Point taken. Maybe

Have I mentioned that I’m going to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Orlando next week? Why yes, I believe I have.

Well, social media is still awash with supplications for anyone who has a ticket that inexplicably has become surplus to requirements (less than a week before the event) to please let them know. (There was one spinning a queen-for-a-day sob story about how lovely it would be to have the opportunity to attend GHC, if only someone would very kindly surrender a ticket. As of course it would, but if she’s only now aware of the conference, perhaps shoot for next year, eh?)

But it turns out that individuals aren’t the only ones who aren’t having their finest hour.

One of the big draws for sponsoring organizations and tech women both is that GHC is a massive one-stop recruitment shop. It’s where companies looking to hire engineering talent (with the bonus points for scooping up women engineers, yay!) set up the kinds of enticements usually reserved for college football coaches seeking to sign high school stars. (I’ll write a post later about the number of networking receptions, dinners and other social events crammed into two evenings)

For the women tech talent, it’s possibly the one place in the world where they can be assured of the concentrated attention of recruiters from big names in tech (Google, Apple, Microsoft), in general business with tech needs (Allstate, Macy’s, Mastercard) and in sexy startups (Twitter, Facebook, Tesla, a whole bunch you’ve probably never heard of; I know I haven’t). They’re looking to hire everything from interns to people who’ve got a few miles on them. (Not so much that last one, but they’re sidling up to it.) So you can see why these women are still hoping that a ticket will drop from the sky into their laps—it’s entirely possible that you can walk into the Orange County Convention Center with a fistful of résumés and walk out with multiple job offers.

Even if you don’t yet have a degree in hand.

Well, but it’s incumbent upon the companies, and their recruiters, to make the case for why this talent should choose them over all the other organizations. And if you don’t have the budget to throw a Game of Thrones-themed cocktail reception (as HBO does) or hand out yet-to-be-seen amazing swag, then you have to be extra primo good at communication.

(I’m going to have a few things to say about how the recruiters communicate—and if you want to know how I feel about recruiters in general, take a look here. For now, I’m just going to say that many of them have miles to go.)

But here’s one crowd who were having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day when they sent this invitation:

Point72 turns out to be a “family investment management” company, which changed its name recently but apparently still couldn’t outrun its bad press. They’ve had compliance issues.

Well—you might think the email was fairly innocuous; indicative of an outfit that’s not much interested in spending money to recruit. Emails, after all, cost hardly anything.

But, as it turns out, Point72’s email cost them rather a lot. They sent it in clear: instead of putting all the recipients on a BCC list, they sent it to all more than 200 of us. We could all see everyone’s email addresses. And, of course, anyone could scrape the email addresses and use them for Russian phishing attacks.

Now, this would be bad enough. What's worse is that they're a fintech company; protecting personal private information (PPI) is the sine qua non of that industry. But they sent it to more than 200 women in tech. This was about the worst group of recipients they could have chosen for this faux pas. A fact that was discussed on Twitter yesterday.

So, their first response was… assuming less than full accountability. Perhaps the public outing had an effect because later in the afternoon they shot out this email; this time to an undisclosed group of recipients.

Nowhere near as glam as the first one. We’ll see how well it works.