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!".

God I really want that script review job @SlightlyJaded is talking about. I'd be so good at it. (In comparison).

I do some home care too so the same with people being signed off on manual handling and then having no clue how to put a sling on someone or use the hoist. Obviously why they are double handed even though it could be done singly by someone who knows what they're doing. It is really frightening and I have no intention of being cared for and will find a suitable cliff to leap off first.

This really is weapons grade entitlement and stupidity!

Surprised that made a tribunal.

This was in another country and the tribunal there is notoriously biased towards employees. We had one case where employee literally stole some tools, but tribunal decided that firing the guy was not justified, as he had brought the stuff back when he got caught, so no harm done..

But even they agreed in this particular case that the employee was somewhat unjustified in their demands.

You were just on the cusp. I'm only a few years older and at university we didn't have great access to computers, people rarely used the internet or email, and essays didn't need to be typed. By the time I finished university, things were getting going more. When I was at school we never used Microsoft applications.

@HaggisHuntress

Interesting. The lazy ones are not the ones who management think are great . As for the non washing , I've known some carers just flick the shower head round the cubicle to make believe they had showered the resident . Also write in the notes that the resident had declined a shave . No they just could not be bothered. I've seen carers let agency staff do all the get ups while they sat outside smoking .They were so far up management backside that there was no point reporting them as it was just brushed under the carpet .

• Meant to say that the lazy ones are the ones that management think are great !

So many horror stories about carers. It’s frightening. I knew someone who worked in a care home. Always did night shifts (obviously because it was less work) and she used to use the care home’s facilities to do most of her own laundry. I despised her for it. But if the pay were better….
No wonder worried relatives have used hidden cameras in the past.

We get a laundry pittance for uniforms that you can legally claim. Also the rest of the mileage owed us that the company don't pay - still only 45p a mile.
I'm crap at claiming what I'm owed.

@Ilovecleaning

This sounds like a thread in inself

At the other end of the incompetence scale was an ex-CEO of mine. He came in originally as a non-executive director (NED) to a company I'd only just joined. The company itself was small but had some really interesting technology, and appeared to be going places. But it became apparent that it was in fact a basket case and had been terribly badly run. The NED basically orchestrated to get the original CEO out, and then changed the strategy to merge with other companies in an effort (so he said) to achieve synergies 🙄with the other companies' products and our tech. He managed to wring a huge salary and options deal out of the RemCom. Initially I thought it was a good move, given how badly run the co had been in the past. But unfortunately ex-NED/new CEO couldn't run a pissup in a brewery either, so things went from bad to worse. After a hideous stressful 18 months I walked out, telling them they would go bust in 2 years or less, and if they wanted me to work my notice period, they'd have to sue me.

Reader, they went bust in 2 years and a day.

I occasionally google his name and can see that he's gone to various other companies around the world, pulling the same scheme and leaving chaos in his wake. But very well remunerated, I have no doubt.

@moggerhanger

You find this in the Care system and retail management too , they just go from place to place often just before they get taken on a disciplinary for incompetence .

Such a shame there isn't an international register of incompetent people with big red marks against them. They do such damage when they are that high up, just look at Johnson becoming PM.

The firm (small accountancy practice) that I worked at in the 90s took on a qualified chartered accountant who'd trained and qualified with Ernst & Young (one of the UK's biggest accountancy firms), as "partner designate", i.e. on fast track to becoming a partner. He was mid-late 20's and had been qualified a few years, so not a rookie.

He hadn't a clue how to prepare basic sets of accounts for small businesses like pubs, shops, etc, he didn't know how to do a VAT return! He'd spent all his working life "auditing" big firms, so had never come across "carrier bags" full of random screwed up invoices and unopened bank statements. He knew all the theory, the international accounting standards, etc., but didn't even know where to start when there wasn't a set of balanced books done by a book-keeper.

He lasted about a month, as he was so far up his own arse that he wanted other staff to do the basic book-keeping elements for him.

We all knew it was a problem on his first day when he was given a crisp box full of invoices to work through and his first question was "where's the nominal ledger"!!

@Kazzyhoward How/why did he end up at your firm?!

@Kazzyhoward , I think this is also an interviewing fail. I work in a field where people with my qualifications may have absolutely no idea how to work in a different area to the one they’ve always worked in despite technically being qualified.

It’s part of the application / interview procedure to check whether people either have sufficient experience or whether they need training (which the business may or may not be prepared to offer).

Johnson was voted in as an MP. He became PM because people voted for him to be party leader, and the public voted for his party.

Winning votes doesn’t mean he’s not incompetent.

@Ilovecleaning , the point is that he was democratically elected into the position.
This thread has pointed out some of the failings in recruitment by interviewing.

He was interviewed before being placed as a candidate, surely? Or did he get parachuted in on the back of being high profile?

As a data analyst I find this wild because I never had a job interview and not had to demonstrate my skills in a technical test, but a few times I have heard of people getting hired by lying in the interview when actually they haven't analysed data a day in their life. They are always men.

I think the owner was "blinded by the light" that someone from a top firm wanted to join his small firm and didn't have the confidence to ask/check his actual ability/experience.

Probably both at fault as the job advert/description was pretty clear the job was a wide scope including "incomplete records" work, VAT returns, payrolls, as well as accounts preparation and tax returns. The firm wasn't a registered auditing firm so the applicant must have known his years of doing nothing but audits wasn't a particularly good match.

I wasn't party to the job interview nor his CV, so can't comment on what was actually discussed or what he claimed on his CV.

New gardener job was to mow the lawn. When asked why it looked exactly the same he said he was "tickling the tops of the grass"
🤣🤣🤣🤣