My new recruit was secretly working a second full-time job

Inc.com columnist Alison Green answers questions about workplace and management issues: from how to deal with a micro-managing boss< /em> how to talk to someone on your team about body odor.

A reader asks:

My company has hired someone to start in January as a Sales Development Representative. At the time, he told me he lived about an hour and a half away, but would be moving soon to be closer to his work.

A few weeks later, he called me and said he was going through some family issues. His wife had been diagnosed with a serious illness and was unable to watch over her two young children on her own in case something happened to her. He told me that being an hour and a half away from his family wasn't going to work for him. I'm a family-first person, so I found a temporary solution so he could work from home. He then told me that it was difficult for him to do his job because he was taking care of the children. We have set up a schedule for him to do some of his work after his kids have gone to bed and when they have naps.

Every week, he couldn't do all his work and came with family excuses, including that his wife was in the hospital. A few months later, I told him it wasn't working because he wasn't able to handle both situations and he needed to be with his family. It then went to PTO. Throughout he kept telling me it would be temporary and once his wife got back he would be back.

Eventually we agreed that he could no longer work here and take care of his family and he gave notice. Shortly after, I noticed on his LinkedIn page that he had another company listed as his employer since January. I was confused and thought maybe he had already found a job where he lived and he faked his start date to eliminate a gap in the job since he didn't list at all my organization. I was curious, so I called his new company's human resources department and they checked on a mid-January start date.

I was floored. The whole time he was working for us and we were trying to accommodate him, he was working another full-time job for the same hours. What recourse does my company have (if any) to recover their wages?

Green responds:

You probably won't be able to get his salary back. It's not illegal to hold two jobs at once, and it's not illegal to be a bad employee.

You tried to be nice and accommodating to someone who told you they were in a difficult personal situation, and they took advantage of it. But it's probably not money you can get back, and your efforts to get it back could end up costing way more than it's worth.

Of course, it never hurts to talk to a lawyer anyway if you're curious! But make sure you don't throw good money after bad, especially if it's just the principle of the thing that drives you.

I'm curious how this all turned out! Did he give both jobs a chance at some point and plan to quit one of them once he picked the one he liked best? Was there a time when he really thought he could do both? Or was it nothing more than a scam all along: he got two job offers and figured he might as well take both and get paid for both as long as he could? Is there a third company he still "works" for?

The situation is particularly unfortunate because the next time a new employee is in a bad situation and needs special accommodations to get them through it, you'll think about that situation - and you might give less thanks to that person because of what that guy did.

With remote work being much more prevalent than before, employers are increasingly aware of it. If you could go back and start over, I would suggest you talk to the employee sooner about the total lack of work you were seeing...