I hate to have my first post after a long hiatus be a negative one, but I was recently exposed to what I consider a public relations faux pas. When recruiting for a position, as I'm sure many people have over the course of their career, you often receive cover letters and resumés that range from "needed a little more attention" to "laughable." If you have the time and feel you can assist someone, it can be a great act of mentorship to write someone back and offer them a meeting for constructive feedback on their cover letter.
What I wouldn't suggest as a great plan of action for assisting a new member of the workforce is the following:
1. Laugh at their letter - a lot. In fact, post it on the wall of your office for a year.
2. Decide to post it on the internet a year later (with all potential identifiers removed of course).
3. Ridicule the person within an inch of their life, within the context of faux pity, of course.
4. Be proud enough of this mean-spirited critique to leave it posted after many commenters point out its unprofessional nature.
5. Make ridiculous generalizations like "How full of themselves most young people are..."
Hopefully you are thinking, "gee Julie, who on Earth would do that?" Well, I'll tell you who: Ragan.com. I recommend reading the full letter in its entirety here: "Is this the worst cover letter ever?", so I can explain my disappointment in the letter and the author after you've had a chance to experience it for yourself.
Commence with my "constructive critique" (ha) of this post:
1. I hate to tell you this Ragan, but I had never heard of you before I read this piece. You had a wonderful opportunity to win me over with what you knew would be a strong PR piece because of its controversial nature. You failed. I do not think highly of your company based on this one piece, and if I was an average consumer, I would probably intentionally memorize your name so as not to do business with you, and never look at your page again.
2. You tell the letter writer "Excellent, except we don't do PR or Speechwriting." I'm not sure if you would be good speechwriters, but I think we can safely classify the "we don't do PR" statement under "duh." Nothing about this piece is good PR for your company, especially if you are hoping to attract nice people who value professionalism.
3. I was curious to see how the student got confused, so I went to your homepage. Frankly, I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly what it is you do. There's a publishing aspect, clearly, a consulting aspect that offers social media services (among others) and a "My Ragan." And then there's all those links on the left hand side bar. As a potential client, I find your page completely confusing. I don't blame this poor grad for not knowing exactly what it is that your company does.
4. I don't intend to address each and every poorly planned and insulting comment you made to this young lady, who was obviously extremely eager for a position without the guidance to position herself well. If you are a successful writer with a good career, in my opinion, you owe it to the world and to recent grads to offer mentorship and truly constructive advice. In this too, you have failed miserably.
To the person who wrote the ill-fated cover letter, I say the following. Chin up! I'm sure by now, an entire year later, you've learned some things about writing cover letters. I'm sure you didn't mean to misspell the company's name, but I also understand that the poor economic situation probably forced you to put out more cover letters then you had time to carefully edit and compose. Next time, you might want to have someone look over your letters alongside the job postings, just to make sure you haven't committed any fatal typos. I would also suggest checking out the vast body of internet sites that have "tips and tricks" for cover letters including major recruiter sites like Monster.com. There's a lot of valuable information out there that can help you with your search. I hope you've found something by now, but if not, and if you are reading this post, please feel free to contact me. I'd be happy to help you edit your cover letters free of charge. I like to think I can give back to those who haven't been as fortunate as I have in the career department.
To Ragan, especially the CEO at Ragan, Mark Ragan, I implore you to take down that post. It is mean-spirited, insulting and it paints a very bad picture of your corporate culture and who your employees are as people. Instead of looking down their nose at a less fortunate person, they should be working to mentor and guide new grads - even folks who don't get hired by your company! The post is not instructive. If you want to get some positive PR, I suggest you replace it with a nice piece on how to write the perfect cover letter, referencing the removal of this post. I will be the first one to RT it on twitter and post it to every social network site I have access to.
And finally, to the commenters who said "lighten up, it's all in fun." Shame on you for laughing, chuckling, guffawing or otherwise deriving mirth from the suffering and struggles of another human being. I'm sure you wouldn't like it if we posted your mistakes and laughed at them - whether your name was on them or not. Then again, if you can't see what's wrong with that post, I'm certainly not going to convince you.
What do you think blog readers (those who have stumbled by and those who are regulars)? I'd love to know.
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