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!".

Many finance jobs are advertised like this too. Some extra skills are part of the advertised job such as HR management and Health & Safety both of which are completely unrelated to finance.
Recently I saw a job advert which was advertised under the banner of Finance Manager requiring all three of these skill sets and in addition to EDI management, all for the princely sum of 33k per year.
I can't take job ads like that seriously. 😫

I’m always shocked at how many MNers don’t get this. If there’s ever a thread where someone has said something like “My boss has been treating me like shit for years; AIBU to coast through my notice period?”, there will be horrified cries of “But what about your reference?”, with no concept that most just say “I can confirm person X worked in role Y between [insert dates]”.

I hate that kind of set up and any jobseekers should run a mile from those kinds of ads because the job is bound to be a nightmare and the organisation unprofessional.

Each of those areas require highly specific expertise and professional qualifications, there is just no way that one person can combine them all. It is like eg expecting a doctor to simultaneously be a gifted lawyer.

There was a thread on here years ago about a role that specifically required every team member to work one Saturday in four. This had been made very clear at the start (OP was the hiring manager), but the candidate had airily stated in the interview that she couldn’t possibly do that, as she had children. When told it was a condition of the job, she stormed out crying “I can’t believe you don’t have any flexibility on this for a MOTHER!!”

I suppose at least she didn’t lie and then pull that shit when she got the job…

This is true, I can't recall a single time when anything negative has been stated on a reference regardless of the circumstances of the person leaving.

However it is worth mentioning that although ex-employer references can't be defamatory they can be factual. So if the employee is eg dismissed for gross misconduct, or resigns during a formal disciplinary process, they can actually state that in the reference if they choose. In practice most employers probably won't go there, unless there is a particular reason eg if there are safeguarding concerns which a future employer would need to know about.

I've just remembered the man I worked with once, only briefly thank goodness, who on being handed some letters that had just arrived dropped them straight into the bin. I don't know whether he was doing this for effect or genuinely. He thought he was very funny. He had a very high opinion of himself, in fact. The rest of us thought he was a pain in the neck and a waste of space. Anyway, when asked what on earth he was doing he said if anything was really important they'd send it again.

Every morning he'd arrive at about 9.15. The rest of us would be there by 9am. Every morning his wife would ring on the dot of 9am and a colleague would explain he hadn't arrived yet. She'd ring again once he was there and he would often be required to talk to his daughter and tell her off for not using her potty, or similar. It was grim.

He was a qualified chartered accountant working for one of the top firms in the world. I often wonder what happened to him.

Quite a few over the years..

The standout one was a woman who was absolutely useless - constant mistakes, no work ethic, lazy, no concept of timekeeping and deliberately snuck off early all the time, came in hungover regularly, dressed like she was at the gym (corporate dress policy), you name it she was it. She got promoted which shocked everyone, then a few weeks later she resigned which our manager was gobsmacked at as she was managers pet. The day before her replacement was due to start no one had cleared her desk or personal items (of which she left behind a huge amount), so I volunteered to do it as I felt sorry for the state the desk was in for the new starter.

Well, amongst the bikinis, make up, loan statements, SanPro, condoms, medications etc was her latest annual performance review, all signed and dated a few weeks before she was promoted. It was dire - she got a score of 4 out of a range of 1 to 5 (5 being you’re basically sacked), and the comments and feedback from senior staff and customers were just appalling. It was an utterly shameful review and the colleagues comments were basically “he e hee I must try harder.” How the actual f!@k both our manager and HR could justify the promotion was beyond me. I lost all respect for the company.

I'm 55 I didn't see a computer till 1984 and even then it was a fleeting glance. We then got a Sinclair spectrum but just played games on it. Computers weren't part of my education, until I did an ECDL, in the early 2000's when I bought a home computer.

Two colleagues in my team simply couldn’t keep up with the workload, weren’t proactive, couldn't use the computer systems without constant help, couldn’t think outside the box (which the job required), and for some odd reason each had one of the biggest retailer accounts to look after.

