That helping hand

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worked for, and if someone asked a similar kind of question of me, I’d give whatever info I had (even with caveats if out of date), and try to come up with someone who might take a call to find out more.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.