The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed (2022)

This happened at my last job before retirement, before the pandemic. I heard later about it, there was a phone interview, things went well. The candidate was Indian, it was for a Salesforce admin or developer position, contractor, guy answered the questions well, etc. etc.

The guy that showed up barely spoke, could barely speak English, and could barely log in to Salesforce. I mentioned that the phone candidate was Indian because my guess is that the pair thought that the Americans wouldn't notice the difference but some of our people on the call were Indian and definitely noticed the difference in accents between phone guy and in person guy.

New guy lasted less than a day, was escorted out. Recruiter apologized A LOT.

chuckle I don't know if that is true or not, but what I do know is true is that he isn't the same person they thought they interviewed---because technical interviews these days bear no relationship to the kinds of qualities actually needed for the job.

Even him being inconsistent about whether he was married or not makes perfect sense if you think about it this way: it's actually illegal to ask a candidate whether they are married or not, and for a good reason: married ones are discriminated against. Given 10 equally good candidates, why not pick the one with no home responsibilities, whose wife won't carp about relocating, etc etc.

Note, I described it as "making perfect sense" not as "being the right thing to do." Personally, its a line I wouldn't cross, but man, its BRUTAL out there right now, and in this post-truth world we are now living in, you know that chances are the company isn't being straight-up about absolutely every aspect of what its like working their either.

I can understand if an applicant approached the process not as giving testimony in court, but more like a poker game, where bluffing is an integral part of the process.

This happened to us. Interviewed someone and when the new guy arrived in the US he had no experience in our particular product like the other guy and he couldn’t understand what we were saying.

This happened at a former job. Once we determined that the guy looked, sounded, and behaved differently than during the interview process, HR got right on it and he was gone within a day.

A couple of years ago at a company I was working at, we tested an offshore staffing company.

First try: the person we interviewed ended up NOT being the person that the following week was assigned to work for us.

Second try: during the interview (voice only, shared screen for technical test, no video was allowed) we are pretty sure that someone else was feeding them the answers to our questions (probably chat) and was actually doing the test using the keyboard and mouse.

2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30150343

1118 upvotes, 599 comments

Some more anecdotes from then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30150343

Any lie while doing business should be prosecuted as fraud.

Heraclitus would say: What did you guys really expect?

This has been going on in 2004. This happened to us as well.