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 boss is utterly devoid of any expertise, depth of knowledge and has never shown any skill in said skill set, and I mean not once in 10 years. The work environment is public sector and very specialist, when they got the job there were few 'clients' then closures meant that the service grew tenfold. I have never understood why they were able to stay in post. It's like The Emperors New Clothes every day.

Yes I do that too @Greensleevevssnotnose . It's so much easier in black and white with red pen.
Sometimes progress isn't progress really.

In the olden days before computers, we employed a young girl ( straight out of school) to work on reception. It involved a lot of filing. After a couple of weeks files started to go missing. They were confidential patients notes so it was worrying.
The new girl was asked what she was doing with the files and she said that she put them back in the filing cabinet where there was room.
After a little questioning it turned out she didn’t understand alphabetic filing and also had no idea about the actual alphabet.
Despite me patiently writing out the alphabet on stickers and attaching them to the filing cabinet, she only advanced as far as put the A’s in the A section and so on. She was sacked pretty soon after this.
Years later new staff would ask why the alphabet was on the filing cabinet.

Interested to hear from those with lots of hiring experience as to how they weed out the potential wasters that might come actually say all the right things in interviews and look ok on paper

Mainly instinct - sorry that's not very helpful! - but also:

Overly short or long answers to anything asked
Too many "uncheckable" past positions (company now defunct, etc.)
Grandiose titles given to jobs which clearly weren't

Plus a lot more (but you did say to exclude those who said the right things/looked good on paper)

My colleage had problems with stomach and had months off at a time for ops. She also struggled a bit following work instructions or noticing errors. So i ended up taking over. I went off on mat leave and witihin 2 years she had died after having an op to remove a brain tumor which probably explained some of her issues.
I had thought age or too many operations hac caused it.

Other dept one team member couldnt understand how to do an account. She ended up crying and never having to do again. She became team leader within 6m.

Or dept got 3 new team members from interviews at once. They were all extremely attactive. All 3 left for other jobs or promotionx within 1-2 years but none could do the job. Clearly the men on the panel were only selecting on how attractive the interviewees were. It really stood out as most of the dept were 30-60 years old and mostly say 5 or 6 out of 10 so average looks.

It really reflects my issue with american style interviews.

On the timeline of computer use, I'd say I'm a fairly normal example.

I'm 54. ZX Spectrum for games at home in the 80s, used to type in the programming for games sometimes (copied out of magazines). First time on a primitive word Processor in 1989, at a temp job. Didn't use a computer at all for university 1988-1991. Then a big gap until emails and internet in about 1995, and around that time starting to learn Word and PowerPoint on the job at work.

Write over the permanent marker with erasable one & it will then wipe off.

Can you get in someone genuinely fluent in that language to talk to him, OP? Face to face? Nowhere to hide then.

Failing that, just say flatly "I don't believe you speak X language fluently. You need to demonstrate fluency ASAP or we will assume you've not been honest with us."

Similar in my previous job. Company (flooring manufacturer) took on a customer services assistant who bigged up in her interview and CV that she actually had an Interior Design degree.

As a member of the design team, I was naturally interested in where she studied. She refused to speak to me about it, which I thought was odd. I smelled a rat, in fact.

Management however, decided that she was wonderful and it was a waste to ask her to just answer phones and process orders, so gave her the entire head office building to redesign the floors for. Cue me being handed a pile of scrappy sketches, hand-coloured in, with wax kiddy crayons of multiple rooms to do proper layouts for, so the new floors could be manufactured and installed.

I asked her what scale her sketches were in, so I could adjust sizes to fit the materials used and quantify requirements, and she looked at me like I'd asked her to explain quantum dynamics in Mandarin Chinese.

Turns out there was no degree, there was no college attendence and management were pissed off at ME for it for raising it right at the start and them ignoring my suggestion that it was fantasy on her part.

She was crap at order processing too, and got fired 6 months later.

Thank you - I'm not sure why people are taking issue with my basic point that in general, people born in the 1970s didn't grow up using computers as we know them today, and particularly not using Microsoft Office.

Microsoft Office has taken over the world, but there were word processors, spreadsheets and email programs in use before then. I dimly remember back in the late 1980s being taught how to use Lotus 123. I then left that job and never had occasion to use a spreadsheet until the early 2000s when I went on an course at our local FE college. That was all about Office - European Computer Driving Licence. Very useful. I already knew a lot of the basics as I could touch type and had been using word processing software for years, but this filled in a lot of gaps. Since then I've mostly worked out how to do things I didn't know by looking up online tutorials.

Track changes is useful because it means you can easily share documents with others without having to hand over a printed copy or a picture of same. Saves a lot of re-typing. You just have to learn how to accept or reject other people's changes. Also important to know if a document has ever been edited using this facility as if the changes haven't been accepted or rejected they will still be visible to others in the right view. This has led to law cases in the past when a document has been sent out during a legal case and a company involved in a lawsuit or their lawyers were able to see the legal advice given to their opponent, which confirmed that the management had been advised of something that destroyed their case. Something along those lines, anyway.

