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!".

Yes, I had someone who was more concerned with his status than actually doing any work.

I’ve worked with a number of these. I twigged after a few conversations in each case that the only thing they had any interest in was perks and squeezing the most out of the company. And not even bright enough to hide it.

Frankly, I’m not too bothered about people being out and out shit or lazy as it tends not to get them far. Mediocre blokes who ascend the career ladder without adding much but not being actively awful is far worse and something I see a lot of.

@Morningmeeting apologies, OP’s post only asked about most incompetent person you’ve worked with, not what you did to resolve the issue.

I work in Financial Services. To prevent conflicts of interest we have to declare the investments we own and get permission before certain types of personal trades.

I owned shares in a family company PourUs Widgets. It was too small to be on their database so the compliance person told me to use PourUs Catering, a listed multi-million dollar company in a different industry in a different country. Um...

My previous employer (in accounting) took on a new trainee. He'd interviewed OK and his references were good.

Turns out he was dyslexic with a particular difficulty with numbers!

Seems his Dad didn't really believe that dyslexia was an issue and had decided he wanted his son to become an accountant, so got his best mate to agree to be a referee for him.

Needless to say he didn't stay long!

A colleague who basically said he was too experienced to do basic things and insisted on saying 'why don't you do it yourself?' when anyone queried anything. This was at the new stage. He thought himself above everything rather than pitching in. He was rude about junior staff. It was strange though. Eventually there were so many complaints that he was let go.

Slightly off piste, but I had a student at university who had written a very poor essay. When I explained that it would need to be massively improved to pass,he said he was going to reprimand the girl who had written it for him!

Actually laughed out loud 😂😂😂😂😂😂

I haven't read through the thread but are you standing over him, hovering? This can make people make more mistakes.

@Testina I had a similar situation with a colleague when I worked in a care home. He was really upset that he was getting underpaid for bank days and couldn't understand why.

Turned out he was writing "10.30" hours on his timesheet when it should have been "10.5"

No amount of explaining could get him to understand that there are 60 minutes in an hour so 30 minutes is half an hour, which is written "10.5".

Should probably have got him to write "10h 30min" or something, but I remember being quite struck by how he had clearly never been taught about decimals and fractions.

Our Head of Finance (of a major UK company) was a complete and utter twat. He delegated all the jobs to everyone else then spent all day playing on the computer.

He got made redundant and the next we heard, he'd landed a similar job with a major water company. He was clearly ace at interviewing, if nothing else.

Was she Nessa (Gavin & Stacey)?

The production director who emailed her scheduling ‘spreadshit’ to our biggest client.

She was awarded Employee of the Year.

By the guy who insisted I input bad grammar into a cover piece for a mag, then reported me for illiteracy to the MD. (I kept his marked up paper just in case).

The MD married the lying jerk. Some businesses shouldn’t survive, sadly. It didn’t.

Same here. We are small family business and can’t afford to hire anyone who can’t do the job. We nearly went bankrupt because we hired someone who couldn’t do the most fundamental part of the job. We found this out during the first week, then he went off sick and claimed disability discrimination . It took us a year to get rid of him and we had to pay him all that time to sit at home and do nothing.

Meanwhile our other two staff were rushed off their feet , customers complaining and we couldn’t afford to hire anyone else as well as as paying the other guy.

It was something as basic as “ I can’t climb ladders because I have an ear problem which makes me dizzy “ when we are a firm of roofers*

Yes we asked for medical reports, which he refused. He claimed that this ear problem started the exact same week he started working for us. What a coincidence.

( details changed to protect the guilty )

Thanks for the thread OP @Peteryourhorseishere that made me laugh. Also love the sticky label on the typewriter roller. The script guy who used all the colours of stickers 😂. Anyway yes I have worked with some incompetent people. What PP’s have said about people who can spout BS is true. Until they then have to do the actual job and the wheels come off. I saw it many times throughout my career. The most blatant was an ‘inspirational headteacher’. They were employed by our LA at great cost. Their job was to inspire us less than inspirational teachers. This would then turn us into inspirational teachers. Except it turned out they were not even a teacher let alone a headteacher.

@SlightlyJaded - can I do that job for you?
I'd actually read the scripts and put the correct sticker on the front and give my feedback too?

I know someone who used to work for a big international firm. She said overseas applicants who couldn't make it to head office were interviewed remotely, as you might expect. Some applicants would find at the start of the interview they had 'camera/video issues' so no visuals for the interviewer. If they interviewed well they'd be taken on despite this. On more than one occasion successful applicants they hadn't 'seen' at interview didn't make it through probation. They were so incompetent the suspicion was they were not the person interviewed.

