Sometimes it is clear in the first interview that this candidate would be terrible for the job. But what happens if they still get hired? According to these stories, pure chaos! Content has been edited for clarity.
That’s One Way To Call In Sick
“So I hired a young woman, who was only eighteen, to tend to the bar and wait on tables. She seemed pretty enthusiastic, until there was a clear string of events that made her completely unsuitable for the position. This woman could not count change. It was like she literally did not know what the coins looked like, and she kept giving out customers incorrect change. She would also ask the chefs up to five times consecutively where she was going with the dishes. She would also lean up against the till with one arm while serving guests too. The absolute final straw was when I got a call from the local police on her behalf. The police were telling me that this woman had just notified them regarding an incident, and she may not be up for working that day. THat was closely followed up by a phone call from her, asking if the police had phoned me to tell me how she was taking a sick day! Why did she get the police involved to notify me about her sick day? Your guess is as good as mine, I have absolutely no clue!”
They Caught Him Doing What?
“So my boss decided to hire a guy from his home country, without even inviting him to an interview. They did have a Skype call, and to be fair, his CV did read pretty well. Although I did have to point out a couple red flags. There was a very outdated email address, and this guy had a pretty noticeable career change, from a lawyer to a quality assurance tester. Other than that, he did have enough relative experience.
After about a month, the developers and producers began expressing some concerns. They would ask him to do something and have to explain it to him three or four times. Like he was manually testing features for a mobile game. It was hardly rocket science. It should of been a walk in the park for someone with his experience. He started disagreeing with anyone who made suggestions for his work ethic. It was rather bizarre to witness. I raised my concerns to my boss. I tried to cut this fresh hire some slack, because he was still new at that stage.
After about three months, I asked him to do something. I wrote very specific instructions in a public chat channel. After about two hours I asked for an update, also in the channel. I walked over to him, and he was using an online dating app! I asked him the status of the task. He again tried to say how I never asked him to do that. I very calmly got him to navigate to the channel where I had given him the task, which he had actually responded to. He had a very confused look on his face, but he knew that he was caught red-handed. He then proceeded to do the task, but he ended up leaving without it being done. My boss had been reading the conversation and asked me what had happened. I asked to speak to him privately, and we both agreed we weren’t keeping him on past the probation period. This guy was completely shocked when he was told they weren’t extending his contract.”
Always Trust The Instinct
“This all went down back at my previous job a little while ago. The owner of the company had hired a young guy that he apparently knew well and liked enough for the job. I was asked to train this new hire. This new guy played the part of ambitious go-getter pretty well for about two days, but I wasn’t fully convinced. A large part of this position was to make sure that medical instruments we loaned out to hospitals were dropped off and completely accounted for well before a scheduled surgery. We were also responsible for implant material, and if you were dropping them off for a surgery, you had to be extra careful that everything was there in advance and another team member could sign off on them!
Two weeks into this new job, the new hire calls me and tells me that he can’t drop off the equipment because he doesn’t have enough room in his car. He drove this brand new massive SUV, while I drove an older and beat-up sedan. It wasn’t that he didn’t have the space, he just didn’t want to risk the equipment damaging his brand new interior, let’s be honest. I told him how easily I was able to get all of the equipment into my own car, and that this new hire really needed to figure this sort of thing out on his own! He simply replied with a brief, ‘Okay!’ and that was that. I thought nothing of it, until I realized that his ‘figuring it out’ meant that he just would not do it at all! How on earth did he think that was acceptable! That sort of action was usually a death sentence for someone in that business, but apparently the owner liked him enough to overlook it. How the heck could he get away with this behavior?! This new hire worked with us for about six months, and then he weaseled his way into a promotion with a competitor in a different territory. I heard through the grape vine that this guy pulled the exact same shenanigans at this new place! He convinced the company to hire two new guys under him to drive the equipment back and forth, because he simply refused to do it! But at least there was some karma to come from such lazy actions on his part. He ended up getting fired in less than three years at that company. He is completely out of the industry now. That very first phone call I had with him signaled to me that he was going to be a terrible hire, and it turned out that I was right! Always trust your gut instinct!”
That Will Definitely Get You Fired
“So I worked pretty closely with my manager in the IT department, and I helped our with our new hires. I was leaving, so the manager decided to hire a replacement and asked me to train him while manager left to go on vacation. This vacation was planned well in advance, and my own manager didn’t know I was planning on leaving when he scheduled it, but it is what it is. My manager had done the interviewing of this new guy through video chatting and a phone call to get him hired, so he never actually met the guy in person. Anyway, this new guy starts and seemed motivated and chill. The only thing was that he knew nothing about IT, which was honestly alright, as long as he was willing to learn.
This dude kept going to the kitchen to take a break and get snacks. He would actually disappear for up to twenty minutes here and there quite often, clearly just slacking off. I communicated to my boss about the new hire here and there, and I told him what exactly was going on. I told him how the new guy seemed to be slacking off, but I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, I didn’t actually know the extent of what was really going on.
