A company looking to hire a Chief Marketing Officer asked us to look at the leading candidate. He turned out to have omitted employment at a public company, and came up in a search of securities filings. He claimed that this company had asked him to do unethical things. We interview the CEO of his former employer, who told us he had been fired for being extremely lazy. The CEO and his company had never been alleged to have done anything unethical. In the end, our client decided not to hire the individual.

Our bill was $2,000.

This was fairly straightforward because the resume omission was so blatant: the only public company for which he had worked. We needed to expand the scope of the investigation to look at his former employer to deal with his allegations of misdeeds, and then we had to interview the former employer.

It is not always the case that lying and poor conduct come to the surface as quickly as they did here. Following his inability to get a job with our client, the candidate started his own company and removed all prior employment history from his LinkedIn account.