CLEVELAND, Feb. 26 (UPI) -- The founder of a job bank in Cleveland for marketing and communications got a lesson in those areas when a nasty message she sent a young job-seeker went viral.
Kelly Blazek, named Cleveland's "2013 Communicator of the Year," has now apologized, the (Cleveland) Plain Dealer reported Wednesday.
"Creating and updating the Cleveland Job Bank listings has been my hobby for more than 10 years," Blazek said in her apology. "It started as a labor of love for the marketing industry, but somehow it also became a labor, and I vented my frustrations on the very people I set out to help."
Diana Mekota, a graduate of John Carroll University in the Cleveland area, said she did not expect the kind of viral response she got when she shared Blazek's email. Mekota, who had recently moved back to Cleveland from Chicago, had gotten in touch with Blazek.
But she decided to share the email more widely after her friends responded with outrage.
"Your invite to connect is inappropriate, beneficial only to you, and tacky," Blazek said in a scathing and lengthy email. "Wow, I cannot wait to let every 25-year-old job-seeker mine my top-tier marketing connections to help them land a job. Love the sense of entitlement in your generation.
In her apology, Blazek called her email "rude, unwelcoming, unprofessional and wrong."
