Asked for Friday Off in His First Week… to Go to Disney [The Bad Hire Ep. 57]

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At a Glance

He interviewed like a keeper. He started on Monday, and Monday went fine. On Tuesday he was late. He said he needed some time at Starbucks to get ready for the day.

Episode Recap

He interviewed like a keeper. He started on Monday, and Monday went fine.

On Tuesday he was late. He said he needed some time at Starbucks to get ready for the day.

On Wednesday he was late again.

On Thursday he asked for Friday off. He wanted to go to Disney.

He was fired that day.

In Episode 57 of The Bad Hire, Ken is joined by Morgan and Emma for a round of first-week stories: a retail hire who passed three interviews and was outed by the UPS driver, a colorblind technician building $20,000 missile cables, a new hire who asked her boss to cancel a client meeting so she could go to a job interview, a bartender who poured free shots for underage friends two hours into his first shift and then appealed his firing, a trainee fired for dozing off who emailed eight months later with an explanation, an assistant whose resume said intermediate but who couldn't save a Word document, and a new hire whose mom tried to return years-old worn clothes because "the girl had died."

What's Covered in This Episode

  • "I needed some time at Starbucks to prepare for the day"
  • Asking for Friday off in week one to go to Disney
  • The CEO who logged every minute an employee was late
  • Three interviews, then the UPS driver recognized her
  • She checked "no" on the conviction question
  • A $20,000 missile cable built by a colorblind new hire
  • Asking her boss to cancel a client meeting for a job interview
  • Free shots for underage friends two hours into the first shift
  • Fired, then he appealed
  • Dozing off in training, and the email eight months later
  • The medication nobody caught, and a second chance
  • An "intermediate" resume and a Word document she couldn't save
  • Thousands in clothes on the employee discount on day one
  • "Give me full price back because the girl had died"

Key Takeaways

  • A great interview doesn't guarantee a good hire.
  • The lie on the application is often the real problem.
  • Ask for real examples, not just the resume headline.
  • Check that a new hire can do the work before giving them high-stakes jobs.
  • Hold the line, but stay open when you learn more.

Full Transcript

Read the full transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and has not been checked for accuracy.

00:00:00 He was like the fifth day of a job and he's basically asking you know for the time off and I asked him what for and he said he wanted to go to Disney. He had been employed for two hours and had served free alcohol to minors and he appealed his dismissal anyway. She said we should give her full price back because the girl had died. 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. One bad hire stole all of it. Crazy stuff. She got what she deserved. I'm your host Ken Monroe and every week we dive into real-life stories

00:00:40 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. Hey everyone and welcome back to The Bad Hire. The show with the best stories about the wild world of work. I'm joined today by Morgan and Emma. Hi guys, how you doing? Good. Also good to have you here. Good, it's been a while and a couple weeks since we shot a show I think. Yeah. Other than one we just shot. Yeah, yeah. Other than that one. We're coming up on the end of the year.

00:01:21 Do you have fun stuff planned for the rest of the year? Yes, yep. Got a good end of year episode. In the works, so it should be fun. I'm looking forward to it. Well you know the drill. Every week we dive into some of the wildest and weird stories. Some shocking hiring fails and really also stories where HR talent is just doing their very best to keep organizations safe from people getting through their screening process and getting inside their business. So I'll kick it off with a story that we found here.

00:02:01 So we hired a guy who absolutely nailed his interview. Very good. He answered every question the way you hope someone will. Told us he was motivated and wanted to be a part of the team. And I remember thinking we found a keeper. He started on Monday and that day went fine. On Tuesday he was late. Wow. And when I asked him about it he told me he needed to spend some time at Starbucks that morning to prepare for the day. So he literally said it with a completely straight face. I needed some time at Starbucks to get ready for the day. Wednesday he was late again. So I'm a reasonable person so I figured hey man he's nervous and he's still adjusting.

