Tell Us Your “Hiring Horror Story & Win An iPod Shuffle
Send us your best, or..uh…worst, hiring horror stories and you could win an Apple iPod Shuffle. Thats right…all you have to do is tell us your story and you could be the lucky winner of a brand new iPod Shuffle.
or enter it below in the “post a comment section.”
Winner will be decided through an online poll. So get you entries in and be ready to vote for your favorite in August!
Contest Ends August 11, 2009
10 Responses “Tell Us Your “Hiring Horror Story & Win An iPod Shuffle”
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[...] time! Below are the entires in the “Hiring Horror Story” contest. Read through and vote for your favorite. Poll Closes August 14th at 8:00 [...]
My past experience includes being the Manager for a local staffing company. During that time I can recall an incident that indicates that perhaps our background check was not thorough enough. We had received a request from one of our clients to fill a front desk receptionist position and they indicated that it could be a possible “temp to hire” if the person did a good job for them. We filled the position with a woman who had multi line phone and keyboarding experience and seemed to be a good fit for the position.
She had been on the job for two weeks when I received a call in the early afternoon from my client informing me that they no longer needed our employee and that he had sent her home. He proceeded to tell me that when he had returned to the office after meeting with a client our employee was not at her station. He was sure she was there because her purse and jacket were still there. So he went looking for her but couldn’t find her in any of the offices. As he was walking down a hallway he heard noises coming from the broom closet and opened the door. He found our employee and the janitor in shall we say a “compromising” position. Would you believe our employee’s name was Chastity?
After interviewing several candidates for a retail position, I offered a
position to a seemingly eager lady in her mid-20’s. She had the personality, appearance and qualifications to be an asset to our company.
We set up an appointment to sign employment papers and begin training. When she arrived, she did not look as energetic or enthused as I’d remembered, but we proceeded with the paperwork. As she completed her tax information, etc., I noticed her write with an angry tone and slamming paper after paper on the table. When I finally asked her if there was a problem, she looked at me with a glare and cried, “I don’t want this job, I don’t want any job…my husband is making me do this.” After I recovered from my shock, I quickly thanked her for her time and excused her from continuing any further. I don’t think I got out of the doorway fast enough for her escape to freedom.
I was working at a local nursing home and had completed the first part of orientation for our new employees. (Keep in mind this is the first day of employment for this group of new employees.) One of these employees was a recent retiree from GM. Having worked in a staffing company with GM retirees in the past, I felt like I had come across a great employee. Later in the afternoon I had several employees come to my office to inform me that Mr. Retiree was asleep in the resident’s lunch area where he was supposed to be watching the residents eat their lunch! When I went to the lunch room I promptly woke the employee and asked him to come to my office. When I asked him about his behavior he told me that he was allowed to sleep on the job at GM, so he was going to have to get used to staying awake in his new position with us. He did not understand why I let him go when it was just his first day. He didn’t believe me when I said employees usually show their best work ethics on their first day of employment and I was not willing to keep him around to see what his work ethics would like after his probationary period! I guess he learned quickly there was no “union” in his new place of employment.
I used to be on a team that hired for Software Sales reps. They were especially fond of bringing in a lot of candidates and round robin interviewing them over the course of a single day.
During one particularly bad day of interviewing, I encountered the following people who wanted to sell our company’s software:
* A man in a ratty tshirt and board shorts.
* A man who when asked a simple question (something along the lines of “Who would you say is our biggest competitor and why?”) rambled on for 40 minutes and never answered the question. I tried to politely interrupt him several times, but he talked over me. Eventually, I just focused on my watch and waited for him to stop talking. That’s how I know he talked for 40 minutes. Oh, and when he did stop, the last minute or so was stuttering and mumbling incoherently.
* Several candidates did not know what my company did, nor what we sold. One offered up that we sold “computer stuff”.
* One candidate lied to me about how much he had sold in the last year, by a factor of 20. The information was on the resume he had handed me.
* Still another candidate informed me that he didn’t really need this job, because he was already independently wealthy and owned a ton of real estate. He told me this within a minute of sitting down with me.
* Yet another candidate insulted my company. Not as a joke, either. (No, it wasn’t Microsoft)
However, the really notable interview of the day was supposedly our “rock star”. Believe it or not, our HR department claimed to have screened all of these candidates, and while they were the cream of the crop (if so, I would hate to have seen the ones passed over), this particular gentleman was supposedly a shoe-in. In fact, we were told that he even knew that this interview was effectively a formality, and as a result, he requested that we buy him lunch and interview him over lunch. So, that’s what we did.
We took him to the hotel restaurant (we’d been doing all of the interviews at the O’Hare Hilton for convenience, since we’d had several candidates flown in for this), which was pretty empty on a weekday lunch. We ordered drinks, and the star candidate ordered a Coke. It was quickly apparent that this guy was a gesturer, with a little Khruschev thrown in for good measure. He answered with his hands, thrusting them out, gesturing and pointing, then making points by slamming his elbows on the table. The condensation on his glass of Coke had made the glass… slippery. With every point driven home, his Coke shuddered closer and closer to his lap. Finally, he made another point and the glass leaped for his lap.
At this point, we offered to stop the interview, as we helped him clean himself up, but he was insistent that we continue. He asked the waiter for another Coke.
Yeah. You see what’s coming, don’t you?
10 minutes later, he had a second Coke on him, this one more on his shirt than his lap. He was quite literally dripping with Coke. At this point, he became literally catatonic. He sat there, dripping, unresponsive, staring straight ahead. We’d finished eating a while ago, since he had been doing most of the talking, so we tried for a while to get him to react, but he just stayed frozen. My manager then decided that the interview was over and that we needed to get back to the other candidates. As we settled our check on the way out, we pointed out our still seated interviewee at the table and advised the hostess that if he was still there in a few minutes, they should probably call 911.
At the end of the day, we swung back by the restaurant, half expecting him to still be there. We found the hostess, who explained that a few minutes after we left, when they had tried to get a response out of him, he suddenly blinked, looked around confused, then got up and walked out of the restaurant, still dripping, without a word of explanation.
We recently had a prospective hire come in and interview. He did very well in the interview, passed the background and reference checks, and was qualified for the job. However, before we actually hire anybody we have to give them a drug test. I went to the young man and asked, “can you pass a drug test?” The young man replied, “well, not right now…but if you give me few hours I can go get something.” Needless to say, we went a different direction.
Gerry, a very interesting post thanks for writing it!
I vote for Lisa’s story