Drinking on break

It's super rare...well, maybe not super rare but rare enough...that someone who is very put together comes through our agency. When those rare gems come through, it's always exciting to get them a job and watch them knock it out of the park and grow.

Example: I once hired a new-grad engineer who had turned down an engineering position at an separate company to get an entry-level job at our most-prominent medical device manufacturing client [one of the top R&D medical device companies in the world]. I grilled the kid pretty intensively why he wanted to work there. He was dead set on working at that company because it was a place where he could continue to grow, use his degree, and build a life-long career. He convinced me, and I hired him. Fast-forward several years, and he is now a manufacturing supervisor at that company and actively working toward a promotion. Yeah. He's my greatest success story, and I have no issues bragging about it.

Having hired a unicorn at least once in my career, I now have the occasional hope that I’ll find another one. After all, sometimes those hoofbeats really are zebras.

A guy comes in who is pretty put together and looking for a warehouse/forklift position. [Sidebar: it is rare to have a forklift driver be put together.] We do our best to find him a good fit. He impresses the supervisor during the interview and is offered the position. He settles in at his new role, and we get nothing but positive feedback from the supervisor.

Great. Maybe not full unicorn, but a solid tick in the Win book.

Until a phone call from the supervisor one day with the news that the guy came back from lunch smelling of alcohol, slurring his speech, and unsteady on his feet.

Sigh.

In those situations, we need to do a few different things.

1. Get the guy somewhere safe like the breakroom or an office so he doesn't have an accident.

2. Notify HR.

3. Call the guy an uber to get him home safely (they are not allowed to drive home if there is suspicion of intoxication).

4. Get factual statements from everyone who had interactions with the guy on what they observed.

The supervisor reasonably requests that the assignment be ended based on what happened, so we do, and HR takes over with their investigation because we cannot just assume intoxication (example: it could've been a medical condition).

Depending on the HR investigation, sometimes it's determined the contractor can continue working with us on a separate assignment. If they determine the contractor was, in fact, intoxicated while on the job, they are no longer eligible to work with our company. Perhaps obviously, 99.99% of the contractors who have been under suspicion of intoxication deny it. This guy, however, totally owns up to it. Tells HR he was, in fact and unfortunately, drunk. He'd been an alcoholic for a while and was hoping getting a new job and getting back to work would help keep him sober. Alas, it unfortunately did not, he was terminated, and HR let him know he was ineligible to work with us in the future.

My coworker drove out to get the belongings he had onsite and brought them to our office for the guy to pick them up. He shows up a couple of days later during lunch hour. Since I'm the one who typically covers the office lunch hour and takes break later, I was the one to bring his stuff out to him. He was, once again, very put-together. He apologized for his behavior and what happened. It was really a rather sad affair. I wished him the best of luck in all his endeavors, and he left.

Hopefully he was able to figure things out.