Most incompetent person you ever worked with/hired

[Medsy]

I've got a new colleague, he has been here for 2 months and I 100% understand it takes time to be eased/trained into a new role, but this is next level. It's actually making me wonder whether he lied on his CV or at interview. There are really, really basic aspects to the industry he doesn't seem to have heard of, the other day he was struggling to use a simple Word feature, and one of the requirements was a foreign language which he said he was proficient in.
Ultimately I am going to have to work with him as a pair and I am trying to be as helpful and generous as I can but a part of me thinks why have they hired him?@
Opening the floor....Have you ever worked with or hired someone where it went beyond just incompetence and you thought "WTF is going on!".

My first job was cleaning hotel rooms, I am by far the most incompetent person I have worked with?

Hired someone who had 10 years current experience of spreadsheets. Asked them to add some basic numbers to our finance spreadsheet. They scoffed at it and said they were used to working with much bigger and complex things and it would be super easy for them. Said person didn't get basic additions right so the numbers we needed to submit to HMRC were all wrong.

My partner wrote a basic script that that returned a "yes" or "no" in each column to automatically show whether the row was added up correctly or not. Explained to the person this was what he'd done and how they could easily identify mistakes if it had a "no," and that it needed to be a "yes".

Said person just continued to submit the spreadsheet with "no" boxes clearly there. Just didn't care. After the third time of explaining patiently how it worked, said person had an absolute meltdown and posted all over Facebook about how they were being asked to do too much at work and it was making them ill.

Another person we hired barely spent any time in the room, always taking calls and having to leave because of his daughter (for some reason his partner who he lived with wouldn't talk to the nursery or look after their kid), was then off 3 months because his uncle died, was back two weeks, was then off because another relative died. As soon as he was going below full sick pay, he was magically back in again. Afterwards was found public photos of him on Facebook posted by his friends during these grieving periods, of nights out at him at bars and clubs with a big smile on his face.

If you work at HMRC and need a calculator to find ten percent,then you're in the wrong job, let alone with one!!!

I’ve worked with a conveyancing solicitor we hired at our law firm. I didn’t directly work for him but on the few occasions I did type things for him (overflow typing) it was clear he wasn’t following up on basic areas (eg when searches were done, writing report on title) and he was trying to wing it. We’d employed a locum solicitor who was shit hot at her job, both she and her colleague were employed to look into his work and went through his files when he was either off sick or on annual leave. Then he was fired and the agency we used to hire him got a bollocking and no commission. All us legal secretaries could tell he was useless within his first week or two of starting!

Friend of mine, her boss hired someone above her who can’t do simple things in his role which he should be expected to do at his age and seniority, tries to palm tasks off on her and worked at Home Office for many years and then a charity for a year before joining friend’s company.

I handed over a temporary role to a guy who by the 3rd day I had to pull the boss aside to ask if HR had actually validated his qualifications and experience because for all he on his CV it was like he'd never used a computer before. Even my mid 70's dad who struggles with such things can use a mouse better than this guy! I would have expected someone who's selling themselves as an experienced data analyst would know how to save a copy of a file in Excel 🙃

An engineer asking for a protective cover for her high-viz jacket.

Mind. Boggled.

I hired a young man who on the afternoon of his first day was found internet shopping looking at shoes on the work computer. When asked what the hell he thought he was doing, he said in his previous job it was allowed, like a sulky teenager.

Another person couldn't make a cup of tea and had to be 'trained'.

We've had several people, all under 50, who can't copy and paste, don't know to press return instead of the ok button, don't know what a browser is... the list goes on.

And the most common one is being reluctant to speak on the phone. This is people who will talk shit all day long to their colleagues in the office, but ask them to ring a company and make a simple enquiry and you'd think you were asking them to present a tv programme to an audience of millions.

It astounds me how little pride a lot of people take in at least being competent in their jobs. I'm embarrassed for them.

Student, rather than employee, who felt it was ok to message me 4th day in to placement to say that she was 'working from home'. And continued to do so for the majority of days for the next couple of weeks, until I could get a meeting together with their tutor.

The first four weeks were shadowing only, in a healthcare setting. Not sure what she thought she could pretend she was working on at home, she had zero work to do other than be physically with other staff observing them.

Also worked in a setting where we supported young people in the care system. Had a member of staff whose primary role was to answer the phone, take messages etc. They always seemed to panic and tried to put every call through. We repeatedly stressed to them that they had to filter the calls and take messages if people were busy, and only put them through/escalate if they were genuinely urgent.

