We had two candidates pass their written tests and interviews recently, so it was expected that I would have two new coworkers joining my chronically-shorthanded department next month. (For anyone wondering, yes, they're both women.)
One of them has just notified us that she is currently based overseas and due to a personal emergency, she won't be moving back to Taiwan for at least another year. She asked us if she could work remotely, but due to a variety of factors (training, confidentiality, observations, etc.) this isn't really feasible for new colleagues. So it looks like she won't be joining us.
The other has been, shall we say, lackadaisical towards her onboarding training. We gave her a few instructional files to read and a practice file to show what she learned. All she had to do was make a few edits based on the instructions. She sent back an unedited file. We emailed her back pointing out that she hasn't made any edits. She sent another file back with edits, but they were edits copied verbatim from the instructional file rather than edits showing she's learned anything. (For example, let's say the instructional file says "you should correct grammatical errors, eg. 'John are' should be changed to 'John is'. And in the practice file there's a sentence that says 'Bob are', but she changed that to 'John is'.) And then we emailed her back again pointing out that she didn't do the exercise correctly, and to please try again, and then she sent back a blank file.
So instead of two good new colleagues next month, we're getting one scatter-brained one instead.