10th June 2013 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Our recruitment drive completely dominated last week. Not just because the flyering took out two working days, but because those days are so long and tiring, they knacker me out for the following days. Also, I was busy arranging tutor assessments in Oxford and Cambridge. I try to avoid doing assessments if we have enough other assessors keen to do them, but the demand is so great in Oxford and Cambridge over the next couple of weeks because everyone has just finished their exams, but is still hanging around at the end of term. The good news is that loads of people have booked assessments, so we’ll have a fresh batch of new tutors keen to start teaching come the start of the school year.
There was something that made me laugh a little recently: one of our tutors hadn’t paid all of the commission that he owed, and had insisted that he had already paid. This had actually gone on for a couple of months, where he would email us quite rudely, basically asking that we stop pestering him, and we would respond to explain that he definitely owes the amount in question. The whole situation then became a bit comedic when his mother emailed us to say that she was now in charge, and demands that we remove the late payment charges on her son’s account. In most cases, when someone has mistakenly not paid us, they usually email to apologise and we almost always reduce the charges, but in this case it was a little ridiculous; someone was emailing us, insulting us, yet conceding the mistake was her son’s, and demanding the charges be removed. What made me laugh was that it must be 3-4 weeks ago that I wrote about how I had worked hard to improve our system for collecting overdue payments, and that, as a result, I had been able to reduce the level of the charges, but had to accept that the majority of people wouldn’t notice what I had done. The sum of the charges for this tutor was £10.64, for a payment more than 2 months overdue. I don’t know of any other company whose charges are so small, and if he and his mother had been more polite from the start, then they would have been even smaller!