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 DH sees a lot of students (HE lecturer) who can't use MS Office at all. He disagrees that Gen Y are digital natives - he calls them the App Prodders. Great at scrolling Insta and TikTok, but can't use Word or Excel if their lives depended on it.

It sounds as if significant numbers of young people are leaving the education system without having learned a few essential life/work skills.

How to put things in alphabetical order
Touch typing? If you use a proper keyboard, so much faster than hunt and peck.
How to answer the phone and make phone calls - this seems to be as much about coping with anxiety and learning new things as much as anything
How to address an envelope and set out a formal business letter (much less needed than in days of yore, but not obsolete yet)
How to use Office to its fullest extent -so knowing all the key features of Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, including how to copy and paste, do simple formatting, create tables, use straightforward formulae, save documents, use Track Changes

Some kids will learn some of these things at home, but lots won't. School is the obvious place. I know the curriculum is very crowded, but isn't there room to teach this stuff? Almost all of them are going to need it.

i worked in a local supermarket. One of the girls was giving away cash for cash back.

i retrained her. Stood over her for about an hour making sure she knew how to operate a till. Made sure she knew how to do cash back.

I had an unofficial chat with the manager because her till was down by £100 every time she was on it and he thought someone was stealing money. I told him I retrained her, and there shouldn’t be a problem anymore, but she wasn’t allowed on tills again for a long time. I had to retrain her again.

Yes, fairly recently we had a colleague start who hasn’t a clue about so many basic parts of the job - not stuff specific to the company that you would learn on the job, but that you should know to the point she must’ve lied on her CV about certain qualifications and experience.
Anyway, nothing can apparently be done because her ethnicity is a protected characteristic and we must “tread carefully”

One role I left (because I was relocating) I was involved in interviewing my replacement.

The man who was hired looked good on paper, references checked out, interviewed well.

Within a month I was asked if I could go back for a few days and sort out the mess he had made. Turns out he did very little, and what he had done, he had fucked up completely. I have no idea why or how.

They did end up hiring someone good and she did that role for several years. Thank goodness!

The person who worked for me who was utterly incompetent and had a very high opinion of himself has got himself a shiny new job on promotion. My mole in HR sent me his application and CV which were utter works of fiction, and he got the job through bullshitting (which he is very good at). The person who hired him didn’t take up any references - these would have gone to me or my boss, unless he put some gullible junior down and gave them an inflated job title. I’m in two minds as to whether to email his new boss or to watch him crash and burn from a distance. Because there is no way he is remotely capable of doing this job.

Lots of companies now do short screening interviews by zoom / teams to check for some of these things that applicants frequently lie about. It’s such a waste of company time and money to call them in for full scale interview and then find out on the day that 75% are completely unsuitable.

Another thing that I’ve found they often lie about is their ability to travel (an essential part of our job). We put on our person spec that the job involves being based in an office in X city ( where they will need to come into the office at least 2 days a week) and to travel in the Uk and overseas up to Y weeks a year.

We get people at screening interviews who say that yes that are totally flexible, they can travel anywhere in eg London ( the job is based in Preston) as long as they are home in London every night. When one candidate told us this, we looked bemused and ask her if she had read the job spec. She then said “ Yes but look !! “ and held up her left hand to show us her engagement ring with a Ta Da !

This was in the last few years, not in 1940. For a job that requires a post graduate degree and a min of 5 years work experience. 😲

After a week of training my maternity cover.
I was showing her a report that needed to be generated and how to calculate value of tickets
“i’m no good at maths or excel” during the interview she explicitly said she uses excel all the time and had years of experience.
I was dreading returning back to work- my manager had to take over from her a few months in.

Don't suppose her first name was Suzanne, by any chance? We had a teacher who came out with similar stories. She left suddenly after just a couple of years and I can well imagine she'd have become a PA.

Oui. Because Maman already test drove his z-z for you! 😂Sorry.

I had someone who couldn't work out how to switch on the laptop or connect it to WiFi

Well if their job was stacking shelves in a supermarket they wouldn't need to...

It wasn't that kind of job. Equal parts client facing and record keeping. The lady was lovely but when I asked how she had managed the computer work in her previous (similar) role, she said her team leader would do that part with her.

You would be amazed at the number of employers (including LAs), who are terrified of putting anything remotely negative into a reference for fear of a legal challenge, I suppose. In one of my old jobs, we had a team member who never worked on a Friday, because her boss had Fridays off as part of his contract. She would say she was working from home on Fridays, and then just not bother even logging on. She was a work-dodger even on the days when she turned up. They somehow got her to leave, and her boss wrote a fairly accurate reference, which he was forced to change, fundamentally, by the head of HR, on the grounds that she may sue for discrimination.

I know the curriculum is very crowded, but isn't there room to teach this stuff? Almost all of them are going to need it.
What would you drop to make room for it?

TrackChanges tip: You can view the document without the changes, there's a drop down at the top.

I've enjoyed this thread. It also makes me feel a whole lot more confident that I am not unemployable after years out of the workplace due to caring for my disabled son.

I know. I’m a big fan but I also work with people who don’t really understand it.

In your case, though, I’d be itching to expose the language lie, if it is one.

Once worked in a technical role where my boss hired a new starter who looked great on paper. About a week before he was due to start he rang saying that he was having to work more notice at his current job so wouldn’t be able to meet his agreed start date. This wasn’t a problem though as he could send his mum to fill in for him! For context his mum had absolutely no experience for the technical role. Needless to say we never saw either of them and the recruitment process was restarted.

@Cherrysoup

Went for an interview involving typing speed once. The girl checking my work started to manually check for errors. I suggested she use spellcheck.

Spellcheck wouldn't pick up where someone had typed a word incorrectly if it was an actual word. Proper proofreading does not rely on spellcheck.

Agreed! Stop with the computer comments please 🙏

Sorry, this was in reply to another comment saying the modern computer comments are derailing this thread.

And possibly these youngsters will go on to great things .

However, this has no relevance to somebody who has chosen to use their time volunteering at the food bank . They may be looking more for a way to get out of the house and some company - but doing some good at the same time. They may also be not very strong and unable to carry a whole tray of tins at once .

I often have naps in the middle of the day! When you are feeling unproductive it's exactly the right thing to do. I would encourage anyone I worked with to do the same.

Not in the workplace though

This particular woman was very much able bodied - she could lift bigger crates than me.

But in any case - I'm of the opinion that charities deserve efficiency just as much or more than profit making companies. There's only room for a certain no of volunteers in the warehouse and if one of them is just there to idle around, the sorting doesn't get done by the end of the day.

I actually had one pair of students who were uninvited from regular volunteering - they weren't naughty when there, just often late or calling in sick so we'd be short of hands.

This woman was so potter-around-y that it was the equivalent of not showing up half the time.

After all, it's a charity, but the volunteers aren't meant to be the clients/beneficiaries. Any benefits to the volunteers, eg to their mental health "getting out of the house for company", is very much secondary and not at the expense of the effective running of the charity.

I'm the same! Need peace and quiet to concentrate and assimilate information, albeit I love the banter and companionship of a good colleague or two.

🤣