Oops. Maybe we have all done it once before, or maybe not. In the professional world it seems that internal and external email issues, along with social media mishaps have been prevalent over the recent years. Someone sends an email to their co-worker complaining or bad-talking their superior and doesn’t realize that they accidentally cc’ed the very superior they were complaining about. An employee loses their job because they posted inappropriate pictures on Facebook of them getting inebriated while wearing their company uniform. A recruitment executive is asked to step down after he accidentally hit ‘reply all’ to his extremely inappropriate email response to a job seeker. Again, oops!
If there is any slice of advice Spark News can give to the hard working or job seeking American it is this: keep your emails clean, your Facebook professional or private and make sure you know who you are emailing before you hit ‘send’. The Inquirer posted an article this morning about a recruitment executive that was asked to step down from his job after sending an expletive-filled email to 4,000 people- on accident. Gary Chaplain was asked to resign from his position at Stark Brooks that earned him £200,000 a year after he sent what he thought was an email only to Emmanouil Katsampoukas. Katsampoukas had sent out a mass email to thousands of recruiting firms in hopes of finding a job in the banking or marketing sector in the UK. It was a polite and formal email, but it apparently infuriated Chaplain and moved him to reply back with a message full of expletives while telling Katsampoukas that he was “too stupid to get a job” since he did not know how to bcc or make a blind carbon copy in email.
Spark News has posted a number of articles that discuss how important it is to tweak and mold your resume or cover letter to the specific job posting. It’s never a good idea to send out a mass resume, cover letter or email for fear that it will seem generic and broad compared to the job seekers that took the time to tailor their documents to the position. Though an email is different, a bcc would have been a good idea for Katsampoukas if he was set on sending the same email and documents to 4,000 contacts. Chaplain though, didn’t take his actions so lightly. He responded under a different name pretending to be Richard Vickers and clicked ‘reply all’ instead of simply replying to Katsampoukas. Thousands of recruiters were met with Chaplain’s expletive-filled email and sent tons of complaints his way. Furthermore the alias he used, Richard Vickers, was the actual name of a recruiter from another company that received the email making the situation for Chaplain even worse.
Chaplain sent out apologetic emails to the dozens of complaints he received but it wasn’t enough to help him keep his job. Stark Brooks asked him to step down from his position and two weeks before the holidays Chaplain finds himself jobless. “It was a moment of idiocy,” Chaplin admitted. “I am now looking for a job just a few days before Christmas. If I could turn back the clock I would. I will regret this forever. I am mortified by what I did. I meant no offense to this man looking for a job.” As the Inquirer points out, it is very difficult to see how Chaplain meant no offense after reading the email he sent to Katsampoukas and 4,000 of his fellow recruiters.
Take a look at the email he sent below and if this story tells you nothing, let it at least remind you that in today’s job market having a job is a very valuable thing. It would be a shame to lose the job you have over something as careless and unprofessional as an email sent by mistake or an unprofessional photo.
Find Chaplain’s e-mail on TheInquirer.net. See this post’s source for the link.
SOURCE: The Inquirer
IMAGE: Photo of Gary Chaplain courtesy of One News Page
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