The job bank head ruined her reputation with some nasty emails

Feb 28, 2014 09:18 GMT  ·  By

Popular social media sites were flooded with messages of outrage after a job seeker publicly shared the nasty rejection emails she received from Kelly Blazek, who runs the Cleveland Job Bank.

The whole story started when Diane Mekota, a recent graduate of John Carroll University, contacted Blazek via Linkedin, inviting her to connect. Ms. Mekota is planning to move to the Cleveland, Ohio area this summer, so she started to look for a job. She emailed Ms. Blazek's job board and sent her a note via LinkedIn explaining her qualifications.

Kelly Blazek was named city's "Communicator of the Year" in 2013 by the Cleveland Chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators and describes herself as a passionate advocate for job-seekers. So, one might think Mekota had good reason to try to reach her through the social networking website dedicated to people in professional occupations.

However, Blazek's response baffled the young jobseeker, and the rest of the world after being posted on Reddit, Imgur and Facebook.

“Your invite to connect is inappropriate, beneficial only to you, and tacky,” Blazek reportedly wrote. “Wow, I cannot wait to let every 26-year-old jobseeker mine my top-tier marketing connections to help them land a job.”

“I love the sense of entitlement in your generation. You're welcome for your humility lesson for the year. Don't ever reach out to senior practitioners again and assume their carefully curated list of connections is available to you, just because you want to build your network,” she added, concluding “Don't ever write me again.”

After being shared with the public on social media sites, the email went viral. On Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks, people expressed their outrage and disagreement with the discouraging email via derogatory comments.

Moreover, in the following hours, three other similar notes sent by Blazek to other job hunters surfaced. During this ugly social media debacle, Blazek deleted most of the contents of her blog and took down the majority of her social media accounts.

This episode destroyed her reputation and she was inevitably forced to issue an apology to Mekota and to the Cleveland Plain-Dealer.

Yahoo Shine spoke with two experts, Barbara Patcher and Lizzie Post, and put together a short list of lessons we can learn from this email saga.

The experts advise people not to let their emotions overwhelm them, be positive and learn from other people's mistakes, avoid impulsivity and aggressiveness, and most importantly, never underestimate the power of social media, because whatever you post there can turn against you.

The entire episode is another cautionary tale about how posting something spiteful or malicious online can come back to haunt you in the social media age.