Weird World work

This fabulous tale of a firm’s ‘new starter’ who didn’t look like the person they interviewed is a proper hall of famer

John Plunkett. Updated September 9th, 2024

Here’s a fabulous tale from the world of Reddit, in particular the corner of Reddit called ‘Ask Human Resources’ where it went viral for reasons which will become apparent.

It was shared by @thechosenberg on Twitter and it’s a proper hall of famer.

Here is the story in full, posted by LuciusDickusMaximus on r/askHR

‘The guy who started today is clearly not the guy we interviewed and no one else has noticed

‘Hi all, bit of a weird one here. I helped my team interview a candidate a couple weeks ago. 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. I really liked the guy. He was outgoing and quick, knew what he was talking about to a very high level, and his experience matched.

‘Now normally, I wouldn’t mention ethnicity or physical characteristics as it does not ever factor into my opinion of a candidate. But since it is relevant here, the guy was (I believe) Guatemalan and had a slight accent. He had black curly hair and a stubble. He was also average height.

‘We ran four other interviews for the position and ended up hiring the Guatemalan guy— let’s call him Josh— since he had the experience and there were no red flags in the interview (not that my bosses would have noticed if there were).

‘He was scheduled to start today, so after a morning meeting I swung by his new office to say hello and welcome him to the team. But when I get there all I see is some tall white guy with wavy brown hair. The name plate on the door had Josh’s first and last name, so I asked the guy if Josh was in, kind of assuming he was the IT guy helping set up.

‘The guy said HE was Josh, and the kicker is he also said “It’s great to see you again” and used my name— I hadn’t yet introduced myself. He said it with what I would say is a midwestern accent. I couldn’t interrogate it too far because he was called into some onboarding thing but I was really confused.

‘I ran into my boss afterwards and he said he had a nice conversation with Josh this morning and he feels reaffirmed that we made the right choice. I said “that doesn’t seem to be the guy we interviewed.” I don’t know if he thought it was a joke but my boss said “You’re a quick judge of character, but time will tell if you’re a good one” then laughed and then walked away.

‘No one else seems to have noticed that it’s a completely different guy. I haven’t brought it up outright to anyone yet but want to because this is weird and seemingly fraudulent. I just don’t know how to bring this up to a superior or HR. So I guess that’s question one. Question two is has anyone in HR heard of something like this before? I would think y’all have protocols in place to ensure this doesn’t happen.

‘EDIT: No fucking joke, 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.

‘EDIT 2: To clarify, the interview was in person and about 4 weeks ago.’

An absolute zinger and no mistake.

And here are our favourite things people said about it.

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Source Reddit u/LuciusDickusMaximus H/T Twitter @thechosenberg