00:02:44 So since the new job takes some getting used to, the new schedule, new rhythm I guess, I decided we'd have a talk about it at the end of the week. Then on Thursday he walked up to my desk very casual and asked if he could have Friday off. It was like the fifth day of a job and he's basically asking for the time off. And I asked him what for? And he said he wanted to go to Disney. Man, off to my own heart. As soon as I saw that it was Disney I knew she was going to be like, oh that's cool he's coursing you to go. He could go. You go on. Have fun. If you were someone's manager, all they'd ever have to do is be like, Disney?

00:03:31 You'd be like, yes, what? I'm going to Disney. I'm going to Disney, yes, yes. I don't think I would ever tell anybody no to a trip. So he says, I fired him that day and it felt bad about it for roughly one minute. I'm sure the guy was having a good old day at Disney though. Yeah, he sure was, after he got fired. This says, what gets this guy is that he never hit anything or tried to be sneaky. He just came in late and said, hey bro, is that Starbucks? Kind of prepping, mentally getting ready. Then he asked for Friday off.

00:04:11 He gave a great interview and once the job actually started, he just didn't want to do it. I don't know that he did want to do it. He said he didn't want to do the job. I don't think he just kind of set himself up badly by being late every day. I feel like it probably would have let him go on the trip if he wasn't late. I don't want to say it's generational. I think there are some people that just think like that. They'll let me off the hook. Or they don't think it's important. It's not a big deal to be 20 minutes late. And there are literally like two camps of people. There are people that this really matters to and there are people that it doesn't.

00:04:56 I am in the camp of don't care. Don't care. For me, it's never been about the time, like walking in the door before a certain time, because I've just never been like that. I was once with a manager, a leader, who asked me for my people one time, said, do you know how many times your employee was late? I said, no, and he had this big log. And when they went through the door and it was he had flagged. This is a CEO of a company. He's worried. That means he's wasting his 20 minutes. Yeah, absolutely. He wasted more time. This is the CEO of a company. He's got a print out and he is highlighted.

00:05:38 Right. And he's wanting to admonish me for not managing this person. Effectively. And I mean, it's one minute late, two minutes. I'm talking about her pass hit the door thing and the door opened one minute late to me. He had added all the minutes up. He's like, she stole, you know, 60 minutes over the course of 30 days. 30 days, bro. Yeah. And he was like, he was like, I want you to dock or pay. How much time did you waste counting all those minutes? Yeah, for real. It was a real issue for him, right? And so what I did is I looked at it and I added up all the time she came in.

00:06:21 Sometimes she'd come in 15 minutes early. I added up all that time and I said, we're paying her for all the time that she came in early. That was so dumbfounded to him. He was like, what? What are you talking about? What do you mean? I was like, well, all these times she came in, you know, she didn't hit the door at exactly 8 a.m. A lot of times she was here at 7 45, 7 50. I said, but most of the time she was late. It wasn't significant, you know, and he, that was beside him. He was on the camp that you hit the door. I own you from the time you start at eight o'clock until you leave at five. And I've always been, you know, be flexible with people.

00:07:01 I don't want anybody headed to work. Absolutely freaked out over, I'm going to be five minutes late. There's a huge difference between being late and then shared up just abusing your time. Yes, I absolutely agree with you. If you come in 15, let's say you come in and they say, hey, it's eight o'clock. Now there are some roles. If you're on a phone role, customer facing role, you had to open a store, that's different, but for many roles, it just doesn't matter. So if you were like, you roll in at eight 15, right? If you're the type person, I was like, yeah, but she works through lunch all the time. She never leaves.

00:07:42 I mean, she's supposed to get, but she just powers through all the time or is still there after five, putting time in, you know, it's that it's when you don't care that they over and you do care when they do show up and you don't look at the rest of the day or how much or the value before we dive back into the chaos on the bad hire. This episode is brought to you by BeechX. Hiring shouldn't feel like rolling the dice. Background checks should come with great tech, seamless integration, and customer service that delivers. That's BeechX, lightning fast results, unmatched accuracy, built in fraud prevention. We help you hire the right people. BeechX plugs into over 100 HRIS and ATS systems.