I show up for work the next day, and new dude showed up about the same time. But he of course went to the kitchen right away, and I didn’t check up on him. That wasn’t really my job anyway, since he was a grown adult. My own manager comes back to work that day and asks me where new guy was. So I told him he was in kitchen. The very next thing I knew, the new hire was being walked off of our premises. It turned out that he was fully asleep on the couch in the kitchen, which caused him to be fired immediately!”
Watch Out For The Flash
“So I have two stories from the restaurant industry. This guy had been a relatively new hire, and he was a promising dude for a kitchen position. He actually showed up forty five minutes late for his interview? His reasoning? Apparently he ran into somebody that he knew! We let him stage the restaurant for an hour or so, and the best we could say was that he wasn’t entirely incompetent. I gave him a free meal and just sent him on his way.
I had also recently hired this twenty something kid to run the food. That was it, just run the food for us. I wanted to give him a day or two to get acclimated, since I wasn’t a total monster. But By the third day, it was pretty clear that he had no real concept of the ‘running’ aspect of the food running. We had already nicknamed him ‘The Flash’ as a joke. We spoke with him about the need for speed and attentiveness. Then we simply watched him basically wander around the kitchen and dining room in a daze. Not he wasn’t on any illegal substances mind you, he was just absolutely clueless. I had to can him at the end of the week, which was honestly pretty generous.
In this industry, it is really based on gut feeling and not much else. The more experience you have, the more you can gauge that sort of thing. Almost all of the time, you’re right about this feeling. We are a peculiar species, and it takes a particular personality to do this sort of job. For me, I’m not ‘alpha’ enough for the upper management, and I am way okay with that, but I’m just insane enough to fit in. And like any job, you can figure out pretty quickly if somebody is serious enough to work out. There is this combination of experience and commitment, plus a little bit of masochism, that equates success in restaurants. But in hiring, it really just is a matter of intuition and observation on your part. But there was no real helping this kid, no matter how much we talked to him. He was a very spoiled college kid, with his parents paying his way. He had a couple of other jobs in the past that his parents had found for him, but this was the very first time that he had found a job on his own, because he finally wanted to move out of his parents’ house. That was commendable, but the issue was how he had absolutely no work ethic, and he had no real concept of how to actually attain one. I felt really bad for the entitled kid.”
How Did He Get Hired?!
“I worked relatively high up in this pretty easy to grasp quick service type of job. Our store manager was transferring to another location closer to home, and the new district manager went above all of us and hired someone who was probably the first person that he even interviewed. You’ll understand why in a minute. This guy had previously worked at some post office package job, and he admitted that he left because that place would not make him a manager there. So this place that we all worked at had a very close knit community of workers, who were pretty close with the local neighborhoods. The previous store manager was very talkative and very involved with initiatives in the local area. He would do things like hire local jazz artists to play in the lobby, the adults would always ask about him, and even the kids knew him as a cool local celebrity. The only way that a new hire was going to succeed at this store was if he got to know all of the local customers and learn their drink orders, which I knew, along with the other current staff members. When the newly hired store manager came around one day to check out his new store, I asked him if he wanted to meet with and get to know some of the many customers that he would be serving.
This man looked me dead in the eye and plainly stated, ‘Oh no, I don’t actually care about those people. I really care about making money.’
As you can imagine, the store morale completely plummeted after we all learned exactly what the new manager’s priorities really were. He would schedule his own shifts working on the floor during peak hours of business, only to not show up whatsoever. He would also sometimes show up for fifteen minutes, only to leave shortly thereafter. He had a new baby at home, and that would be the only thing he would talk about when he wasn’t talking about making money. Oddly enough, he would have various suspicious women meet him at work, so we all figured that he was having multiple affairs with his wife. One time, I had to call in sick to work because I had a horrible case of strep throat. There was no one else who could take over my shift except for that manager. He had to go in to close the store down. This complete moron kept texting me periodically throughout that shift, asking me how to do the most basic managerial tasks. It was so crazy. How was it possible that he had not learned these procedures already and still got hired for this job?! Thankfully, this manager eventually got in trouble with a different district manager, and this store manager was finally fired. I actually quit my job long before that, because I had totally had it with this moron’s actions. Nobody should have to put up with a person like that day in and day out!”
Why Not Try Common Sense?
“This happened years ago by this point. There was an incident with the city’s drinking water, and it was up to my department to investigate the matter. We had to go out door to door and take water samples from each person’s house. I went out on the first day and collected a sample from number 100 of a suburban street. The very next day, one of my newly hired employees went out. It didn’t take her very long to come back into the office, and she told me how she couldn’t find number 100 house to collect another sample from. Apparently she was able to find the houses 99 and 101 though. I nearly burst out laughing at her. I asked her if she tried looking across the street, since the house addresses were divided up by odd and even numbers on each side of the street. She just stared at me, completely dumbfounded, and she walked away in pure embarrassment and shame. I don’t think that new hire lasted very long in this position. She had lived in the country this story takes place in (New Zealand) for all of her life, she she seriously had no excuse. It’s called common sense, why not try it out? Or at least turn around and check out all of your surroundings!”
