Mean-Spirited Rejection Letter Backfires Big Time
In today’s example of “blowback can be a b*tch,” we submit for your consideration a jaw-droppingly vicious rejection letter from a self-styled job bank guru that went viral. And then the real fun began.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.”
“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.” …
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.
