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 years ago ( 1983) I worked in a legal dept in a massive insurance co, with an incredibly sly and lazy girl ( same age as me )
She was ALWAYS late with wilder and wilder excuses to explain why she rolled in at midday. The most bizarre excuse was that an old man had pooed himself on the tube and it had rolled down his trousers onto her shoes so she had to return home and change 🤣

She then left to join the marketing dept where she and her boyfriend created false invoices for pretend companies and stole £200,000. She went to prison for 2 years. Before she was caught she would pretend her boyfriend was a black cabbie to explain all this new wealth when she popped back to brag 😂

How do you define 'competent in Word'?

@G5000, it depends on how much you (don't) know you don't know.

I work with people who can write a document in Word but their formatting is pretty awful IMO, but they are competent for their job function. So what if they use paragraph marks for spacing ...

The ones that bug me are the ones who need a level of expertise but don't.

Yes. A temporary head of a funds team who had never worked in investment funds before. They couldn’t work out where various funds were domiciled. Just awkward all around and a very unpleasant person.

In all the places I've worked, most have been ok at their jobs, some have been fantastic at their jobs and a few were incompetent. It got me thinking some time back, that if this were the general spread of workers across all sectors, in some settings it may not matter that much apart from the unfortunate souls who have to work with the incompetent.

But in other settings, eg surgeons, Lawyers, Prime Ministers, it really does matter if you get a dud. It rings true to me what others have said here that often the useless are promoted to sort of get rid of them, or because they can talk the talk. This is such a dangerous situation. What can be done about this?

Care workers are really important and incompetence can mean death. Lowly paid though so we probably don't matter.

Same here. Just feel so inadequate and useless

Currently work with a young guy who’s a team assistant who turns up late most days, doesn’t finish any tasks to a good standard (if at all) and has said about ten words in the six months he’s been here. I get being shy but being virtually mute in a forward facing role is pretty ridiculous. We found out he had an identical twin and we’re convinced the twin did the interview!

Many years ago, my boss hired an office assistant for me. While I was a part of the interviewing process, he decided to hire without even reading my notes on the interviewees. THIS girl was one of the few that I had noted, "not able for even simple tasks." She was, however, VERY pretty. The second day on the job, I asked her to get a stack of bills ready to mail (envelopes stuffed, addressed, and postage applied). She brought me a stack of sealed envelopes with no addresses. She didn't know you had to write that on the envelopes. Had never received even a bill by mail. Her mama took care of all of that.

We had a new business support/ administrator who needed instructions on how to type a basic word document. She kept putting calls through to me even though they were nothing to do with me. She kept going around the office making people cups of tea to avoid doing the things she couldn't do.
She was a lovely kind heart but just wasn't up to the job.

The most incompetent person in the world is probably ME !!

When I left school the head teacher told my parents I had brains, but no sense. Over the next 30 years, I proved him right. I had over 40 jobs in 30 years, and in virtually every job I was totally incompetent, and was either laid off, fired, or let go because of a change in organisation, reduction in funding, etc etc.

In addition to having no sense, I was a hard worker, always punctual, etc. Some supervisors tried to help, but my incompetence always won in the end.

Then, I got lucky. I was hired by a large organisation, which had the well-deserved reputation of being the sloppiest company in the country. This is the kind of company where, if an employee
a) shows up
b) on time
c) sober and not hungover
and
d) ready to work
then the company declares him employee of the month.

It was wonderful, and quite well paid too. After 10 years of well-paid idleness, I achieved nirvana... I was offered early retirement, with a partial, but adequate, pension.

Ooh I'm curious to know what company that is @BrainsButNoSense !

I'm not incompetent but I'm pretty idle. I've got to a level of competence where I can just coast and not use my brain at all at work. I love low expectations.

Luckily I'm a teacher of a very shortage subject and so if you're vaguely half-competent you are gold dust.