I had a colleague who was a phenomenal bullshitter. To hear him you would have thought that he was the only one doing any work. In fact he did almost nothing. He had been moved around three departments after being rumbled by each one in turn. The odd thing was that he was quite competent, just very lazy.

I had a cheap pocket calculator, bought from TESCO for about £1. it went wrong so I put it in our electrical scrap box for disposal. One afternoon he spent three hours getting it to work. He was so proud of himself and very miffed when our manager enquired whether he thought the time spent was an appropriate use of his energy!

I once worked in a call centre. A new member of staff asked "do we have to answer the phone every time it rings?"

You're joking aren't you. Surely HRT is a commonly known acronym. I'd be concerned if a nurse hadn't heard of that.

Nurse who point blank refused to do mouth-to-mouth on a mannequin in basic life support training.
Ended up in an awkward stand-off with the instructor refusing to sign her off unless she did it. It was really embarrassing.

ETA this was many years pre-covid

@Crinkle77 , she was probably checking. Abbreviations can mean several things.

@TheLogicalSong , grew up in the1970s and used WordPerfect and Lotus 123 in the late1980s. I can remember this new thing called Windows.

I don't take issue with that, but I was born in the early 1960s and had colleagues a lot older than that who all learned to use Office and other computer systems when our jobs and personal interests required it. A willingness to learn and a bit of initiative go a long way when it comes to IT in the workplace.

We once interviewed an older woman who had worked in the NHS for decades, never rising above the lowest admin grade. She seemed to have been moved from one department to another at regular intervals, which was a bit concerning, but could have been just bad luck. We could see from her CV that she had minimal educational qualifications but that wouldn't have mattered if she'd given any sign of being bright and capable, and having good basic literacy and numeracy. She didn't. My line manager asked her how she felt about learning how to use new software. She sighed, pulled a face and said sadly 'Well, you don't like it, do you, but you gotta do it these days'. Same woman, asked how she would keep track of her workload, given that she would have several jobs on hand at any one time, looked nonplussed. 'Well ... I mean ... I just look at my desk and I can see what I've got to do.' She didn't get the job.

😮😮😮😡

Sometimes it is not necessarily that people are incompetent; sometimes people over overworked and corners get cut. Some roles are simply unrealistic.

Yes, it's really concerning. I spend a bit of time each year teaching my science students how to use basic formulas like sum and average and get Excel to generate a graph.

I don't understand why we're teaching teenagers to code when they can't use basic microsoft programs. Obviously coding is useful but I think more people use Excel in their jobs?

Every job I've ever had, including temp jobs at uni, I've used Excel in some way/shape/form!

If someone printed out a document nowadays and scribbled their notes on it, instead of doing track changes in shared document like all the rest of the people working on it, I'd probably post about them on this thread. It really isn't that hard and no it really isn't easier for people who then need to read and implement the scribbles.

@G5000, I find Track Changes almost impossible to read.

the office junior who didn't know her alphabet and couldn't *?wouldn't ) make tea.. not great for someone whose main jobs were filing and making tea!! she also refused to answer the phone because it was "frightening"

I was ever quite clear how she ended up with the job but she didn't pass her probation

Get the candidate talking early. That helps them to relax.

Best way to see if someone can do the job is to get them to do it. Obviously, you can't do that completely in an interview situation, but giving them a practical test, getting them to do the kind of thing they would be doing in the job, is useful - much more so than a theoretical test. You want people who can apply their knowledge/skills.

Know what attributes you want from the candidate and question them about times in the past when they have demonstrated those attributes - "tell me about a time when...". Drill into their answer, don't just take it at face value. That is far more useful than hypothetical questions - "what would you do in this situation". Those who try to bullshit their way through interviews often struggle with this. If they try to invent examples, their story often falls apart when you try to drill into it.

Check their qualifications. Some candidates will claim to have qualifications they don't.

I like to get someone they will be working with who isn't part of the interview panel to take them out to lunch if possible. That gets the candidate in a situation where they may be more relaxed, so gets another perspective on them.

Remember that, no matter how careful you are, you will recruit the occasional dud. Make sure that you set up probation to find the duds and weed them out quickly. If staff tell you that the person you're recruited is not up to the job, listen.

I think we all must remember that we were all the new kid in the past.
If someone is new to the job or just new to working, I know that doing is learning, no amount of theory equals just letting them do the job until the pennies drop and it is second nature.

That said, really stupid stuff gets on my nerves. Had a trainee recently break all his words with hyphens when he reached the end of a line, to keep the lines straight. I told him to use the full word, stop the hyphens. Kept doing it, letters to clients looking embarrassing. Wrote dumb things too like un-mitigating circumstances instead of mitigating. He had to go, I felt so bad…..