They were lovely people, but just simply couldn’t manage the role and so the rest of us were constantly given their work to do. This was all widely known in the company. At the company Christmas party they announce employee of the year and runners up, but managers cannot have any input into nominations for anyone in their team. So, the sales team thought these two were great despite knowing that everyone else was also heavily working on these retailer accounts too.

These two got employee of the year and runner up due to Sales voting them, and the rest of our team was beside themselves. The morale and atmosphere just plummeted. Later in January our Manager called us all in one by one and said that “certain people were given awards that they should not have been,” and as a consequence we would all receive an additional % bonus at year end April, and to acknowledge and thank us for all our hard work supporting these colleagues.

An effective selection process can identify incompetent candidates but it can't unfortunately weed out candidates with a bad attitude; they are effectively incompetent as they have no intention of doing the work they are being paid for.

Agreed, in most instances I find candidates show their true self within the first 2-3 weeks of starting. The CV description of the dynamic, passionate, enthusiastic, hardworking person with excellent organisational skills blah blah blah bares zero resemblance to the reality. The issue is when employers will persist with training when the fundamentals such as attitude, work ethic and self discipline are just non existent.

@StockpotSoup

Most employers don't really care about references unless they are for jobs where you have to be highly vetted such as working with vulnerable people.

Employers can get rid of you easily within two years anyway . Plus they only need to ask an ex employer one question: Would you re - employ , yes or no ? There is only going to be the choice of two answers .

I do think some of these are just a case of if you've never learnt or been taught something, how do you know? I am a good contracts lawyer (if I do say so myself) but I didn't learn what a noun or a verb was (let alone anything like an adverb, adjective etc) until I was in my 20s. Because I was never taught it. I know how to write perfectly well and am a bit of a grammar Nazi but can I name all the technical definitions? Nope.

I'm also a tech/software lawyer who can't set up her own laptop.

Wondering if any of these posts are about me now 😅

I agree with this to the extent that I don't set a lot of store by glowing references that tick all the 'excellent' boxes. The main use of references imo is to ensure that people are who they purport to be; that they really were working 5 years for X Company in Y role as on their CV, and weren't doing something else (eg they worked only 3 months there in a much more junior role).

I think the 'Would you re-employ?' question is a good one but need to ensure the response isn't misleading....some ex-employers may reply 'No' and what they mean is that the role the person was doing no longer exists, not that the employee wasn't any good. So this may need teasing out.

I can use track changes but would struggle with a pivot table. Track changes is easy!

I also think a lot of employers are too lazy to train people properly.

As for computers, when I started university they only had BBC Microcomputers. I only used a computer with DOS and Word when I worked on the student newspaper and had a technically minded boyfriend who taught me a lot.

I've not worked with anyone who's been as useless as the examples in this thread but I have worked with particularly unpleasant people who should have had some management and softs kills training.

Ahhh this now reminds me. My ex solicitor boss dealt with divorce/matrimonial cases, but he said he thought women were stupid and had no empathy whatsoever. One of our clients had to come and see us and got upset during and after the appointments. He did nothing to console her, was left to me to do.

A new partner then joined who was good at the matrimonial/divorce side, very empathic and a good listener. However, his admin skills including typing letters, emails and submitting the right forms on time were very poor. He was always submitting important forms late which isn’t great when you’re awaiting your decree nisi or absolute. We thought he wasn’t organised enough. He got lots of complaints to us, Law Society and via Google. My boss offered me and the other legal sec to him to help him out (incompetent man would have had to pay us) but he refused this offer.

I can use track changes now but when I first saw it, it scared me. Yes, stupid I know. Most packages I can use now after training myself but there’s so much, too much in terms of packages and new ones, in my opinion. In Teams I learned Planner over lockdown. Then One Note.

A few people I’ve worked with in the past aren’t proactive and/or lack common sense. Want an important legal document signing (I got this done in 2 days in one job in one non law firm) then chase it! My boss was impressed and pleased I’d got it signed so quickly but 8 years of being a legal sec and having to be proactive made this easy for me.

