My Candidate Missed Her Interview. Then the FBI Showed Up.

A stolen identity, a prison escape, and a phone interview no one saw coming

More than twenty years later, it remains the strangest thing that has ever happened to me on a search.

A candidate missed her onsite interview at a hospital.

A couple of days later, the FBI showed up at the director of pharmacy's office looking for her.

This happened more than twenty years ago, during the period when I specialized in recruiting hospital pharmacists. I believe the hospital was in Ohio, although the exact location has faded with time. The details of what happened have not. They are 100 percent accurate.

It started ordinarily enough. I received an unsolicited resume for a pharmacist position I was working. No referral. No previous connection. Just a resume that looked good on paper.

I spoke with the candidate first and then arranged a telephone interview with the hospital's director of pharmacy.

The interview went extremely well.

The director gave me great feedback. He loved her and wanted to bring her onsite. She was sharp, knowledgeable and easy to talk to. She knew the profession well enough to hold her own throughout a full conversation with an experienced director of pharmacy.

We scheduled the onsite interview and confirmed the details.

The day arrived.

The candidate didn't.

There was no call and no explanation. I tried reaching her afterward, but I never got through. She simply disappeared.

A couple of days later, the director of pharmacy called me.

He was the person who told me what had happened. The FBI had shown up at his office looking for the candidate because she was not the person described on the resume.

She had escaped from prison and stolen the identity of a real, licensed pharmacist. That was why her credentials had checked out when I verified them. The license was legitimate. It just didn't belong to her.

The director also sent me a link to a news story about the case. I have tried to find it again but have had no luck. At the time, I never imagined that more than twenty years later I might publish the story myself. I had no reason to preserve the link, and eventually it disappeared along with the ordinary debris of an old recruiting desk.

What made the story even more remarkable was the interview itself.

Somehow, while incarcerated, she had gained access to pharmacy textbooks and studied them closely enough to construct a credible resume and carry on a detailed professional conversation with a director of pharmacy.

She had not merely copied someone's credentials. She had learned enough of the underlying material to sound like the person whose identity she had stolen.

I still don't know exactly how the FBI traced her to that hospital or how long they had been looking for her. I only know that a candidate who disappeared on interview day had disappeared for a reason considerably larger than cold feet.

I never spoke with her again.

After more than twenty years in recruiting, it remains the strangest thing that has ever happened to me on a search. Not because someone lied on a resume. Recruiters encounter dishonesty. It was the scale and preparation behind the deception that made this different.

She escaped from prison, assumed the identity of a licensed pharmacist, taught herself enough pharmacy to pass a professional telephone interview and came remarkably close to walking into a hospital under someone else's name.

I don't have a tidy recruiting lesson to attach to this story. Some stories are simply stories.

But if you are ever having a slow week on the desk and thinking nothing interesting happens in recruiting, remember this:

One of my candidates missed her hospital interview.

The FBI showed up at the director's office looking for her instead.