00:08:27 So your background checks run smooth, fast, and backed by top level service. Protect your team, protect your reputation, protect your sanity. Go to BeechX.io. That's B-C-H-E-X.io. I'll get another story. So we hired a woman for a retail job ever interviewing her three times. I want that on the record. Okay. It's on the record because when people ask me how this happens, that's the number I give them. She literally went through three interviews. She impressed the manager on every single interview. I spent her first two days, I spent her first two days with her before she went on to the store manager training.

00:09:11 And I didn't think anything of it the first two days. Nothing special came out of it. Nothing came up. Then the store manager started calling me every day. The complaints were never dramatic, just constant little complaints. She was always in the bathroom or the break room, basically hiding. And whenever anyone corrected her, she wanted to argue. And it was strange, giving her how well she had interviewed. Back to those three interviews. But hiding isn't a crime, so I didn't have anything. Hiding kind of is a crime if you're like camped out the bathroom. Why are you hiding? Supposed to be working. But hiding isn't a crime, so I didn't have anything I could act on. Then a UPS driver made a delivery to the store and pulled the manager aside. He said he recognized

00:09:55 her and that she, oh, and that she had been convicted in jail for raising money for a fake missions trip. Oh, God. Wow. You busted by the UPS driver. Wow, dang. I assumed it was gossip. A delivery driver clearly didn't do a background check on this person. No. Yeah. Right? I assumed it was gossip, a delivery driver passing along a rumor, but it looked it up anyway, and it was true. She had been using a different name and had even colored her hair. We had hired someone to stand behind a cash register who had once collected donations for a mission trip that never existed. Wow. I wonder how you do that. You put a big jar and say donate to our missions trip and people

00:10:37 are dropping money. That's crazy. I wonder how far back that was that she got convicted of that for the UPS driver to remember her fix. Yeah. What made the decision simple was her application. We went back, which asked whether she had been, she had ever been convicted of a crime. Uh-oh, that was bad. That was bad form. That's a really bad form to ask that on the application. It's really bad form to ask that on the application. You need to run the background check. You don't ask them and then delete them and not interview them. Yeah. So, I mean, it's almost like this is saying, well, if you'd have told us she had had a record, we would have done a background check. Otherwise. Ever been convicted of a crime? No, of course not. Why would you ask me that? She had checked no. We fired her on the spot and it had nothing to do with hiding

00:11:21 or the arguing or even what she did years ago. It was the lie on the application. That's always the fallback. Yeah. I still think about that UPS driver. We put three interviews, a background, you didn't run a background process and two days of training and the most reliable information we got came from our delivery guy. Well, she did use a fake name though. They did a really bad background. Yeah. They should have used their ID. They should be able to pick up on your aliases. Yeah. Oh goodness. Shame, shame. So, I worked at a company that made cable assemblies for military products. The work is

00:12:02 precise. I imagine it is. You read schematics and identify connectors and the connectors come in a lot of different colors and the colors matter. So, we hired a new technician who trained for a week and it went like any other training week. Then they put him on the line and his first real job was building a cable. The cables we built cost around $20,000 each and went into missiles. That number is the point. One cable, $20,000 built by someone. This is their first day. He's going to build a $20,000 cable. I saw the first connector he finished. I've seen a lot of mistakes in my time,

00:12:43 but this was one of the worst I had ever laid eyes on. You guys have a feeling what's coming. Yeah. Yeah. You could have used it in a class on how not to do the job. I took it to someone the next day and I took it to someone and the next day he came forward on his own, told us he was colorblind. I hope he didn't lie about that. That's what ... I'm blind. You hope he didn't lie about being colorblind? Yes. I really hope not. See, I was thinking the whole time when he started talking about color that I was like, oh, he's going to be colorblind. Yeah, I was pretty much thinking that. He's going to get the job if he's colorblind. Then he asked if he could keep the job. That would be interesting, right? I mean, honestly, you want to figure out is there a way

00:13:29 that we could get someone who's colorblind to do this? Is there a way we can accommodate him? I mean, if you had an assistant, maybe, that's the right cord. I was about to say maybe there's a way for him to label the cords for the way that he sees them. Put them in places, greenas. Oh, this is the red one. This is the blue one, whatever, I guess. I'll give him credit for the honesty since it takes something to walk in and say that, but it raised a question nobody in the room could really answer, which was how a colorblind man had gone through a full week of training on reading connectors by color without anyone noticing. Why didn't he say anything upfront is what I'm really confused on.