I'm pretty awful at IT though and someone could easily come on here and post about me in that respect. I mean I can use Excel and stuff but it's actually getting stuff to work. I've lost count of the number of times I've phoned IT support because the projector won't turn on in the middle of a lesson and one of the guys will rush over, pointedly hold eye contact with me while pushing in a loose cable that I should have noticed. I only use paper and board pens unless I'm delivering someone else's lesson.

What is this company you speak of?

I could use employment where they're not going to notice my lack of commitment to the corporate workplace and I can bumble on by.

^ My money's on BT

@Mumoftwo1312
Sorry to disappoint you, but they got taken over by a German company shortly before I was offered early retirement. We employees were amused by the idea that any new owner could change the corporate ethos... even Germans!

In my case, I had drifted over to watch some repairmen fix one the machines. As usual, I was looking bright, attentive, and enthusiastic, but had been told to keep well away from any actual work. The fellow standing next to me, also watching, asked me what my job title was, and what I actually did. He then said "your job sounds pretty useless." Notice that he didn't say I was useless. Turns out he was one of the German efficiency experts

Two days later I was offered early retirement. That was over 20 years ago. Now I am useless at home, screwing up repairs and decorating. I am the king of the bodge jobs.

I'm 62, went to uni in '79, studied computer science. Worked in the industry after that

WordPerfect was my preference but I had to learn both. I think it was the IBM PC, came out about 1981.

What happened about her in the end? And did your boss acknowledge he'd made an error? 🌹

@Duckingella

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

I hope that means Dick wasn't paid when he was a no-show and your husband got paid instead? 🌹

She lasted four days, and no, he never admitted it. But he did start asking me for more input. SMALL company, no HR department there.

@Str8talkin , but if the role needed Excel & Word, which many do, you'd need to have a level of competency.
a masters in a STEM subject, can code in SQL, R, Python and some other languages won't be much use to someone unless the role needs them.

There was one guy in particular. He was great at interview but once he’d got into the job for a couple of months, he just stopped using his brain.

There was a thing that I was showing him how to do - I showed him three or four times because he kept saying that he didn’t understand / didn’t know what was involved. However when we were sitting at the computer, he was looking everywhere except the computer screen - a bit like a five year old when they won’t settle down to their reading book. It got to the point where I said “Are you looking at the screen?”. He got made redundant in the end.

There are some jobs where I think whoever wrote the job description didn’t understand the job. A bit like asking for 10+ years experience in a software that didn’t exist 6 years ago.

Oh god this is bringing back nightmares.

Years ago I worked in a department that was being abolished and its functions transferred. So we were all put at risk of redundancy while they worked out what roles would transfer and what ones wouldn't. While this was going on there was a recruitment freeze.

So if we needed any new staff we had to apply for people from the redeployment pool. Pretty much all of whom seemed to be unemployable.

Standouts were the person who weeks after arriving to applied for a temporary management cover role, didn't get it and had a screaming meltdown at the hiring manager, refused to work with the person did get the role and took out a grievance saying they were assured the job was theirs (it turned out in email records they asked their manager if they should apply, to which the manager neutrally responded it "might give them good experience of applying for internal roles" and offered to review their application).

Or there was the person whose entire job was interpreting data requests from non data experts and sourcing that data for them, who spent their whole time telling people they were stupid as they didn't understand data and they should do it themselves.

Or the guy who it requested two days a week working from home and did not appear to do one single jot of work on those days . When challenged he protested indignantly he was looking after his child on those days and it wasn't possible to work at the same time.

If you teach in a high school then at least one pupil on every class will be able to fix this kind of thing for you. Your colleagues will know which pupils are the knowledgeable and helpful ones .

My 16 year old son is always helping teachers do things like this as often it takes half the lesson for one of the technicians to attend.

His school even have a lunchtime club where they learn all about sound and visual systems, the whiteboards, PA, etc and they organise this for school assemblies, parents events, concerts etc