This email response is decidedly unprofessional.
The keeper of a Cleveland job bank online posting group is under fire
after she ridiculed, embarrassed and trash-talked at least two job
seekers who sought the woman’s help in getting admitted to the group’s
email listserv.
Kelly Blazek, the group’s self-described “House Mother” and
communications professional, has scrubbed all traces of herself from the
Internet after the web erupted when her vitriolic emails went viral.
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It all began when Diana Mekota wrote Blazek about her qualifications so
she could use the listserv to find a job after relocating to the Ohio
city from Rochester, N.Y.,
the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported.
Mekota also sent an “invitation to connect” on LinkedIn with the well-networked Blazek.
But Blazek, who once said she wanted her “subscribers to feel like
everyone is my little sister or brother, and I’m looking out for them,”
instead wrote back with a scathing email telling Mekota off.
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“Apparently you have heard that I produce a Job Bank, and decided it
would be stunningly helpful for your career prospects if I shared my
960+ LinkedIn connections with you — a total stranger who has nothing to
offer me,” Blazek wrote to the John Carroll University graduate. "Your
invite to connect is inappropriate, beneficial only to you, and tacky.”
Kelly Blazek, a Cleveland
woman who ran the city’s Job Bank newsletter and resource center, has
basically gone into hiding after her harsh letters went viral.
The scorned Mekota posted the nasty letter to imgur.com, posted under
the headline “Your humility lesson for the year from a ‘professional.’”
“Guess us twenty somethings should bow down to senior professionals
because clearly we have nothing to offer,” Mekota wrote alongside her
post.
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The email quickly went viral — and sent Blazek, who won a local “Communicator of the Year” award in 2013, scrambling.
The contrite communicator sent the Plain Dealer an apology, writing, “My Job Bank listings were supposed to be about hope, and I failed that.”
RELATED: UPDATE
“In my harsh reply notes, I lost my perspective about how to help, and I
also lost sight of kindness, which is why I started the Job Bank
listings in the first place,” Blazek wrote. “The note I sent to Diana
was rude, unwelcoming, unprofessional and wrong.”
It was a far cry from just last year,
when the Cleveland Chapter of the International Association of Business
Communicators wrote that “Blazek is not just a headhunter or a
recruiter, but a senior communications executive who enjoys helping
others in the profession," in announcing she had won the communications
award.
PettieBettie/via Twitter
Diana Mekota is one of the at least two job seekers that Kelly Blazek sent EXTREMELY harsh rejection letters to.
And the story of one rebuke brought out another job seeker who says he, too, was verbally beat down by Blazek.
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"My December Job Bank had a five paragraph rant about what a poor job
my subscribers do when telling others to sign up for my service —
explaining one's career field is paramount to entry. Period. I promise
to deny any requester who made me guess what they do. Congratulations —
you're another one,” Blazek wrote to Rick Uldricks late last year.
“This is the most bizarre response I've ever gotten from a Yahoo group,
but maybe she's just having a bad day," Uldricks told the Plain Dealer.
But when he heard Mekota’s story, he came forward with the snarky, rude email.
"I provide an amazing free service to an entire industry that needs to
remember I have no idea, nor do I want to know, the personal resume
behind 7,300 e-mails or 2,700 Twitter handles. People are removed from
my list for spamming me, for annoying me (you're doing a great job), and
perhaps you were removed on purpose?" she wrote.
“I suggest you sign up for the other Job Bank in town. Oh, guess what —
there isn't one," Blazek, signing off with, "Done with this
conversation, and you."
Blazek has deleted her LinkedIn, Twitter and blog accounts and other
LinkedIn users named Kelly Blazek are distancing themselves from the Job
Bank one, including a Wisconsin woman who wrote she is not the Blazek
“in the news.”
Blazek parody Twitter accounts have popped up and a new Cleveland job
bank service, “run by a couple of millennials,” sprouted under the
handle
@OtherNEOJobBank.