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!".

We once advertised a clerical job which said we required computer literacy and one of the people who turned up didn't even know how to turn the computer on, or read a floppy disk (it was a while ago!). His CV had said he was computer literate.
It turned out that his local Job Centre had told him to apply for the job and also told him what to put on his CV. Needless to say, his interview was a short one as it started with us giving him a task to do on the computer.

This one has an amusing ending.

DH went to work for a company;he did a 4 on 4 off shift pattern.

The person who shared the job role and worked the opposite shifts was an arse;let's call him Dick.Dick was there years;he refused to go on the books as a PAYÉ employee and work as a self employed sub contractor for the company instead.He also refused to sign the sub contractor agreement as well.

Dick would regularly blow out on shifts meaning my husband would have to cover them as well as his own.

Why would Dick cancel his shifts?sometimes it would be because he couldn't be bothered to work,sometimes it would be because he'd taken work elsewhere on that day.

Dick also refused to work Christmas meaning DH would instead which was rubbish;it would have been nice if DH got at least boxing day off if he couldn't get any other time off but no Dick wouldn't even cover a single day.

Dick would regularly trot out "I'm a self employed sub contractor;I can pick and choose when I work".

This eventually bit Dick hard on the bum.

My DH was promoted twice;he became Dick's "Upline manager".Dick was annoyed by this and wanted to know why he wasn't promoted (well promotions are for employees).

DH then calculated that Dick over a 6 month period had only covered 50% of shifts he'd been allocated.

Well the business expected sub contractors to cover the shifts they'd been allocated;if a subcontractor couldn't do meet businesses needs then their services would no longer be used and a different subcontractor would be used in their place.

Well Dick wasn't meeting the businesses needs and there his subcontractor services were no longer required.

How can you not know the alphabet!

Thinking about it, the most damaging incompetency has been from senior management. I've been made redundant or chosen to leave a job a number of times where the redundancies or downward trajectory of the business could certainly have been avoided with better management.

I had one boss who almost never did any work and one who believed a total lack of experience in or knowledge of the sector wouldn't be a hindrance. Both businesses failed completely.

@Ilovecleaning
I had someone argue they were left handed whilst holding up their right and refused to be corrected!!

As awful as this woman sounds, it’s right that you should take care not to come across as racist. We all should, surely?

Let us know what you find out!

I worked with a women I was meant to train up. Apparently she’d been a project manager at Cable & wireless for over 10 years and the company I worked for was another telco. She didn’t even know how to scroll down on a computer screen, how to minimise a window and literally did the complete opposite of what I told her to the point I thought I was actually going mad!!

One day I told her ‘under no circumstances send that router to the customer’ an hour later, she’s trying to send the router to the customer.

my boss asked me what the hell was happening with me, (thinking I was just not training her or being awkward etc) I told her she was untrainable and never even seen a laptop let alone been a PM for million pound customers. My boss took over training and fired her after a week - completely as baffled as me as to how she had even got the job!

🤪
Unbelievable!

This makes me laugh so much because a few years ago now a young trainee was employed with us, she retained zero information from the day she started til the day she was let go… my boss to this day swears she was complete opposite in interview and wondered if there was a twin sister interviews instead 🙈. Honestly, I do not know how she’d be employable anywhere, nothing and I mean nothing was retained.

My last manager absolutely dire. She was the same level as us ( not much good at that job either ) but got the management role as she had a degree. The first thing she did was offload a lot of her tasks to other staff. She hadn't an actual base and worked around a network of branches that was ideal as she could hide and claim she'd no phone signal or WiFi. No one knew where she was or what she did. Under her watch more people left in 2 years, me included than the previous 17 years put together. Well eventually the regional manager who was as useless as her left and his replacement sussed her out and she left too.

The line manager hired above me. They were full time managing 2 part timers. She couldn’t use our main software (Adobe), didn’t manage our workflow. Lost both part timers (the whole team) within 6 months, one of which went to tribunal for constructive dismissal and was paid off. The line manager was gone in under two years- whole exercise seems utterly pointless.

And she wasn’t actually that young either! She’d had a local shop job for a few years from leaving school. She had a dimwit “chef” of a boyfriend - he worked in the local fast food shop!
i shouldn’t laugh but it really really was unbelievable how incompetent she was

My BOSS called me when she was WFH and asked me how to connect to Wi-Fi. Yes people, my boss.

This… I hired a junior and as soon as his probation was over he thought he had all the answers.

