Worker Asks What To Do After New Hire Shows Up On Their First Day & Is 'Clearly Not The Guy We Interviewed' — And No One Has Noticed
The guy even pretended to be the interviewee on LinkedIn.
Voronaman | Shutterstock.com We all know job interviews are a nightmare, and most of us would never endure one ever again if we could help it.
Still, most of us accept these things as just a part of life and do them anyway. But one man that a worker on Reddit encountered seems to have resorted to extreme measures to skip out on this process — at least, that's how it appears because what's actually going on with him is a total mystery.
A new hire showed up for their first day at the office and was clearly a different person than was interviewed.
Right off the bat, this sounds like something out of an SNL sketch or some farcical Jim Carrey movie. And it may well just be someone's Reddit comedy bit, but it sure doesn't sound like it.
The worker added their Reddit post to the AskHR subReddit in hopes of getting some advice on what the heck to do about this incredibly bizarre situation.
"The guy who started today is clearly not the guy we interviewed," they wrote, "and no one else has noticed."
The man who nailed the interview was Guatemalan and had an accent.
To be clear, the Redditor was not just someone who met the interviewee in passing and might be misremembering. It was an in-person interview, and they were pretty much leading the process.
"I helped my team interview a candidate a couple of weeks ago," they wrote in their post. "By 'helped' I mean, I asked all the questions and engaged with the candidate while my bosses worked on their own projects and half-listened."
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So if anyone knows the guy, it's this Redditor. And they instantly took a liking to the candidate, saying that he had a great personality and really knew his stuff when it came to the field and the job itself.
After interviewing several other candidates, they decided the man, named Josh, was definitely the one for the job "since he had the experience and there were no red flags in the interview (not that my bosses would have noticed if there were)."
"Since it is relevant here," they added, "the guy was (I believe) Guatemalan and had a slight accent. He had black curly hair and stubble." What came through the door weeks later was the opposite of all that.
The man who showed up was tall, white, and American — so different that the Redditor assumed he was an IT guy.
On Josh's first day, the Redditor was surprised when he went to his office to welcome him and found "some tall white guy with wavy brown hair." They didn't think much of it at first, assuming he was a guy from IT helping set up Josh's workspace.
But, "the guy said HE was Josh," and even added, "'It’s great to see you again'" and called the Redditor by name even though they hadn't introduced themself yet.
Josh then got called into an onboarding meeting, so the Redditor couldn't ask any questions, but they quickly went to talk to their boss — who hadn't even noticed the difference. "I said 'That doesn’t seem to be the guy we interviewed,'" they wrote, but their boss thought they meant something about Josh's demeanor and laughed it off.
"No one else seems to have noticed that it’s a completely different guy," they added, and they don't know what to do because the situation is so "weird and seemingly fraudulent."
Making it even weirder, they updated their post to add that "seconds after posting this I got a connection request from Josh on LinkedIn — the profile picture is the white dude but his cover photo is the Guatemalan flag."
fizkes | Shutterstock
So-called 'bait-and-switch job interview fraud' or 'proxy interviewing' is an increasing trend — but it's usually only done in online interviews.
People in HR say situations like these are happening with more frequency, especially in IT and tech — but usually online in online interviews.
In 2022, Business Insider interviewed several employers, recruiters, and business professionals who all said that amid the hiring frenzy that occurred during the "Great Resignation," they'd caught several people running scams like this.
HR and workplace advice writer Alison Green, author of the website "Ask A Manager," said she too has heard about several cases in which someone "Cyrano de Bergerac’d their interview," especially in the tech and IT fields where not just interviews but the jobs themselves are frequently online.
In many cases, the job applicant has actually paid someone to do their "proxy interview," similar to how students have long paid people to take standardized tests in their stead. One Reddit commenter said they'd caught four people doing it at their job just in the last year.
But it's one thing to pull this off online in a virtual interview. Faking an interview IN-PERSON? That's a whole new level of bold! People suggested the worker contact IT to see if there was any security footage to prove that "Interview Josh" and "Actual Josh" are, in fact, different people.
Hopefully, that does the trick because there's no other way to really prove anything in this hilariously bizarre scenario. But if nothing else, as many others pointed out, it's at least one heck of a story.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.