What is your funniest recruiting story?

I was talking to an old recruiter friend of mine today and he was telling this great story about a hire gone bad, but it was very funny, and I realized that as recruiters we probably see more and hear more than anyone else. So in an effort to lighten to stress of these crazy times I want to here your funniest recruiting story.

I'll start with mine....

In an office in a far far away land there once worked a recruiter who hired an extremely talented and highly sought after engineer. This engineer moved to area for this great position at the recruiters client site. When he arrived it was time to do all the required paperwork, you know I9's, benefit forms etc. During this rather long orientation he started to ask a question about the cost of the benefits the recruiter unsure of an answer came to get me and asked me to help out. I arrived in her office and started speaking to the wonderfully talented engineer when he abruptly stood up and asked where the restroom was. Quickly we pointed and gave directions as he peed his pants. He left to visit the restroom and then returned to office where he proceeded to act as if nothing happened and sat down in the same chair and went right back to work filling out his paperwork. While I felt sorry for the wonderfully talented engineer I was very perplexed at his behavior AFTER the accident. Many years later it's just a funny recruiting story.

Your turn....

Ok keep it clean, keep it funny, keep it confidential.... no candidate names.

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Marc Trebels on November 11, 2008 at 9:12am

You're absolutely right Vikki, I think that we as recruiters come across a lot of funny ~~people~~ situations....

One situation that came to my mind was the one with a candidate that had a very peculiar taste of style when it comes to his clothes.
Being a technical IT guy, he just did not care so much for appearances.
The first time we met him, it was pretty clear we could not let him go to our client, a somewhat conservative financial institute, looking like that.
So we tried carefully to persue him to wear, at least for the interview, some more commonly accepted cloathes-to were-on-a-job interview...
Just to be sure we asked him to stop by our office first before he went to our client.
And sure enough, when the candidate walked into our office, the whole office fell to a silence.
In came this guy, that looked like a mixture of someone out of Saturday Night Fever vs Revenge of the Nerds.
He had borought an old green (!) suit from his dad, which may have been the right thing to wear during the 70's but definitely was not the right thing to wear these days, a orange shirt with on top some old blue-ish sweater. And to finish this in style, a pair of orange sneakers underneath this all !

Clearly he made an impression but we did not wanted to risk taking the attention away from his technical skills to much...so with an hour and a half to go before the interview, we took him to a mall near by and bought him a pair of jeanos, a brown pair of shoes and a nice shirt and send him of to our client.
Sure enough he got the position and the guy was very thankfull for our "extreme makeover" advise !