00:14:13 He was let go. The mistakes that cost the company $20,000. No, it didn't. No, it didn't. You got to tell me that you didn't get to sell the cable, which tends to be a conversation. My favorite part is what happened to that connector. They put it on display in HR and used it to show why we stick to the hiring procedures. Somewhere, there's a desk with a- That's just messed up. Somewhere, there's a desk with a ruined connector on it, and it's the most expensive piece of training material that the company's ever owned. That's just messed up. I don't know. It didn't cost him $20,000. Unless he makes $20,000 a week because he needs to know what that job is.

00:14:56 For real. I don't know. I guess, and I don't know the work, but- Might be placement. That's a really niche role. To try and wait for or find somebody like that, maybe it was $20,000. We talk about the cost of a bad hire a lot. That is a super specific position to fill. That is true. I just feel like he should have been up front about the colorblind this first if he knew what he was going to be doing. You got through training. Morgan, what's up? What do you got going on? What stories you got? My first story is, I run an agency and we hired a woman with a good resume and a lot of energy. She started on a Monday. What I didn't know was that she had already been looking for her next job and had been

00:15:39 since the day we hired her. I found out because we had a client meeting on the calendar, a real one with a paying client who is going to be on the line expecting our whole team. She came to me during the work day and asked me to cancel it. We don't cancel client meeting, so I asked her why. She told me she had a job interview. A few days into us working, she would ask me, or she wanted me to cancel a meeting with a paying client so she could go to interview with another company. I'll give her credit for not lying about it. There's something almost refreshing about someone being that direct about how we wish she planned to stay. Then I started asking questions and it got worse. From the day she was hired, she had been going on job interviews, all of them during the work day while we were paying her. I fired her on the spot and she lasted about seven days. I still go back and forth on whether

00:16:20 I'm angry or a little impressed. That's funny. I don't know. What do you think? I don't know. I guess both. If I was the hiring manager, like maybe both. Yeah, like how did I not catch this person was not happy with getting this job, but it's going to take it anyway. Yeah, I don't know. I once interviewed a person. She was currently working at a job for a week, right? Yes. When you're talking about, yeah, I remember when she came and introduced herself to our whole company. I was like, yeah, this girl just started a job. We all looked her up on LinkedIn. We were like, this girl just started a job that we can get on. Yeah, she's just like, she's- Oh, wait, no, I do remember this person. I do remember this person.

00:17:02 I was, she was sharp. She had gone to school for sales. It was a sales role. She'd gotten a degree in it in sales and this is like someone committed to wanting to be in this inside sales. We're like, oh, that's awesome. She did really well. Then we offered her, we started looking at some of her background and they're all like, she's online right now sending her things out. I just got a new job on her LinkedIn. Her first post that we saw was- And she accepted the interview with us. Yeah, I forgot about that. It's like a little over a year ago now. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:17:42 Wow. Maybe longer than that. Maybe actually. Yeah. Yeah, it was wild. And it just was shocking that, and I was just like, when we offered her the job and then she didn't take it. And then it was like- Why were you waste your time? I know. You know, it was, it was- Maybe we should check- I think she was like, someone had certainly probably coached her like job. If you got one in a hand and if you're interviewing, you never know. You might have something great come. It's just way better and- I don't know. I just would have- For me, it was like- A week on my resume. Yeah. Well, it's not even there for me. It's just like the, the- You, when you accept the job in my views, you're giving them your word. You're like,

00:18:28 yes, I'm coming to work here. Yeah. You know, for you to be like, eh, I don't know. I don't know. Sometimes I think that there's, I have more expectation of loyalty than probably is due. Companies will fire you in a second and you should always take care of yourself. I get that. Yeah. I don't know. I'd like to think it was different. Probably not. All right, what's up? My second story is I am a pub and bar manager. The job comes with a lot of paperwork and a lot of trust. The trust part is usually where new hires get into trouble. We hired a new guy and on his first shift, he was on the phone constantly and kept going out for a cigarette break without asking. I wasn't going to let that slide, but I hadn't done anything about it yet