The production director who emailed her scheduling ‘spreadshit’ to our biggest client.

I nearly sent someone a 'daft report' a few weeks ago (draft report).

One had the misfortune of being managed by someone recently awarded an OBE. I had my doubts about their experience when they were recruited but also wanted to give them a chance because of their background.

Wind on two years and they'd gone, leaving a real mess behind them, a wrecked team and reputation. They were as I thought - strong on photo ops and virtue signalling (usually their own) but no management skills.

This person has now moved on to a gullible public sector organisation and is, as far as I can see, repeating the same process again - overpromising, virtue signalling, doing all the PR etc. They'll move on again no doubt.

On reflection this person was possibly one of the least equipped and most entitled people I have ever had the misfortune to cross paths with. But they ticked the PR boxes and looked good in a photo.

Now I am not saying this person is like those in the Horizon scandal, but we do have a tier of empty headed climbers in this country who cycle around these jobs - see also the Lucy Letby/Chester hospital crowd.

We now have someone in place who is actually qualified for the job, doesn't have the OBE, doesn't virtue signal and only ticks boxes that are relevant to the job.

I'm pretty average in my job, BTW, and wouldn't actually want the job they were given. I just think that we deserved better, and an OBE doesn't mean that you are necessarily good or suited to the role you've been given.

I find a huge difference between the convincing bullshit said at interviews compared to reality, especially amongst younger people/school leavers.

E.G 'I'm an Excel Expert' in the interview but in reality they can't create a basic formula.

Another example 'in my last job I did a presentation for 100 people' but then refuses to ever speak or contribute to anything as they're too shy to talk in a group of more than 3 people in a meeting - this was a training co-ordinator vacancy!

People are getting so good at acting their way through interviews then are hopeless once the job starts.

And, don't get me started on sick leave......

I think you're probably quite unusual in having been using a mac since you were 3. I'm a year older than your husband. We had a sinclair zx81 in the early 80s, used for playing Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy and Pong. After that my sibling had a commodore 64 which I was only rarely allowed to use. It was only used for games. None of my friends had computers, we were unusual and the computers we had were for games and nothing else. I certainly wouldn't have learnt how to use software like excel on them.

In the last year of primary school we had a go on a BBC computer about once a week, but it was one computer shared between the whole class so we only got a couple of minutes on it. Next touched a computer in 6th form when I chose to do some basic computer skills classes which were offered and that was the first time I used excel and word. Didn't touch them again until I got a job which involved all day computer use a couple of years after I left university, and from them on had to self teach myself.

I’ve worked with two contractors in the last few years whose lack of competence had to be seen to be believed. Both getting paid at least £400/day. The first one wittered on a lot about taxonomy, and after he’d been sacked we found he had spent most of his time creating spreadsheets that listed all the data items in the drop down fields of the off the shelf software he was supposed to be writing requirements for. The other did literally nothing and couldn’t describe the product we were delivering after six weeks in the job. Both had a long history of working for local councils- I get the impression a lot of people manage to hide in public sector roles for a long time.

We had a sinclair zx81 in the early 80s, used for playing Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy and Pong.

We had one of those! Complete with a '1k RAM pack'!

When managing a day centre for adults with complex disabilities a new support worker who was transferred from home care was asked to give 1:1 support to a young man who could not swallow or chew food and needed everything liquidised. He had severe learning disabilities and uncontrolled epilepsy so required constant supervision. She was given clear guidelines on his needs but twice put food ( first time an apple and second time peanuts) in his pockets “to take home”.
She objected hugely and brought her union rep in to argue her case when at the second occasion I had to give her a written warning.
This young man could have choked to death from her incompetence.

Years ago we had an offshore team member who typed ‘unidentified funds received in a c**t’ instead of account. Then copied and pasted down to all of the unmatched lines on the rec.Then download a report to PDF and sent out to the client - a huge wealth management company 😱

Not my recruitment as I wasn't important enough to have such powers but I was given him to train

He was calling a customer and I was sat listening

The customer gave their email address. It had an underscore in. He actually wrote the word underscore. I was trying to correct it without the customer hearing. I think he then deleted it while trying to correct it, and had to take it down again. I don't think he could copy and paste either.... And I think ended up deleting the notes he'd made

There were other things too but I can't remember them. Pretty sure they hated me because I said I was struggling with training him!!

It was a call centre so computer based role...