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!".

Knew someone who used to cruise in around 9, stay for about half an hour then leave for the fay and come back around 5 and stay for an hour. Apparently he had a business, management did nothing. In fact they paid about 15k for him to do training. Another person (contractor), who left for about 4 hours during the day, turns out he was working for another company (both worked under an umbrella company), when he was questioned about his time he just stopped answering emails and didn't turn up again! Luckily he had left his work laptop in his locker so we could retrieve it. So many I could go on and on, but they were the worst in terms of not even bothering to hide it!

I work in retail and they hired a complete idiot-he had a very high opinion of himself-hes told me every shift the place can't cope without him,even though he's only been here 5 months and we coped just fine before him

We work customer facing,and he's been bollocked for the following

Wandering around with his phone

Ignoring customers

Telling more than one customer to 'fuck off' (we do get arseholes but none of these customers deserved that)

Slagging customers off-where they can hear him

Slagging us off to customers-we can hear him

Wandering around with a tray of food,claimed he couldn't find the table so plonked it down and walked off without saying anything

I asked him to keep an eye on the open drawer of the till while I ran to get change-he walked off,leaving the drawer wide open
We where very lucky nobody stole from us

Wandered off so nobody could find him for over two hours-we thought he'd walked out
Wandered back in like nothing had happened

Walks past the trays of food,sticks his fingers in,grabs a bit and eats it

Is lazy and will claim he's done work everyone else has done-even though its all on camera

Will try and play one off against the other-then lie and say he didnt

We her 45 minutes for break-every single time we have to go looking for him or he just won't come back

So much more,he only applied for the job in the first place because his ex started (lovely girl)

I know it's a job that's hard to get fired from but he's taking the piss-we are very short staffed and weak management who want an easy life so they ignore him

I have a team leader who has worked at the company for 15 years. I have been there 2 years. He couldn't understand when I was telling him the difference between a glass shelf for a unit and glass for a door. 15 years and doesn't understand something so simple. Another team leader couldn't understand why I was telling him a door was wrong. All he understood was it was the same size. It was a different style

The woman who got the role over me. I went for an external promotion. Didn't get it. The lady who did has had more time off in the past 4 months than I have in 10 years. She's also managed to reduce her workload by half and most of that has been given to me for, "professional development." I'm in the process of looking for new jobs!

IF this is true and I really hope it isn't then how on earth did they get QTS?

I might have to look that up too ( seen them, no idea how to set them, but i do use the help button if stuck )

A trainee solicitor who didn't know the alphabet and couldn't find files!

This was an emergency situation in a care facility where a resident was threatening in their behaviour. The care worker who was present froze and I shouted at them to phone the police. They looked at me blankly then asked "what's the number"?😆

Ah my old boss, Head of Finance, who couldn't insert a new line into Excel or in fact could barely work Excel at all. Kept getting credits/debits the wrong way round in the system. Couldn't manage anybody. It was my first proper finance job and I was constantly having to teach him things, they kept extending his probation but thankfully eventually got rid of him. Boggled my mind

I’m not sure about sharing this as “incompetent” seems such a loaded word, likes it’s a result of laziness. It wasn’t laziness, and it has stayed with me for 30 years, feeling sorry for this guy.

I was a shift manager in a warehouse and he was an agency temp. He’d get a pick sheet and it would say:
Oranges: 1 tray - London - tray 1
Oranges: 2 trays - Birmingham - tray 1
Oranges: 2 trays - Birmingham - tray 2

We used a “pick by label” system, so for each tray (3 above) you peeled off the label, stuck it on the tray, then put it in the London or Birmingham pile. Even so, he couldn’t count and the labels still confused him. But even if he could have counted, he couldn’t read. In a way he didn’t have to read - just match the shape of the word London with the banner saying London. But, he couldn’t. Dyslexia perhaps. Frozen by fear of it, definitely. I had to tell the agency to take him off our list, and never in 40 years now of hiring have I felt worse for someone. He really tried.