How To Fail Upwards
“Oh man, do I have a great awkward mishap of a story! This happened before quarantine, so don’t be worried that everyone was so out and about like they were in this story. I was working at a pretty large engineering firm, and there were two types of people that I always worked alongside with. The first type were the very intelligent people who got the job and kept it based off of their prior experience and high performance. The second type included those who had a STEM degree of some kind, typically at least a master’s degree. This could be in math, engineering, or computer science for anyone not familiar with the acronym STEM. Maybe they didn’t have as much performance history, but they were specifically qualified for this positon. I had been working at this company for quite a while, and I needed to fill in a new spot. My team focused on an interesting mix between project management and technical comprehension, so we were looking for someone with some experience in both of these categories. A recruiting company we had used found a candidate for us, who I’ll call ‘Britney’.
We ended up conducting this series of round robin interviews, and Britney gave us a presentation on her prior work experience. During the interview, I directly asked her, ‘If you weren’t at work one say in your previous position, what wouldn’t have gotten done?’ I was pretty skeptical about her responses in her presentation, so I really just wanted to cut to the chase here. She replied how solid her team was, so nothing would have been left unfinished. Great, Britney just tole me she was professionally useless in her last position. And her presentation itself was just about as impressive as her impromptu answer. There were several points in her presentation where she could have demonstrated actually impressive scientific inquiry and research she had completed. But when I asked if she made those findings herself, she told me how that was always provided to her by someone else. To make a long presentation short, she was really demonstrating the fact that she could plug a few numbers into a formula for us, based on her experience at her former job. This was literally the equivalent to a high school science homework question. Britney was applying to a multi-billion dollar engineering firm with plenty of Phd and MS degrees in the building, so she would need to demonstrate some more critical thinking here. One of the upper manager above me just straight up walked out of the presentation interview. He exclaimed out loud how he would have rather chewed on glass instead of witnessed that interview. It was brutally rough to phrase it like that, but at least he was being honest here?
It was obviously a no from me in regards to hiring Britney. Our senior tech lead at the time made what I believe to be a massive error here. He was a great guy to work with, but I think this was a huge oversight on his part. For some reason, he saw something in Britney and recommended her as a new hire for our firm. She ended up getting hired, as this senior tech lead’s vote carried more weight than mine. It was rather frustrating, but it was understandable, given how high up in the company he really was. Six months later, all of Britney’s work had been redistributed and given to myself and several other team members. She still failed to grasp basic concepts we reviewed in the work place, and she was effectively a net negative on the team. Somehow she was eventually transferred to being a manager in another division, since she has some pretty good managerial experience, and it was clear that she couldn’t actually do the technical aspects of her initial position. We were all working at a non-American company, so the firing process would have been especially difficult to complete. I have since heard form the other division that Britney has been terrible at that job too. It is honestly impressive that she has stayed here as long as she has without doing any work competently. It’s weirdly inspiring in a way!”
Don’t Say That Out Loud!
“So I work on an Air Force Base, and I had a hand in bringing several new recruits on board with us. Of the new people joining our team, one of them was an older gentleman who seemed to have extensive experience on another base previously. On the very first day, during the new employee orientation, we had to cover employee harassment in the workplace. There was one section that consisted of a specific scenario to read out loud, which included two male coworkers talking about an attractive female coworker and saying very inappropriate things about her. I went over why that was especially wrong with my new recruits, and that was when this old timer piped up with a comment. He told me, ‘Yeah, but there sure are some lookers up on this base though!’
I didn’t even know what to say. I tried my best to address this comment as best as I could in the moment, but what do you say to that? It was pretty awkward with all of the other recruits in the room staring at him in horror, and the tone of the event made a big shift afterwards. This older guy is still employed for now, but I worry about how long he will last with that attitude. I know he is set in his ways, but why couldn’t he have just kept that comment to himself? It didn’t benefit anyone, and it only served to make things much weirder around him during the work day! I mean he could have said something worse, I guess? WHo knows what other weird comments he is just waiting to drop on us!”
No Wonder She Was Having So Much Trouble
“I had just actually hired eight people for the same role, with the intent to see their performance and which one of them would actually stick around in the long-term. Unfortunately, I can already tell that one of these new hires definitely was not going to make it. I would give her every chance that I could and coached her as much as possible, all with the intent of getting her to stay on, because finding someone else was already too much work as it was! Unfortunately, it did not take very long for me to see how she could not keep up with the workload. That work is being slowly yet surely transitioned to another new hire, who definitely will be taking on the job permanently from her. This woman had actually expressed to me several times how she was used to being told what to do all the time in a job. In her position, she needed to make her own decisions and critically think, and I am not sure that is something I can really teach her or coach her into doing. What a pity!”