A friend who runs an event management company (let's call him Roger) recently shared with me what has to be one of the ultimate employer's nightmares: An employee who evades all the verifications of her background and then proceeds to nearly implode your company in just a couple of weeks!

Roger's company was seeking representatives to sell booth space in one of their upcoming trade shows. The lady (let's call her Sally) showed up with a sterling resume and excellent references, and she also talked a good game. She was slick, she was smart, she was poised, and she had superlative market knowledge.

Of course all her references were checked out. They were all from the other side of Canada, but with today's mobility of individuals that didn't necessarily raise any red flags. Besides, her common law husband (let's call him Jay) was the partner in a major cell phone retailer in the city, thus there were no real reasons to smell anything fishy.

As it turned out it wasn't just smelling a bit fishy: It was going to end up smelling worse than a fly-clouded Portuguese cod market in August!

She passed the training with flying colors, asked all the right questions at the right times, demonstrated that she truly had the potential to be a major sales star for the company, then with all of the company's official sales materials under her arm, she dutifully marched off to make personal calls on the various retailers in the area to pitch them trade show booth space.

The very next day she came in with a major buy. It turned out that Jay had spoken to the national manager for his cell phone brand and they wanted to take over a huge block right in the middle of the trade show floor. Roger was quite impressed with this turn of events within 24 hours of her first sales call, so they began to deal with the details. Sally wanted to book the space on the official floor plan, but Roger resisted that, as he had no contract or any other documentation from the cell phone company. All he had was Sally's and Jay's say so. However, Roger didn't want to throw cold water on his red hot new sales person, so he agreed to pencil in an enormous and expensive block of space in the middle of the trade show exhibition floor.

Sally kept coming in every day with a new deal to "pencil in" on the master trade show floor sheet. Pretty soon that trade show floor sheet was getting filled to the brim. Other sales persons were complaining that the floor was filling up and that there would be no room for their own clients. And all of this "peniciling in" had yet to be accompanied by a single signature on a single contract.

The next few days brought more and more bookings. However, these bookings also were never accompanied by any paperwork. Only Sally entering the office triumphant to announce how this big company or that big company wanted all of this and all of that and all of over there.

Continued In: Caveat Procurator: Employers Beware Of Perfect Resumes Hiding A Scam! Part 2