We all have been tasked with checking references and with giving references to employees. The process is riddled with peril, and recent events involving George Santos, the “resume-embellisher,” should serve as a befitting reminder.
It appears that Santos fabricated every important claim that he made to the public during his campaign.
George A. Devolder Santos
Summary
Proactive Business Development Professional fluent in three languages and well-versed in Sales with extensive proven ability to optimize the bottom line. Enthusiastic leader able to provide a high level of sewice and enthusiasm for building positive experiences with histoly oftransforming inefficient, underperforming operations into successK11 enterprises.
Skills
Account management
Sales
Customer relations
Financial
Investors relations
Marketing Strategies
Real Estate
Forecasting
Project and vendor oversightMarket trends and analysis
Budget oversight
Performance monitoring and evaluation
StaffDevelopment
Public speaking
Strategies and goals
Training and mentoring
Proposals and presentations
Currency and coin counterExperience
LinkBridge Investors. August 2017 to Current
Vice President
New NY
- Capital introductory sewice from IN to GP sewices.
- 3X on sales growth within first 6 months from 450k to 1.4M.
- Overall revenue growth of24X (450k to 11M) in revolving sales. Client d evelop ment.
- Investors Relations- 15k LP database Account management.
Goldman Sachs, GSAM Janumy 2017 to August 2017
Project Manager
New NY
- Private Real Estate institutional sales strategy development.
- Investors Relations Client development.
- 2x revenue growth from (300M to 600M).
- Developed and managed new sales strategy for the department.
Met Global Inc. January 2014 to October 2016
Business Development Manager Orlando, FL
- Maintaining and delivering double digit growth for high key accounts.
- Developing sales strategies Evaluating risk on clients.
- Multiple current pipelines Marketing strategies Creating loyalty programs enhance partnerships.
- initiated with 2.5M client pipeline and delivered 2.9M
Citi Group Februa1Y 2011 to Janua1Y 2014
Asset Manager Associate
New York, NY
- Investment orientation on LP base.
- Consumer education of new opportunities.
- Customer financial applications into debt and grovvth vehicles. Customer management
- International customer relations
Education and Training.
NhTJ New York University. 2013
WIBA International Business
New York, NY
GMAT 710
Baruch College (CUNY 2010
Bachelor Economics/ finance
New York, NY
3.89GPA
Summa cum laude graduate Ranked in Top 1% of class
He claimed to have graduated from Baruch College and to have earned an M.B.A. from N.Y.U. with a 3.89 grade average, graduating with top honors. Neither of those assertions was true; in fact, he never earned a college degree. While he was making these false statements, why not aggrandize it even more? He claimed to have worked in executive positions at Citigroup and at Goldman Sachs and another investment firm, more assertions fashioned of whole cloth. He stated that his grandmother escaped the Nazis and that he was Jewish. He later explained that he meant “Jew-ish.”
Perhaps more troubling was his apparent ability to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to political parties when he had skipped out on landlords without paying rent, when he was charged with check fraud in Brazil and apparently absconded to the United States, his claim that he is gay although he was married to a woman, seemingly to gain entrance to this country. This discussion could go on and on, but let’s get to the point that Carpe Diem learners are most interested in.
What do you look for in a resume?
A graduate student from N.Y.U. should be able to present a document that is free of spelling and diction errors. That should be a red flag in most cases. But close examination of time frames can also assist you in determining the believability of an applicant’s alleged history. Santos’ incredibly rapid rise in the financial industry should have also been a red flag. In fact, his political party did their vulnerability research and learned that his claims were bogus. With respect to time frames, for instance, one employee whom I investigated, Richard Wigfall, submitted a resume that came to my attention after a patient complained that while he was transporting her and acting as a Nursing Assistant, he offered her $25.00/hour to clean his apartment. In the early ‘90’s, this was a tidy sum, but she found the offer offensive. There was a gap in his resume of two years, but the Assistant Director of Nursing (A.D.N.) who hired him failed to inquire about this lacuna. When I investigated his past, I found that those three years had been spent in jail. That ADN paid a fine for her nonfeasance.
But that was not the end of the story. After three days of negotiations, we were able to persuade Wigfall, with union representation, to resign from the Hospital. I followed up several years later, and I found that he was later convicted of rape. His modus operandi? He posted an advertisement for someone to clean his apartment for $25.00/hour; the woman who was supposed to be interviewed could not make the appointment, so she asked her sister to attend and get the job for her. That was who he raped – the sister.
We are all under great pressure to fill spots that are vacant to be able to serve our clients. However, the exigency of our efforts must be tempered by a thorough investigation, or we may be exposing clients and colleagues to dangerous people.
Please note that this does not constitute legal advice; please speak with an attorney if you desire same.
A case study of Charles Cullen, the homicidal nurse who went from hospital to nursing home to hospital in New Jersey (about 12 in New Jersey) and Pennsylvania, and killed at least 64 patients but probably many more, demonstrates that he was hired over and over by healthcare HR people who failed to vet his resume. They needed a warm body with an R.N. license, and that was enough. Even when they did try to investigate, the facilities that he left, or where he had been investigated, often failed to respond or were noncommittal, demonstrating the lack of concern for patients universally. He had poisoned or killed people in Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and tried to come to New York, but the Dean of the Stony Brook College of Medicine detected something suspicious. The result was that Cullen was accepted into a program in Africa where he killed more unknowing, often unconscious, patients. He is currently serving a life sentence in prison.
Why does this interest us at Carpe Diem?
No one wants a violent criminal on their staff who has not been rehabilitated; that goes without saying. Along the same lines, no one wants someone who misrepresents his credentials. Vigorous and thorough vetting can avoid such grievous blunders.
We know that we are subject to defamation suits if we give references that are incorrect. Therefore, most HR people are trained to just give name, rank, and serial number, and then, generally, only when the employee consents – which creates another layer of opaqueness. If we have a reasonable basis to believe that a person should not be working in the Human Services field, we encounter a moral dilemma: Are we obliged to affirmatively share such information with confreres who are considering hiring such a miscreant and reach out to us for a reference? Will I place my agency or myself in legal jeopardy? Truth, by the way, is a complete defense to defamation, but that does not mean that no lawsuit would ensue that you would have to defend, or that you would be able to prove what you consider to be true.
The crux of what happened in the Wigfall and Cullen cases is that hiring managers put their self-interest first and allowed potentially dangerous people access to vulnerable clients and co-workers. This possibility cannot be managed from afar, but we can intervene effectively if we are willing to take the calculated risk to do the right thing. All those healthcare facilities that merely passed Cullen along made the choice to cast a blind eye at this moral quandary. The Carpe Diem approach calls for more than mere integrity, though; you must care about others whom you do not know and who may never learn that you could have categorically blocked the harm that may affect them.
That is what leadership is all about.
