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.”
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“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.
sgoldstein@nydailynews.com or follow on Twitter