00:19:13 when his friend showed up two hours in. He started handing them free drinks and free shots, working somebody else's bar like a generous host. A few of those friends were under 18 and that's the one line you can't cross in this business. I fired him on the spot. Then he appealed. He had been employed for two hours and had served free alcohol to minors and he appealed his dismissal anyway. We had five witness statements in security footage and our stock account came up short about what you'd expect for someone pouring shots for his friends. The appeal went nowhere and it didn't need much of a hearing since the camera had been the best view of the building or best view in the building. I still love to read what he wrote on that forum to argue it was unfair with five statements and a video against him.

00:19:55 I don't know, busted. Like what did he think was going to happen? Would you at a bar, you know, when you look up, there's like six cameras pointed at the bar. Yeah. Like if you steal, if you're an idiot, I mean you almost deserve what's coming. Well, also when you're just handing out free drinks to everybody that walks in, like what do you think's going to happen? Right. Just a big shot. Like it's your, like it's your booze. It's mine to give away. No, literally. It's expensive. Laker is like something that they really keep track of. Like, I mean, I don't know, super irresponsible. All right. My last story is, so we had an older guy in training who was a really nice

00:20:36 man and everybody liked him. The problem was that he kept dozing off during training and when someone pointed it out, he denied it. It happened more than once and every time he told us he hadn't been asleep. What bothered me wasn't the sleeping because people get tired. It was a denial. If someone can't tell the truth about whether he was just asleep in front of me, I can't build a job around him. So I fired him on day two and I figured that was the end of it. About eight months later, I got an email from him and I opened it expecting something unpleasant. He told me that he had fallen asleep while driving and rear ended another car. He went to see a specialist who found something nobody had caught before, a medication he had been started the night before training was making him fall asleep and had nothing to do with him as a person. He had since switched to a different medication and felt like

00:21:17 himself again and wanted to know if he could have a second chance. I fired him fairly based on what I knew at the time, but now I knew more. So I hired him back and he's a good employee. I tell the story to other managers and they usually expect a lesson at the end. I don't really have one. I'm just glad he emailed me. Wow. Oh, a little redemption story. I was thinking maybe he has narcolepsy or something. When people have narcolepsy, they don't even know when they fall asleep. They just do. That's really scary. Yeah. I mean, you're like, dude, you're falling asleep. And he's like, no, Ron. Yeah. I just freaking saw you close your eyes. I get pissed off too. I remember the story he had a few shows ago about the guy who had his hands back and leaning.

00:22:02 Oh, yeah. Yay back. And he's like, I'm not sleeping. I'm just resting. I'm just relaxing. So you're like, that was a true denial. This guy had health issues. I got on a new medicine one time and I wrecked my car and ran it into an 18-wheeler. And it was a medicine. Jeez. Okay. You know the story. No, I didn't. No, I didn't. You fell asleep for the wheel. Wow. Crossed multiple lanes of traffic and slammed me to the side of an 18-wheeler. Wow. And that's real. I mean, there are some medicines and I fell asleep hard. I fell asleep so hard,

00:22:42 I slumped over in the seat, asleep. And when I hit him, it knocked me out of my seat. I wasn't wearing a seat belt. And it knocked me out of my seat and I woke up and I was sitting on the center console and it was from the medicine. Oh my gosh. Yeah. No, I did not do that. It had a big warning. Donut, do not drive. I mean, a really big warning. This could call drowsiness and I just ignored it and took my medicine, jumped on the road a couple, you know, an hour later and had the sound of my car destroyed. Well, I'm glad this person got his redemption. Right. I got emailed them back and was like, hey.