Said person then started asking every caller 'is it urgent'. Those of you who have teenagers will know their definition of what is urgent can be a little different to ours - they escalated a call all the way up to a member of the executive team who was pulled out of their meeting, only to discover that the 'urgency' was because a teenager was refusing to leave the chair at a salon wanting to have their eyelashes done and the beautician wasnt prepared to do them without parental consent.

Why mention his autism? How is this relevant?

I worked as a team leader in investment banking years ago and we took on a temp with a brilliant CV showing a 20 year history working in the industry.

On the first day the team member who was showing her the ropes called me to one side she said ‘I’m not sure she’s ever done this before she’s looking at me blank when I go through even the most basic stuff’

So next day I made time to do some training myself. I started showing her how to input the Foreign Exchange and money market trades and she said ‘let me make notes. So what does FX and MM mean?? And this is a woman who claimed to work in banking for 20+ years.

Im sure she was using someone else’s CV

About 15 years ago I was going to be involved with an interview to which the essential skills stated "needs to be fully competent with most of Microsoft Office".
I had an email from someone who told me she was totally perfect for the job but just wanted to check that we didn't use Microsoft Word much as she found it too difficult to use. Upon enquiry, she didn't know that Microsoft Office had anything other than Word on it, and certainly hadn't heard of Excel or even the term "spreadsheets".
Thankfully she didn't get the job.

Of course I didn't use a calculator to work out 10%!!
She couldn't do it in her head and couldn't work her calculator to do it either.

So you FOTTFSOFAWYGTFOSM.🙄

Oh just remembered another one - working in a role that requires professional registration that the individual pays for, very standard. Frequently in the job when you have to sign declarations to confirm that you are professionally registered and therefore able to make that decision.

Colleague lost their registration because their payment bounced. More than once. Had been working for a considerable time without being registered, no one else knew (I believe there's since been a change where the body notify the employer when someone's reg lapses)

When it came out, colleague instead of being mortified and trying to rectify the situation as you might hope, instead just ranted indignantly about how the 'problem' was because of the CMS that he had to pay his ex.

When he eventually left (annoyed that he didn't succeed in getting promoted) we found out that there was loads of stuff that he'd just failed to do at all. Eg he'd be telling us things were in hand with a certain long term piece of work, chairing regular meetings etc, and when the new worker contacted the same professional group who told us they hadn't heard from him for six months or so.

one of the directors at my small company didn’t know how to filter a excel document.

@EbonyWood I don't think that's probably uncommon. The more senior, the less competent in basic tasks IME because they have people to do stuff like that for them and spend most of their time talking in very important meetings. Our business manager asked me for help with a spreadsheet he was having trouble with and i thought it was going to something really difficult.....no, he'd seen other people with graphs with 2 lines on and wanted to know how he could do it too. A man who is responsible for a couple of hundred staff, 2 buildings, and a multi-million pound annual turnover......makes you wonder how they manage to analyse the data that leads to business decisions!

my unit hired a data entry clerk to assist my research post. They claimed to have 15 years of experience. I was on leave when they recruited and the person recruiting knew jack shit about the job role.
My clerk didn't know how to turn on their PC or shut it down safely.
They literally asked constant questions and didn't understand drop-down lists. drove me mental repeating the same data entry errors again and again, then we got our data validation back, and 90% of what they had inputted needed re-verification.
Flagged it up immediately and was told to give them time as their references were excellent! Obviously used to get rid of them , as it was the Public service sector, so impossible to get rid of them any other way.
I left the job in the end because they added instead of took work away.

@TheLogicalSong "The thing is, no one in their mid 40s or older would have grown up with a computer in the remotely modern sense of the word (might have had something like a Sinclair Spectrum if they grew up in the 80s) or had access to Excel at university."

Really? Computers might not have been in every home, but they were certainly common (and vital) in many industries by the 1990s

I did a computer programming course at university - in 1975. I'd even done some at school before that. From this alone you can work out that I'm well over 60.

I worked in offices that had computers from the mid-1980s and in the newspaper industry that had computerised typesetting, admin and accounting in the 1980's.

From the mid-1990s computers were a part of daily office life everywhere I worked. Amazon on-line shopping was founded in 1994. People who were even just in their 20s in 1994 would be over 50 today.

Colleague started a role caring for vulnerable people who needed 24hr support. The role was clearly advertised as a rotating shift pattern, 8-4, 10-6, 2-10, and it specified that nights were covered by a separate team.