I worked with someone who couldn’t stuff an envelope. She kept taking the strip off the sticky bit before putting the magazine in. Lost a handful of expensive magazines which had the back torn off, got in a strop and walked out.

There are some things you can’t help people with if you’ve shown them several times and they don’t get it.

That's very sad, I can understand why this has stayed with you :(
Was he a native English speaker?

Trainee who had zero concept of workplace expectations, arrived late most days without apology or explanation, swanned off to get breakfast, spent half the day on the phone messaging her boyfriend because he missed her, called in sick for a whole manner of random things such as feeling tired or it being too windy.

I was talking about two separate teachers. One with an MA in mentoring NQTs!
Beggars belief.

I’ve experienced this, but by far the worst scenario is when you join a team of experienced people who are shit. Properly think I’m being pranked!

Worked in a small local shop. One night a freezer on the shop floor broke down. I asked the new lad to fill the freezer in the warehouse with the lot.
Get a call from the managers next day. Plonker put it in a fridge and the lot was defrosted and wasted.. Apparently I should have checked on him. On a grown man who didn't know the difference between a fridge and freezer.... He left as apparently he hadn't 'gelled' with any staff...

Oh that's really sad

Yes … my last assistant was awful. Said all the right things at interview, then did bugger all. Put them on a PIP but every time I tried to escalate they put in a grievance about me - all I wanted was for them to do their job - didn’t impact me if they didn’t do it but the poor buggers who arrived to no hotel reservations or had the wrong train tickets certainly were not happy! But it was my fault apparently 🤷‍♀️ btw - they could book their own easyJet flight and air bnb for a holiday but couldn’t use the company booking site ! 😳

My current boss.
He's honestly one of the most incompetent people I've had the misfortune to work with.

He's only doing the job because he was so bad at his last role so they moved him into this one. At the time his particular area wasn't particularly important but over the last few years it is not pretty much front and centre. It's an absolute disaster.

He's also sexist and hierarchical. If I propose an idea or request something I either get told no or completely ignored.
My slightly more senior male colleague will send my exact email and gets a response almost immediately and suddenly the idea is considered.
It's infuriating.

Staff member employed to work in our legal team, which unsurprisingly meant completing and filing legal documents. Documents that had to be clear, concise and included all the correct info to prevent a Judge dismissing the case..

She was incapable of doing the documents, it was clear she had no idea what she was doing and her court submissions were an embarrassment. She lasted about 4 days.

Another who had worked with us for a long time, but somehow kept under the radar. Until he got a new manager and they noticed how rubbish he actually was. Triple the number of workload to everyone else as he could never figure out how to work the computer system to close the job log off (i must have shown him 20 times how to do it) , and then couldn't keep up with all the system messages because of the volume of open jobs and so it all just backed up. Eventually was dismissed for gross misconduct and it took the rest of the team 4 months to clear down his work alongside our own work.

Can you raise this with HR? As you have the emails to provide evidence of sex discrimination.

I do think interviews aren't always helpful in finding the most competent candidate, instead they are a test of who can bullshit the best.

@Medsy yes, native English. Young guy, similar age to me (20s at the time) which I think made it stick more, how different our lives were just through chance of how our brains worked. I was a shift manager - but on a graduate track. I’m sure I was no more a hard worker than him. I pretty much spent the entire shift with him - it wasn’t a job that you trained, it really was an “anyone from the agency can pick it up in 10 mins” situation.
I’m sure he wasn’t trying to get “not asked back” to keep the job centre off his back either. He just couldn’t do it. Years on, I have a nephew with SEN who I can see being in the same position.

But in our line of work we spend about two thirds of our time collaborating on text documents.

The most curious thing is the language thing, it's my mother tongue so a few times I have made a casual (simple) comment and he has never really responded, he has been able to avoid speaking on the phone using it. I have a feeling he might not actually speak it

Agreed @icelolly12 , our interview process gets longer and longer as we try to weed out the malingerers, the agitators, bullshitters, and those who will accept the job but then think they can amend the hours, days of work and salary during the recruitment process.