00:23:23 It bothered him. Yeah. You could tell it bothered him. Yeah. It was like, that would be humiliating to be like, I fell asleep at my desk and they fired me. You know, how do you go and tell your family, I drove dosed off. Yeah. You know, so good for him for digging into it a little bit longer and learning that he probably needed help there. Yeah. What's up? Um, I'm next. All right. I'm a digital marketing strategist and we needed an assistant for a job that was mostly admin work. We hired a woman who looked right on paper. She listed an intermediate, she listed an intermediate level in the tools we use,

00:24:04 which isn't the same as claiming to be an expert, but does tell you she knows what she's doing. The position required a bachelor's degree. Her resume had one and she also listed a year and a half of admin experience. Everything added up and it looked like a safe hire. She started and it didn't take long to see the gap. She didn't know how to use a basic Word document. She couldn't, she couldn't save one or edit one. I'm not trying to be cruel about it because everybody learns on the job, but an assistant role assumes a baseline and the baseline here was a Word document. By her fifth day, I sat her down until I didn't think she was ready for the role and I had to let her go. It changed how I hire. I don't just read the resume anymore. I ask for detailed examples of past projects

00:24:46 and I want the how and not the headline. So I'll ask someone to walk me through a document they built. The resume said intermediate, the first day said something else, and those five days in between cost everyone a lot. Yeah. Well, it's kind of sad. Why? It's like... So that's pretty basic. Yeah, it's sad that you don't like... No, I mean, who says I can't do that in a job interview? True. True. You know, I mean, like literally, can you use Excel? Oh, yeah, I'm great at it. Yeah, okay. Yeah, true. And then we Excel used to be like a mission critical skill.

00:25:27 So it's not as much anymore with AI, but it used to be mission critical. You just like... And then you get people who say, oh, I'm great at it. And then they had basic, basic fundamental skills in it. Like nothing, like what would be needed. Can you build a pivot table? Yeah, can you build a pivot table? Yeah, it would be like, hey, I need you to build a list. And I remember one time someone... You know, if you're going to do that, you would set it up in data and columns. And like, here's the first name, last name. You would build this data set, right? I haven't heard the pivot table in a long time. So easy. That just unlocked the... She built... What she did was she made every cell really big and she typed an entire address into it.

00:26:10 Oh my gosh. Right? And so it was like, here's a name, here's a name and address, here's a name, here's a name. I don't mean to be mean, but like, did y'all not learn this in like, middle school? So when you asked, hey... Well, I guess it depends on how old she was. Like maybe she's never been very like... I mean, maybe that just speaks to her. Education, like, I mean, the different levels of education will begin. Because I feel like I've done that in middle school. Yeah. Good folks in HR and recruiting, you know, know how to peel past that. And so many of these hiring mistakes are made from hiring managers when we hear about, who are just so eager to get somebody to have such a need.

00:26:51 I also feel like maybe there's like a little bit of a learning curve, if you're like, only used to Google Docs, for example. Because Microsoft has so many different features to all of their different things. And so like, maybe she's only used to Google Docs. And that's true for those students coming in. Or whatever. But I feel like they still have a lot of the same functions, though. Yeah, I mean, students, I would say most colleges use Google. Using all Google, high schoolers, they're using Google Docs. That's kind of a rarity. When I was in middle and high school, we only used Google. And then I didn't start using Word and Microsoft heavily until I got to college. Oh, so you did use it in college? I did, yeah, in college I did.

00:27:32 Also, like a platform, though, like Canvas is like a big one in college, where you could do stuff in Canvas, too. You didn't even have to have an external tool. Yeah, yeah. So I guess, yeah, that does make sense. Very interesting. Good learning from that person. Yeah. Test the skills. All right. We were hiring a writer for our small team. And a writer is the kind of hire where you can't hide, because the words are right there on the page. We did it properly and asked for a writing sample. And the one we got was sharp and had a real voice. I remember thinking it was exactly what we needed. And she passed the writing test in her interviews, too. Within a couple of days of her starting, I knew something was off. The first work she turned in looked nothing like her sample.

00:28:14 It wasn't just a little weaker. It read like it came from a different person with a different rhythm and different instincts. I tried to be fair about it and figured it might be nerves or a new set of rules, since people write differently when they feel when they feel like they're being watched. After four days, I sat her down. I didn't accuse her of anything. I just asked. And she all but admitted that she'd had help with the sample. The piece that got her hired hadn't come from her, so we let her go right then during her first week. Most resume fraud is a long con. And this one lasted four days. She didn't seem to realize the job would ask her to do the thing she was hired for. It's just about getting the job. We see that all the time and read it, don't we?

