Because weed is legal here

Oh, Google.

Need I say more?

Well, yes. Yes, I will say more to let you know why I'm saying it in the first place.

[Oh, Yours Truly. You think you are so funny…little do you know…]

An applicant had called in to follow up on his application, so he and I were starting to walk through his work history for the purpose of putting together a rough picture of the kind of worker he was. Early into the conversation, he told me he had recently moved to my state from halfway across the country. Because I can sometimes pull a normal human response out of my backside and fake giving a damn, I asked him why he decided to move here. His response? "Because weed is legal here."

Excuse me, sir, but weed is legal in just about every dang state in the US now. Weed also happens to be legal in all the states surrounding the one he left. Cue my raised eyebrow (well, “eyebrows” since I'm an utter failure at the whole 'raise one eyebrow' thing).

Niceties aside, we got into the nitty gritty of work history, starting with the chronologically most recent gig. He said he was self-employed. Doing what? you ask. Why, he was a self-employed broker. For fourteen years.

Uhh. Cue my 'he's so full of shit' and 'he was probably in prison' radars.

Yes, yes, I can hear the mental 'you're so judgmental' comments through the computer, but, as I've said before, many-a-time, when you've been in recruitment for as long as I have, there are patterns and behaviors and all kinds of other things you eventually learn. Someone who managed to scrape along in the finance industry for fourteen years does NOT, I tell you, NOT end up applying for the type of jobs I am filling. NOT, that is, unless your average self-employed finance broker spent eight hours a day also stamping license plates for that same period of time.

So, what did I learn? For starters, I learned he didn’t have any verifiable work history for the past fourteen years, so he didn’t end up with a job through me. Just for kicks, though, I decided to poke around on Google to see if there was anything else to learn.

[Gasp! 'Oh my gosh, you can't base your hiring decision off what you find on the internet!' You're right, I can't. Technically. But, since I already rejected him and DNU'd his file, I get a free pass for some sleuthing.]

Now, I’ll be the first person to sign up for the “don’t believe everything you read on the internet” petition. But something definitely popped up when I looked up this person's first and last name and the area in which they lived. Yes, I understand it might not have been him since there are people out there with the same name (which is why we use SSN for background checks. So annoying to deal with those pesky 'oops, you had the same name as a serial killer, but that's not you' kinds of issues).

Could this whole thing have been a complete 'guy with the same name in the same area' kind of thing? Absolutely.

But there were too many things between the news story and the information I got from the guy on the telephone to make it seem more than just mere coincidence that Joe Bloe from That State, who was arrested twelve years ago for making and trafficking meth across state lines and sentenced ten years in a state penitentiary, was not my guy.

Self-employed broker for fourteen years? Well, I guess I gotta give him props for creativity. It was my own fault for assuming finance.