Hiring managers of Reddit, what's your favorite "They were perfect until we Googled them" story?

1. I was interviewing a much older guy for a similar position of mine. Everything seemed okay, and he was our best candidate. Before moving forward, I did a quick google search to only find out that he was fired from his previous job because of stealing $5000 worth of computer equipment. My director hired him anyway.
   — inspeck


2. Everything looked good on her resume, she was very professional and enthusiastic in her interview and just had that...thing. That self-starter attitude that made you feel like "this girl is going to get shit done". Wellll...ran a background check and literally nothing checked out. She was not actually licensed in her field like she claimed and she had about a dozen priors for various white collar crimes and none of her work history or references checked out. I guess she was just hoping that her charisma would win us over and that we wouldn't bother checking up on her.
   — uhB4


3. Oh, I've got a good one. We had hired a new entry-level graphic designer. Let's call him Will. He had talent and a decent portfolio, but there were some strange things right from the beginning For example he would always come in wearing expensive suits, despite our being a jeans-and-t-shirt office, and his having a very low-paid position. We didn't care much about that. No clue how he affords that wardrobe, but that's none of our business. He's a designer, and I guess he likes to look nice. The weirdest thing was that he adamantly refused to accept direct deposit for his paycheck. He wanted a physical check every other week. Strange, but okay. Designers are eccentric sometimes. So, one evening we're all working really late on a project together. We've got some bottles of wine around, some pizzas, etc. It's miserably long hours but we're a good team and having a good time. All of a sudden Will looks up from his computer and fugging runs as fast as he can out the door. Not a word to any of us, he just dashes out. We all look at eachother, try calling him, etc, with no answer. We finish up the project and go home still wondering what happened. The next day Will doesn't come into work. He doesn't come in the next day either. We try calling his emergency contact, but don't get any response there either. So we Google him, and see the FBI press release. Turns out he was arrested about 500 miles from our office a few hours after he ran out. I guess he got a tip that the FBI was onto him and decided to make a run for it. Turns out he had been defrauding payroll companies for years, to the tune of about $1M. That's why he didn't want direct deposit for his paycheck. What he didn't know was that we processed our physical checks through the same payroll company as our direct deposit, and they reported his new address to the FBI. Oops.
   — anschauung






4. Not the hiring manager but I was the intern responsible for checking references and running backgrounds at our company and this was in my first week where I was just learning how to go about things. This guy did great in the interview so I got the go ahead to run a background check and call his references. Something popped up in his background so I had to call the police station to figure out how to get a copy of the police report since whatever happened had just happened. I talked to someone on the phone and gave them a his name and who I was and what I was calling for. After doing so, whoever I was talking to didn't know how to go about obtaining the information on her end. She put me on a brief hold then took a call back number and promised to call me back with some info. Well, it's a good thing neither of us knew what to do because I received a call from the police department less than an hour later. An officer told me "I'm really not supposed to be doing this but I just wanted to let you know that _interview guy_ had been arrested for a carjacking a woman and that woman works at your company" He saw the company name and the guys name and warned us. I'm so grateful too. Edit: woohoo! My first gold! Wubbalubbadubdubbb! Edit 2: Let me clarify the timeline a bit. The woman was already working here, the guy applied, had a phone interview, then got called for an in person interview and while we were still interviewing other candidates, this is when the crime was committed so by the time I got a green light to pull the background check so that we could offer employment, it had been at least a month.
   — oooohweeeee


5. Hiring private tutors to work with middle School students. Had a great conversation with a girl, she stressed how much she wants to be a role model for young girls, basically exactly what we were looking for. Then I googled her and the first picture on her Facebook is her doing a line.
   — shankliest


6. I wasn't the hiring manager but my teammate was - a candidate came through that he and some other members interviewed and seemed pretty okay for the job until they checked her out. Turns out she was suing the company (yes, the one she applied for a job for) so my teammate ended up not hiring her.
   — Miya81






7. I wasn't the hiring manager but I was talking to him about a couple interviews he had coming up. He said he looked up one guy and found that he'd been arrested previously for various identity theft/credit card fraud crimes. This position involved taking payments from customers, among other things, so obviously this guy would not be hired, but that had to be an awkward interview.
   — cassiopeia1280


8. I was a restaurant manager and the owner hired this guy as a chef without doing basic research (which he did a few times). Anyways, the guy said he had won several awards and worked with celebrities, etc. The guy was a total dick to everyone on staff. I decided to google him. First hit is a mugshot from a drug arrest. Then more articles, one about where he lied about getting a James Beard award from a previous restaurant he worked at. A comment about him owing 25,000 or something to his former boss. The only positive restaurant review he had was from 1990. I came in after the weekend to show my boss this stuff, when I learn he was fired the night before for exposing himself to one of the waitresses.
   — poopship462


9. Had a guy apply for an enrty level post with us recently. His CV was okay, so we offered him an interview. Social media seemed okay too. He never turned up for the interview. A couple of weeks later, there's a story about him in the local paper. Turned out that he was living at the local boarding house, and was found in the kitchen one morning totally wasted, wearing nothing but a pair of socks. When a couple of women who also lived there tried to escort him back to his room, he got violent and assaulted them. Given the dates stated in the paper, he didn't turn up because he'd been in jail at the time of the interview. His resume has now been added to the 'do not touch with a 10ft barge pole' section in our filing cabinet.
   — bookpixie






10. Candidate listed employment history as "Director of Finance" for a company I had never heard of. But, there are a lot of fish in my pond and you can never know them all. Resume looked good, nice and clean, good experience, great education, immaculate credentials. Except none of it was real. The company was real, when I checked their filings with the state it turns out it was the candidate's own company, it had no physical location, and didn't actually offer any product or service. The phone number went to a cell phone that was answered by an "assistant," who it turns out was the candidate himself. None of the other companies he listed on his resume had any record of him ever working there. Then we googled the guy himself, turns out he was awaiting trial for sexual assault. His plan must have been to dazzle us with his credentials, get a glowing recommendation from the "CEO" of the "company" he "worked for," and have us be so impressed we would just hire him without any due diligence. Sad part is some company's probably going to.
    — SIave


11. This kid, early 20s comes in for a job, seemed normal enough. Google him and he was wanted in another state for stabbing a St. Bernard to death.
    — washthatdickson