Arduinna

Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/08/i-hired-someone-who-wasnt-who-he-said-he-was.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=32416

A reader writes:

I hired someone who presented themselves as a senior-level configurations specialist with over seven years of experience. They interviewed well and said all the right technical answers that convinced me they already knew how to operate the system and would just need to pick up the configuration.

A week before they started, I found an identical application with the same name and contact info, but for a different department — with a completely different resume and job history overlapping the one that had applied for my role. I thought this was very weird, but I decided to give this person a shot, thinking maybe they were a person of many talents. Their LinkedIn profile matched the resume shared with me, so I didn’t question it too much.

Since they started, I progressively gave feedback and suggestions to their work, offered many times to provide any support they needed, gave them a summary of the expectations and job description again after they committed a significant error, and finally gave them an informal coaching document per the guidance of HR. There was no improvement in the three weeks following the coaching document.

Fast forward to terminating this person at the end of their informal trial period. It got to this point after:

• They removed a data entry rule that led to over 100 employees getting shortchanged by a day’s worth of pay (this data entry rule is a basic and common installation a junior-level person could grasp). This mistake still rears its ugly head to this day with a different ripple effect from implementing later enhancements even though we have already corrected the issue.

• It took two to three times longer to design a configuration that is very basic. Even though I checked in on their progress once a week, reviewed their work, and gave feedback based on real-life examples of where their draft design is likely to not work as intended, they didn’t make any changes and tried to pass off their unchanged draft as if they did something.

• The workload that I used to do that was now the new hire’s scope of work barely moved (to their credit, they completed one assignment), so it felt like it more work to manage this person and the existing workload that they were supposed to work on.

• A peer confided in me that they were on a Zoom call with the new hire and could clearly overhear the new hire talking to an unknown person about what to do about a troubleshooting item in our systems.

• Every time I asked this person if they needed anything to help them complete the assignments, any questions, etc, they always said, “I’m good.” They would take more than 24 hours to get back to people about status updates for troubleshooting items (too busy googling for the answers?).

This person, predictably, did not take the news of termination well and used the opportunity to list out all the grievances they had about me even though they had never communicated any of it to me or my manager. I was convinced that I had failed as a new supervisor because I didn’t know any of these grievances that I could take action on.

Several months later, out of morbid curiosity, I looked at their LinkedIn profile, wondering if they had found work similar to the job we hired them for. Turns out they’re now presenting as a senior-level person with 7+ years of Site Reliability Engineering, which is wildly different from the past two resumes they have previously applied with at our company.

Now I’m just more paranoid about screening whatever applicants come by my desk to make sure I’m not hiring an imposter.

I wrote back and asked, “Did you ask them about the second application at all (and if so, what did they say)? And when you interviewed them for the job you hired them for, was the interview in-person or virtual, and did you do any skills testing as part of that process?”

I never asked them about the second application, because at that point I was already onboarding them. This was my first hire and I decided that since I already committed to hiring them, I should give them a chance.

When I interviewed them, it was virtual and the only “skills testing” we could do was asking them questions about what they had done in the past and to explain in detail how they build solutions. We can’t give access to our test sites to non-employees. This person used all the right technical keywords that someone experienced in a specific HR system would know.

Nowadays, a lot of resumes I see have very similar verbiage like this ex-new hire so I don’t know what to trust anymore.

Before you throw up your hands and conclude you can’t trust anything you see from candidates, there’s a lot you can do to ensure that a person actually has the skills they say they have.

First and foremost, you have to test people’s skills and see them in action doing the work they say they can do. Otherwise, it’s entirely too easy for someone to bluff their way through an interview — which happens a ton, because people have an overly-inflated idea of their own skills or they don’t know what they don’t know and so they wrongly estimate how easy it will be to figure things out on the job. Combine that with someone who talks a good game, and you can easily end up with a terrible hire if you don’t bother to verify what they’re claiming. Less commonly, it can even happen for nefarious reasons, like you’ve been targeted by a sketchy company that hires people to interview and then sends someone else to do the job (see this example!).

Seeing people demonstrate their skills is always important, but it’s especially essential when you’re only interviewing virtually. In fact, if at all possible, I’d recommend you do your final interviews in-person because it will help weed out deliberate scams like the letter I linked to … but if you can’t do that, there’s still plenty you can do virtually. You don’t need to have someone go in-person to a test site. You can ask them to whiteboard problems right there in the interview and show their process. Have them share their screen. Pose work questions and ask them to talk you through their answer. Make sure you’re not just asking people to solve a problem, but to explain to you in their own words how they got there, and then ask follow-up questions to probe for real understanding.

If someone’s behavior seems suspicious during an interview — like if they seem to be reading answers off their screen, or they keep having “connection issues” and then magically have the answer as soon as the connection is reestablished — don’t be afraid to address it in the moment. There’s no reason you can’t say, “It looks like you might be reading from notes. Can I ask that you put those away so we can have a less scripted conversation?” or “I’d like you to talk through your work as you’re doing it, so if you’re having connection issues, let’s reschedule for a time when that won’t be the case” or so forth. You don’t want your mindset to be, “This seems suspicious but there’s nothing I can do about it.”

In fact, if anything seems weird when you’re hiring, ask about it! I can kind of see why you didn’t ask about the totally different resume, since people tailor their resumes to the job they’re applying for. There’s no requirement to include everything you’ve ever done, and so your resume for job 1 might highlight A, B, and C while your resume for job 2 highlights D, E, and F … but it really depends on exactly what the differences between the two resumes were. If the work reported on the one resume would have been hard/impossible to be doing at the same time as the work reported on the other resume, that’s not a situation where you want to just figure, “Well, I’m already onboarding them so I should give them a chance.” Instead, that’s a situation where you should talk to them and say, “This didn’t line up with the work we talked about, so I want to ask you about it.” Listen with an open mind — it’s possible there’s an explanation that will make sense — but have the conversation; don’t just ignore it.

You should also always check references before you hire anyone, to confirm that what they’ve told you about their experience and accomplishments is actually their work experience and accomplishments.

And then once someone is on the job, if you see problems right away, address it very assertively. If their skillset appears to be wildly different from what you thought when you hired them, don’t let that drag out for months. If it’s clear that they can’t do the job, have a very direct conversation about the mismatch and bring things to a resolution quickly rather than waiting for the end of a probation period. (To be fair, I’m not sure how long you did let it play out, and it’s possible that it wasn’t long at all.)

If you do enough hiring, you’re going to occasionally make a bad hire. Hiring isn’t a perfect science and managers aren’t infallible. But there’s a lot you can do to weed out actual fraud in the hiring process.

The post I hired someone who wasn’t who he said he was appeared first on Ask a Manager.

https://www.askamanager.org/2025/08/i-hired-someone-who-wasnt-who-he-said-he-was.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=32416