A Guide to Avoiding Hirer’s Remorse

Dealing with life’s personnel-ities

By Ed Goldman

Are you your company’s HR director? And you’ve still opted to live?

How do you do it in this day and age when you can hire people, pay to relocate them cross-country and then have them resign three weeks into the new job—thanking you, on their way out the door, for having accommodated their move? (This really happened to a company exec I used to know. He couldn’t decide whether to sue the bastard or have him iced, gangland style. Trying to be helpful, I suggested he do both, just to “send a message.” I have no idea what he decided on—and you didn’t just read this, if you get my drift.)

Hiring freeze

Well, maybe you should’ve thought twice about the individual you on-boarded but should probably have water-boarded. Here’s a 20-point guide to help you avoid hirer’s remorse. It would have been a 25-point guide but I ran out of toner and somebody iced my supplier. I may have to change-up my network.

When you say, “Remember, there’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’” and his response is, “There isn’t?”
Told he can ask questions, the job applicant for your accounting firm asks, “Will there be much math required?”
Asked if she has any special skills as an illustrator, she says, “Well, I’m ambidextrous, but not in both hands.”

When you ask where he envisions himself five years from now, he replies, “In your job. But why should it take that long? ”
Told the job she’s applying for will require her to be in the office five days a week, she asks “Which week?”
Asked why he wants to leave his current job, he says, “They asked too many questions about my arrest record.”
Queried on what she thinks are her weaknesses, she says, “In all candor, I fantasize about murdering my co-workers.”
In presenting you with his résumé, he says, “This should prove beyond a doubt that one canmake a living writing fiction.”

During the routine medical exam before being hired, he suggests to the company nurse that if hehas to unbutton his shirt, she should have to, as well.
When told she may occasionally have to travel overseas for the job, she says she’ll be happy to once Interpol returns her passport.
Also on the question of travel, he volunteers that he’s bi-lingual. Then he shakes his head and laughs. “Sorry, I meant bi-polar.”
She asks how many sick days she can accrue in the first month on the job.

When told that for the first six months he’ll be a probationary employee, he says, “Oh, not a problem. My probation ended last year.”
Asked if she had any mentors, he cites her mom, older sister and parole officer.
In the section of his application asking him about his hobbies, he writes “Girls! Girls! Girls!”—then adds in parentheses, “Any age, weight, height or ethnicity. It’s not like I’m a male chauvinist pig or anything!” then adds this emoji 🐷
Filling in the blank for the make and color of the car he drives, he writes, “Changeable, depending on hot-wiring challenges.” (He then adds, “But I love challenges!”)

In the category of “Family” she says, “We’ve stopped referring to ourselves that way. Same goes for the terms “don,” “capo” and “godfather.”
If you tell the applicant, “Walk me through your resume,” try not to be offended when the response is, “Okay, but it’s a pretty long walk—and you don’t look as though you take many of those.”
When you ask, “How’d you hear about this job?” be on guard if the answer is, “My cellmate had the LinkedIn app.”
You’ll naturally want to ask, “Why’d you leave your last job?” Try to keep an open mind when you’re told, “Well, we could hear the police sirens in the distance and since we already had the money in the trunk, I said to my co-workers,, ‘Hey hanging around the bank seems inadvisable under the circumstances.’ I think I have pretty good judgment.”

Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).