Colleague started, did office hours for the induction, then 8-4, then asked me and a colleague to swap the next two weeks when she was down to do 10-6 and 2-10. I was a bit surprised at being asked to swap a whole week of shifts and asked why; she matter of factly described that she had to do the school run, cook tea, housework etc. She had a husband at home but these all appeared to be her jobs (possibly cultural factors)

I explained I'd be willing to help out in an emergency but not to swap all my shifts and asked whether she understood the people we helped needed 24hr care and so the job required working the hours they needed. She said she'd assumed that she'd been able to choose the shifts and that she only wanted to work 8-4.

I asked who she thought would choose to work permanently 2-10 (given there was no enhancement) and she said 'young people', which is why she'd asked me (I presume she meant no children)

She then complained to the manager that me and the other worker had 'refused to swap shifts without good reason'.

Needless to say she didn't last long. Bizarre that you could go all the way through the process for that type of role and assume you could just choose when you wanted to work!

The company I worked for took on an autoCAD technician to produce highway design drawings. He didn't understand basic concepts like scale, model space and paper space and drew everything by eye rather than using the required precise measurements. He lasted about a week.

I work in a support function in an NGO. We recruited a deputy for my role - lovely girl, interviewed well, but turned out to be lights on but nobody home. One example: we needed a new policy. I found a decent template and gave it to her to customise. Told her specifically to remove references to directors and replace with trustees, change customers to beneficiaries/grant recipients etc, take out square brackets. She gave it back to me with no changes other than to put our organisation name at the top of the first page. And said she'd spent hours on it!

She was still in the probation period so was told sorry, not the job for you. She then brought a grievance that she'd raised some donations for our org at a family event, so should have kept her job.

Did you miss my caveat in the remotely modern sense of the word? What I meant by that is that you wouldn't have been using Microsoft Office in the 70s and 80s. As I mentioned, we had computers at work in the mid 90s, they'd had them since the early 80s, but not running Windows - that wasn't adopted until about 1999 - and this was a large organisation.

I once had to work closely with this bloke who seemed very pleasant at first. We discussed which parts of the work we'd take responsibility for , all good. I went away and did my part and a couple of times I asked him how he was doing and the answer always came back 'fine'. I'm sure you can see where this is headed...

• didn't do any of the tasks he had agreed to do
• lied and said he was doing them
• Decided to make up his own task and do that instead?? (badly)

I was so angry because it was my reputation on the line as well as his. He jumped before he was pushed and apparently secured a similar type of job in the same sector where I know he would have fucked it all up again.

I don't understand some people.

ThanksAntsThants23

Probably me! I can work fine on my own but as soon as there are people around I get anxious and start making really stupid mistakes, like the example of someone not knowing how to work out 10% or do something basic on a computer, something like this I could do absolutely fine while I was alone but if I was with someone else and they asked me to do it I would just panic and not be able to do it.

Same here and I remember talking to a girl who said she couldn’t believe they’d kept her so long and everything she said resonated. I try my very best though and go above and beyond for people and was lucky to hit the jackpot with coworkers who let me take a bit of time to remember how to do things and figure myself out

Ex-boss (managing director) hired someone as a "junior" version of my role after realising he'd basically loaded three peoples worth of work onto me as the business expanded. Then found out I'd have to train her as well. Supposedly she had 40 years of office experience though, so NBD.

We had a 5% price increase and maintained an Excel list of all prices. (Approx 5 or 6 sheets - v small company and no proper "systems"). 10min job for someone who vaguely knows their way around Excel. I asked Junior to add in a column with a calculation for the new price increases. She laughed at me and said "oh no that's not how I do things", copied and pasted the spreadsheets into a Word document (?!), printed them, and sat for 5 hours manually calculating each one on her calculator and writing it down in pencil. (I had stopped her after she went to the printer and said "it's OK if you don't know how to do the formula, excel can be tricky, did you need me to show you? It's far quicker". I got back "no, ill work how i prefer to work thanks") office manager HOWLING at this point.

She handed me the paper towards the end of the day and I sweetly smiled, pushed it back and said "yep, now on the spreadsheet. we need it in that format. Thanks!"

This was one of SO MANY examples.

Glad her 40 years experience served her well. Found out she was being paid more than me just because she was older and as boss said, a "proper adult" (I was 21, married and had just bought a house). Handed him my notice, told him id got a "proper job" with a 35% pay rise and substantially better benefits, and never looked back.

Are you me?😁 I came on the thread to say I was probably the most incompetent person I’ve worked with and like you it’s always when someone is hovering around. I’m incapable of carrying out the most basic function if I’m being watched or not left to my own devices, god help me when the phone rang at such a time 😬😁 When I’m on my own I’m super efficient and capable. I used to share an office with just one other person, I really liked them but when they weren’t there I was so happy to be in there on my own.