Yes, I have worked at places where they would never rehire because they always thought their next shiny new hire would be the making of the team. (Usually bitter disappointment set in when new person turned out to be just like the rest of us!)

I worked for an MD as a PA a few years ago which put me off being a PA for life.

I would come into work find my desk littered with post-it notes of tasks to do, which my boss Mr Important had left. Not just one or two....dozens.

If I dared make a single mistake such as a letter typo (eg one space instead of two after a full stop) he would scream at me in front of everyone who was there; colleagues, customers etc. For a baritone he could make a really good stab at screaming.

He would tell me to 'get customer so and so on the phone for me' so I would have to ring them and explain this, and ask them to hold before I transferred them to Mr Important. By then Mr Important would be doing something/talking to someone else and I had to wait to transfer and explain the delay to the increasingly irate customer, who would be questioning why their time was deemed less important than that of Mr Important.

Once he asked me to get a client on the line who (he had somehow found out) had just flown in that day from the Far East. I rang the poor man who was in his hotel room recovering from jet lag, and he was extremely annoyed: 'How did Mr Important know I was here? What does he want?' I transferred the call and could hear them arguing, it ended with the boss screaming 'Fuck off!' and slamming down the phone.

Some colleagues shared with me that the company was suffering due to Mr Important falling out with everyone. But of course nobody dared to say this to his face.

If I dared make a single mistake such as a letter typo (eg one space instead of two after a full stop) he would scream at me in front of everyone who was there; colleagues, customers etc

I had a boss who once swore at me because I used one space instead of two. I ended up crying in the toilets and then sulking through a departmental lunch. Not his finest hour, but not mine either.

You should have had more training and support before working on the shop floor.
Being able to interact with customers is a must but comes with confidence and experience.
Shoplifting is a difficult one though. Sadly there is little or no enforcement available to stop it. I have much sympathy with retailers trying to combat this.

This is why I hate being a PA/EA sometimes! Some bosses are awful to work for.

That's very true, with the right support it could have been a lot easier. This job (like others mentioned) date from the early 80s when I was just starting out, in those days I think there was much less awareness of mental & emotional health issues and lack of self-confidence was more likely to be perceived just as a character flaw. It is a shame that bad experiences like this can colour a young person's outlook for a long time.

I see young adult workers talking openly about their mental health challenges & disabilities, I am really glad that they feel able to do this. However I know that horrible workplaces still exist.

I have a colleague who is nearly 80 years old. They can't make her retire.

She often loses things, accidentally deletes things, can't find anything in an electronic sense, forgets instructions etc, and takes up a lot of my time asking questions she's asked before and forgotten the answer to.

I do love her though! 😭

I wonder if the company / agency gave the trainee any induction training ?
Vegetable preparation - she could have thought this meant washing and peeling spuds for example - company need to give out job description listing what It required in job description. Saves everyone's time and energy then.
My husband worked for an agency as a fork lift driver - a few times he turned up at the site to be told he was also expected to operate machines with cutting tools and do carpentry skills as well which he wasn't comfortable doing.
It should have been explained to the trainee beforehand that the job involved using knives to chop veg.

Oh my god it was me, when I briefly worked as an event coordinator. It was an internal role - I was new to the company and didn't really understand what the job entailed as it had some vague wanky title, but for some reason someone or other in senior management who'd never met me in person decided I was the one for it and I was strongly encouraged to apply, despite expressing my doubts even at that stage. They must have been absolutely desperate, as I missed the application deadline by a week then told them honestly in the interview that I had almost zero experience of event planning, was rubbish at anything involving organisation or admin, wouldn't be able to deal with any external suppliers because my grasp of the local language was poor, tended to avoid conflict and hated speaking in front of people, and they hired me anyway I spent about six weeks being unsurprisingly rubbish at it, endured the surreal nightmare of hosting a whole-company dinner (for which I initially managed to turn up at the wrong location, despite being the person who organised it) and promptly quit, to everyone's great relief.