Someone I worked with in NHS contract management. Told us she had a maths degree and had taught maths in secondary school. Did not know how to work out a percentage! Could not use excel atall. Didn’t understand how to create an agenda or take meeting minutes. I wasn’t involved in interviewing her but I understood she interviewed very well. Put contractor meetings in her diary, disappeared for hours, then would remove said meetings from diary.

I am competent in Word and I did not know this, so maybe they aren't that bad?

We had someone, recent Masters level graduate with different but significant prior work experience. Took an exceptionally long time to complete training and then would not move forward to actually working. Constantly worried about getting things wrong even though it was explained that nothing was permanent/ all fixable. Was there 3-4 months. Very critical of others, needed constant, immediate feedback.

Always asking for more training but would not put themselves out to get it. Wouldn’t leave their area to travel to another city although they claimed to have studied there. I wondered about severe anxiety, agoraphobia but did not disclose anything even though workplace would’ve provided accommodations.

In the end they left instead of doing 3 days training. Claimed toxic environment.

A former boss.

I was involved in the interview process. At interview he seemed really together, lots of experience in the right areas etc.

It turned out what he was really good at was looking busy and talking to the right people. I soon discovered was that he started lots of things, and finished none of them. He spent a lot of time talking to every single person who came into our office about nothing work-related; his old football team and "funny" things he had created for them, an ongoing dispute with a neighbour, projects he had delivered and had turned out exceptionally well. Meanwhile, I was in a junior role dealing with absolutely everything else. He also had a glorious habit of just as I was about to finish a significant piece of work, he would ask to review it then deliver everything I had done as his own.

He was there for about 18 months before the business closed. I'm absolutely certain he spent 12 of those months doing the sum total of fuck all.

I was a fairly new teacher in a secondary school when I was told that I had to split a class on Wednesdays and I’d take the girls and a new male teacher would take the boys. On Friday I taught the whole class. Obviously it only worked if said male teacher got through the allocated work with the boys that I was teaching the girls Fridays were so stressful when the boys told me they’d done nothing in his class. Every week I had to confront this older teacher and he’d say nothing, just look at me with slight amusement. I complained to HOD, he suggested I help him! Told deputy head who said his hands were tied. Told boys to complain to parents they weren’t being taught and would fail exam. Lo and behold said teacher mysteriously disappeared and we settled down again. What a horrible incompetent lazy swine he was.

So many. I had underestimated how blatantly some people lie.

One guy claimed to be a qualified accountant from another country, but although he brought a photocopied certificate it was a common name and we found it difficult to validate with his professional body abroad.

We only tried to validate once it became obvious he had never used a computer. 🤔

Our HR department, in their wisdom, told us that even though he had lied about his proficiency in MS Office on his application (amongst the raft of other untruths) that we should have tested anything essential at interview 🤔.

My boss wasn't having that thankfully and confronted him in a meeting about the lies. He agreed to resign.

These were the days (early 2000s) where we were desperate for people, and he was a hasty decision made in desperation from a very weak field. But still...... He lasted 3 days.

I don't mind people who are motivated and thick, a bit lazy as last ng as they're intelligent, but pathological liars are my worst fear. They can honestly mess with your sanity.

I’m afraid I was once this incompetent lol. Worked in an office as a temp and was asked by some external clients (who were using the office for a while until their meeting) to send a fax to someone. I put their paper in the machine and stood next to this machine for a good 20 minutes. The clients asked if the fax had gone and I assured them it was going. After about 45 minutes another girl came running over and said oh this fax machine isn’t working, let me show you the one that is. She then told me I had been standing next to a printer (that wasn’t even plugged in). I’m forever thankful to her for saving me and it gave me the 😱 kick up the arse I needed to be more assertive and proactive.

I had a part time bar job, a new evening manager was hired.

One particularly busy shift I asked her to open a bottle of red wine, she got really flustered when the top would not unscrew. It was a bottle with a cork. I politely suggested she use a corkscrew. She looked very blankly at me - she had absolutely no idea what a corkscrew even looked like let alone know how to use one.

Even now when I think about it I feel lost for words.

Yep - now! Both doing same role and same pay. I’m doing twice as much work as they can’t be allocated anything significant due to incompetence. They talk total bull about how experienced/skilled they are … and have an irritating tendency to repeat everything you’ve just said in a more confusing way … and as if it was their idea.
Im looking for a new role!

I have tried to put some basic misogyny and racism traps in my interview processes (tow types of bad attitudes we don’t need in our company ).

Of course they only catch the more stupid ones. But you’d be amazed how many that is, in our typical interviewee list of (mostly) men aged 30 - 50 with postgrad degrees.