Every now and then I gain a small insight in to the human condition. It’s not always edifying.

We had a client recently who asked us to rewrite her resume. She was a contractor in the public service. We sent her the terms and conditions, emphasised the 24-hour information turn around rule, then created a first draft. We emailed her some questions.

She said she was ‘too busy’ to answer and would ‘get back to us later’. She said her business had been badly affected by the Coronavirus. Fair enough, even though we work on a tight 24-hour turn around schedule, the phone is ringing off the hook with prospective clients, and much of western capitalism is crashing around us.

She eventually got the information to us but it was incomplete. She said when she got home from work, she was ‘too tired to work on her resume’, so she sent what she could. What she sent was so poor and no employer would have spent more than five seconds on it.

We rewrote what we could, reformatted and restructured the resume and asked more questions and included the account.

She got back to us and said she was ‘too tired’  to work on the resume ‘at the moment’ and would get back to us ‘later on’. She said she forgot to pay or ‘hadn’t got around to it as yet’.

She failed to read the terms and conditions. Failed twice to write to set deadlines. Failed to send results-based information and she failed to pay the account on time. Would you employ someone like that?

In the last 14 days, we have had 168 contacts with people who have lost their jobs, who may lose their houses or apartments and who would do ANYTHING to get a job. These are the people we want to help at Republic.

I refunded the client’s money and sent her a short email saying we won’t be proceeding with her resume. Why? We’re too tired.

She’s the first client we have blackballed in 18 months.