Somewhat similarly, I once hired an employee who didn't have the skills we needed but said he was motivated to learn, seemed like a good fit from a personality

Somewhat similarly, I once hired an employee who didn't have the skills we needed but said he was motivated to learn, seemed like a good fit from a personality standpoint, and had really great communication during the interview process. We spent a year trying to bring him up to speed, waiting through all sorts of excuses, and worse, all of his communications were terrible (bad spelling, inability or unwillingness to use a spell checker, bad grammar). It was so bad that we eventually made him get any communications that went to clients (~30% of his job) be reviewed by a coworker before they were sent out. At the last "PIP" meeting we had I asked him: "I went back and looked at all of the e-mails we exchanged during your interviewing, and they didn't have any spelling or grammar or punctuation problems. How did you do that?" "Oh, my wife wrote those."