Job list manager’s harsh emails go public; she apologizes
Kelly Blazek, one of the International Association of Business Communicators’ communicators of the year last year, pulled no punches with people seeking to join her Cleveland-area job list.
Hundreds of people contact me every month looking for help, and as the bottom fell out of the job market, their outreach and requests demanded more of my time. I became shortsighted and impatient, and that was wrong. 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.
At least three applicants to the newsletter made the self-described “house mother” of Cleveland’s rejection emails public on the Web. Quite a few critics on Twitter called Blazek’s responses a bad reflection on Cleveland’s professional community. The #KellyBlazek hashtag is a pretty good catalog of that criticism, and there’s even a parody account.
Here’s one example of a response from Blazek—a 2013 International Association of Business Communicators communicator of the year—which was posted to BuzzFeed last week:
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