In the spirit of Choice magazine’s Shonky Awards, I have listed our Whacker Awards for when prospective clients or clients go feral.
Each client listed below takes out the Whacker for displaying the more curious aspects of human nature. You’ll understand why employers may go around them.
My favourite was Avinash Sanjeev Pilli who was never a client, yet left a one star Google review. He sent us FOUR resumes to consider, ignored our quote, wanted a package deal (which we don’t do), then haggled over the price of the cover letter. I pointed him towards another writing company and he lost the plot. He worked in IT customer service. God help the customers.
Kelly works as a sales representative. She wanted a new resume. Unfortunately she told us after she paid that she had no desktop, no laptop and no copy of Word. She used an old iPad with a corrupted email system. We ploughed on knowing we were on a kamikaze mission. We copied and pasted drafts into the body of an email. 43 emails later we realised she’d sent us wrong information. We cleared that up and sent her the final draft. Two weeks later, she complained the resume formatting was wrong. Thanks for the memories.
There’s a new player in the Adelaide resume writing scene. It’s called ‘Adelaide Resume Writers’ – for SEO reasons. It states it trades out of 53 Wakefield Street, Adelaide. That will be a surprise to the staff and girls of Saint Aloysius College, which is located at 53 Wakefield Street. It’s another SEO con job from an offshore spook organisation. Unfortunately, there will be more work for us next year, fixing their resumes, like we do for the ‘cut and paste’ shonks.
We had an early career Vietnamese accountant who wanted a resume and cover letter to apply to one of the big four accounting firms. Myself and another writer worked on her documents and were criticised with every draft. Yet she made no changes to the drafts. We realised she couldn’t write English. How in the hell did she get an accounting degree from UniSA? That’s another story. Then she wrote she didn’t want the employer to know she’d hired professional writers. We replied with one word, ‘Terminated’.
The Bouquet Award goes to a nurse who figured out that we conduct a harmless but important test on prospective clients. We ask them to send us their old resume or respond to an email by a certain time and date. Those that do are highly likely to be good online clients. They will meet deadlines. They get the ‘Welcome Aboard’ email. Those who don’t tend to break deadlines and unfortunately, never make it up the gangway. The nurse showed nice deductive skills and got a one-off 20 per cent discount.