Arshia Kaur, founder of beauty brand Tint Cosmetics, recently took to Instagram to share what she called a "hiring horror" story. In a series of videos, Ms Kaur opened up about the many challenges of running a startup, and shared a shocking hiring experience that left her short on time, money and trust. She revealed that her company hired a person for the Head of Marketing position who looked "amazing" on paper, but failed to deliver on every task assigned to him.
"He looked amazing on paper... everything seemed extremely legit," Ms Kaur said. But within three weeks, the new employee struggled to communicate with the team or management, failed to deliver on assigned tasks, and offloaded work onto other employees. Ms Kaur said that the new hire was eventually fired, and it was later that they realised that the person had faked his entire CV and generated fake salary slips to land the job.
"He walked us through his previous work. All the growth he had done for his previous company and everything looked extremely legit because we actually saw the backend," Ms Kaur said in the clip. However, when he started failing at his tasks, the employee was fired - just two and a half months after he had joined.
Ms Kaur then wondered why the person wasn't able to deliver. She started rechecking his documents. "We went through his salary slips, letters of recommendations, etc, and found out that the person scammed the company with fake salary slips," she revealed. "It was all fake. We got completely duped," Ms Kaur said, showing screenshots in her Instagram post.
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"Honestly, as founders, this was such a huge wake-up call, and it's so important to do your due diligence and make sure that if something seems fishy, you need to ask questions early," she said towards the end of another video on the same scam.
"When you're bootstrapped, every single penny matters; it's shed-earned money. You cannot pay people whatever they ask for - founders, please don't do this. It's your right to have the correct information about anyone you've decided to hire!" she advised.
