Well, this happened.
Yesterday I made my weekly visit to LinkedIn
and came across an opening with IBM’s threat management services business unit.
It’s not a precise match, but it is interesting, and LinkedIn helpfully
reminded me that I know someone who’s associated with IBM. So I copied the link
to the posting and reached out to that person—I’ll call her Hannah—and asked
what she could tell me about that division of IBM.
Note, please, not if she knew anything about
the job, or for an introduction to the hiring manager; just what she knows
about the division.
Here’s what I got back, quoted verbatim and in
its entirety:
“Nothing. Not with IBM anymore (and don’t do
linked in either). Hope all is well. H.”
Now, this is someone I consider a friend,
although not a close one. When reorganizations at Booz Allen a number of years
ago meant she was going to be laid off, I completely rewrote her résumé (a lengthy
process that involved interviewing her, researching the market and ensuring the
value she could bring to an organization was immediately apparent), which
played no small role in her getting the IBM job, inasmuch as it got her through
the screening to the interviews. In comparison, my request wasn’t a huge
imposition. Or so I thought.
As I said above, this is only about a 50%-likely
opportunity, but even so, Hannah’s brusque dismissiveness leaves a sour taste. (If she "doesn't do LinkedIn", it's entirely possible she didn't even click on the link to look at what division it was in.) I don’t know whether it’s a case of I’ve-got-mine-so-you-can-sod-off, or she
just can’t be arsed in general. Maybe she was having a crappy day. I did know she’d left IBM a while ago; maybe it
was under less-than-stellar circumstances. But even so—I think of large
companies I’ve worked for, and if someone asked a similar kind of question of
me, I’d give whatever info I had (even with caveats if out of date), and try to come up with
someone who might take a call to find out more. (I have in fact done just
that.)
Making less than that basic effort (which I
consider a minimally decent thing) hardly strikes me as kind. For a regular churchgoer, it’s also not especially Christian.
And here’s the thing: it’s rebuffs like this
that makes it so difficult for a lot of people to network during their job
search. We’re all told that networking delivers the biggest bang for the buck when
you’re looking for a gig, but a couple of 15-word Hannah-style brush-offs could
just crush someone who’s already feeling a little frayed from being unemployed
and getting fistfuls of rejections from job applications. This is precisely
when someone doesn’t need this kind of crappiness.
Well, I’ll wash this sour taste out of my mouth
and regroup. Hannah’s pettiness may make me exercise more caution in whom I ask
for help in my current search, but it has magnified the generosity
of others who haven’t been such jerks. It’s also reminded me to make that effort
of kindness to those who reach out to me.
So, thanks, H.
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