A first for me. Had a candidate start an interview, then tell the hiring manager to hold on someone is at the door… client hears… “this room CLEAR,” “bathroom CLEAR,” etc. The client heard the police sweeping the house! The candidate never returns, then the police are in front of the computer and the last thing the hiring manager/client heres is “What is this guy… some kind of YouTuber?” and that’s it. On the plus side, we recieved immediate feedback! :-)… Read More

Several months into my position as the first full-time HR manager for a start-up company in Seattle, I had completed redesigning the layout for the personnel folders. In the process, I noticed that a lot information pertaining to benefits seemed to be less than organized. At that point, I decided it would be prudent to develop a quick reference on all the employees so I could quickly access which benefits each person had.

It was a fun, easy idea at first, which quickly began to snowball. Only… Read More

When a company is planning to do layoffs, the executive and management team tries to keep the proceedings under wraps, having secret off-site meetings, negotiating between departments without letting on about what it going on and trying to keep employees in the dark. Employees catch wind of layoffs very easily if the management team isn’t careful.

I was working at a company and walked into a meeting room where a group of executives had just met. On the board was a list of names that someone had… Read More

As people in the office were putting up Halloween decorations one woman asked that they be place far away from her because she was afraid of spiders. In fact, her exact words were, “Please put those over there. I am deathly afraid of spiders.”

Unfortunately, one of her co-workers thought it would be funny to poke fun at this woman’s fears. This woman was 50-something and was recovering her sight in an eye where she had recently suffered from a detached retina. Her co-worker approached her fro… Read More

Not a manager but for my last job I read over the resumes and made piles of no’s and maybes’. Anyway one of the people put “practicing Christian” in their “other skills” section. One put “really good at yu-gi-oh cards”. Another put the word resume on the center top of their resume… Read More

I work at a gas station that sells “made to order” food. Most people who call out of work will give some type of legitimate excuse as to why they can’t come in, they are sick, etc. One Friday night a 3rd shifter called to say he wasn’t coming in that night. His reason? “I have a life” and hung up… Read More

There was this lady at my first job out of college who would sneak away into the lunch room, which was in the basement of the building and steal lunches. She’d go through all of them taking bites or eating it all. If she took a bite of something she didn’t like, she’d throw it in the garbage. Staff would come downstairs to find their lunches devoured or in the trash with one bite taken out of it. This all came to a head one day when some guy was up in arms after his meatloaf sandwich fell victim… Read More

This time from the Department of Veterans Affairs Careers in Healthcare website… Read More

What Safety Poster?… Read More

I used to manage a Blockbuster video store. After one particularly awful interivew, I walked the candidate out toward the parking lot and the shoplifting detection alarms began to sound. It turned out that the candidate stuffed three DVDs in hus suit jacket before being called to the office for an interview. He did not get the job. Nor did he get Mama Mia, Fools Gold, or High School Musical 3 for that matter!… Read More