00:28:56 Yeah. It's just about getting the job. You think they can get in there and then duck behind? Yeah. It's kind of like those fake job qualifications that we read today. This is what I did to get my job, and now I'm hired. And they're just like, I'm in here now. It's hard to fire someone. I guess that's how they feel. Just get in. Get your foot in the door. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Crazy. I think that's one of my resume frauds, is one of my line on your resume. It's just one of my pet peeves. And listening to people say and coach each other that is totally okay is something so deeply wrong.

00:29:38 Because then what are you going to do when you get into the role and you don't know what to do and they have high expectations of you because you said that you were more than proficient in the skill. I don't know. Who was the famous guy that we told the story of who, I think we did a social media clip on it. It was famous and he said he could build websites and he didn't have it yet. Oh, it was Murray from A Practical Tooker. Yeah, Murray from A Practical Tooker. Well, he said that he got hired and he went to Barnes & Noble the next day and bought every coding book he could find and read all of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh my gosh. That's funny. All right, here's my last story. So I worked at a clothing store aimed at teens and college students.

00:30:23 I wasn't a manager but I was one of the people who trained the new hires so I saw a lot of first days. We brought on a new girl who showed up late which I didn't make a fuss about since people get lost on their first day. Once she got on the floor though, she didn't greet customers. She tried on clothes at a clothing store that's technically close to the job just on the wrong side of the counter. I also heard that she laughed whenever a customer asked for anything bigger than a medium which is a serious problem for a store that sells to the public. What the heck? What the heck? Then at the end of her shift, her family showed up to shop. They planned to use her employee discount and tried to buy two to three thousand dollars worth of clothes with it. Corporate policy let them get a good portion of it

00:31:05 so on her very first day, she got the benefit of a policy meant for someone who had been there for years. We let her go anyway on day one and I figured that was the end of it. Years later, her mother came into the store. She wanted to return the clothes and they were clearly warned. She explained that wasn't how we explained that wasn't how returns worked and she threw a fit. She said she said years. Yeah, years. She said we should give her full price back because the girl had died. I didn't know how to react but I remember what happened next very clearly because everyone in the store could see who was sitting in the passenger seat of her phone's car. So she just walked in.

00:31:45 She didn't. I was about to be like, oh, this is so sad. But like years later, why do you still care about the clothes that much? Oh my gosh. I don't know. There's normally a 30-day return window. I don't know what you were used to but I'm not used to years. Yeah, years later. I don't know. Maybe she got herself in a bind and I don't even know. That one, I just can't explain it. Her judging the behavior. That's kind of crazy. Just you got to learn how to operate and be a great employee. I have to say that there had to have been a lack of preparation of that employee.

00:32:26 If she did know that it wasn't cool to just sit there and try on clothes all day and then just not getting someone ready for employment. Missing the mark. Crazy. Another good one. All right. Well, that's it for today. I appreciate y'all. Thanks so much. That was good stuff. And thank you for being with us and thank you for joining us. Hey, like, share, comment on our things. We'd love for you to do it. Submit a story at thebadhire.com. We'd love to have your stories. We'd love to tell them on air. And if you'd like to do a video segment like you saw, like you've seen in previous episodes, let us know. We'll absolutely put one together and get you on the show.

00:33:09 Thanks so much. And until next time, thanks for joining The Bad Eye. Bye, guys. Bye.

Ken Monroe, host of The Bad Hire and CEO of Bchex
Your Host
Ken Monroe

Ken is CEO of Bchex, where he leads a platform spanning background checks, continuous monitoring, visitor management and volunteer screening. He created the Screening Hero Masterclass, a free SHRM-certified course on building FCRA-compliant screening programs. After a career spent in screening, what still gets his attention is what good hiring builds: safer workplaces and stronger teams.

Posted On: Nov 11, 2026 · 33:27