"Can you connect me with someone at Microsoft?"
I'm getting more and more mail from folks that want to be connected with someone at Microsoft to talk about sponsorship deals, business opportunities, employee rewards (at least 5 phone calls on this one)...the list goes on. They are trying to sell something. I know in the past I've said I answer every piece of mail I get and I'm sticking with that (not including spam of course), however, unfortunately, the answer to these requests is going to be "no". I hate saying no to people but I'm in Staffing. If someone is asking about something Staffing related ("can you forward our info to the person that handles your recruitment advertising?"), then, sure, I'll do that. I know who that person is.
But we are a 65,000 person company. I've *maybe* met 500 of those people. Also, I am not really the person to evaluate whether these presented opportunities are worth the intended recipient's time so they (the recipients) could be considering my mail spam (which is why I don't share other peoples' contact info). I'm not comfortable acting as the middle-person when I don't know the requester and it;s not staffing related.
I get that we are a big company and people want to do deals with us. I'm just not the appropriate conduit for those deals. My recommendation to people tempted to contact me and ask me to get them in touch with someone at Microsoft is that they go online and do some research on the people that might be responsible for fielding their request and call the receptionist and ask for that person. Or try to leverage their personal networks (people they know and trust) to get an introduction. If they call me, I can't call them back. If they e-mail me, they'll receive a polite decline (sorry,there's only so much time in a day...gotta focus on my actual job).
If it's staffing related, definitely feel free to contact me (e-mail is preferred). But unfortunately, I can't field other "deal" requests as a representative of Microsoft at large. That's a different job than the one I have. Anything job or resume or staffing or career related, get in touch!
Just posting this in the hopes that the number of deal introduction requests goes down.
Comments
Anonymous
March 10, 2006
The comment has been removedAnonymous
March 11, 2006
Hehe, I'm not important enough to get any of those. In this case, I'm quite happy to go unnoticed. ;-)Anonymous
March 11, 2006
I must have commented on something on GapingVoid because I can't imagine that Hugh linked to me ; ) So I hear your pain about figuring out who the contact is when things change as the do a lot around here (which I like, but I'm kind of weird that way). Maybe get the home phone number of the person that's your point of contact..haha. I'm kidding ; )
Glad you found my blog Martin!Anonymous
March 11, 2006
That's OK tod, I'm happy to refer the ones I get over to you ; )Anonymous
March 12, 2006
hehe, face it, you are a cyber-celebrity. ;-) It's only going to increase and you'll have to auto-reply to them with a link to this blog entry.
What I blog about (general Q&A and digested information transfer) pretty much assures me that I'll be saying no most of the time. I wish I can answer them all. I just get way more requests than I have time to investigate/respond, so I have to pick through the ones I am interested in. I try to preface it all by linking that I respond on best effort and that I don't do private communications because problems rarely affect only one user... seems to be working.
//DavidAnonymous
March 12, 2006
I recall a similar experience as a (long ago) graduate of my undergraduate program. “You went to Purdue, do you know Bob?” Now, given an average undergraduate population of 35,000+ it’s pretty unlikely (even with a fairly strict time window) that I knew Bob, but it doesn’t stop everyone from asking. “No, unfortunately Bob studied agriculture and I was an engineering geek – we never crossed cow paths.”
I now work for a rather large ‘blue’ company with 300,000+ plus employees and everyone still asks, “Oh my aunt worked for blue, do you know Halya?” It’s a fortunate and simultaneously unfortunate repercussion of being with a large organization of any kind.
You get extra credit for blogging and identifying yourself as a current employee of Microsoft (aren’t you lucky?). I think you go a great job here as demonstrated by your previous post about blogging to recruit vs. being a recruiter that blogs. There’s always a switchboard and a website that should take most of these requests. I always send people where they are best served.Anonymous
March 13, 2006
Davis-that sounds like a good policy. The thought of being a cyber-celebrity! Hah!
Dennis-I have a friend that went to Purdue and was in the engineering program (OK, that is actualy true but I'm just joking and it was in the late 80s). You know sometimes I don't even know where to send people. It's kind of weird but I often tell them to see if the group has a blogger they can connect with.Anonymous
March 13, 2006
they prob jus think ur in marketing /shrugAnonymous
March 13, 2006
then they have a bit or reading to do before they shoot off a mail. If you are going to "ask" for something, I think it's reasonable to expect that they would at least want to know who they are asking.Anonymous
March 14, 2006
Heather, so many roles get reversed these days that sometimes hr people end up on the bottom of things. This is just the way things are.Anonymous
March 15, 2006
So I'm guessing that e-mail asking for a casual sitdown dinner with Bill is going to go unanswered.
Phooey.Anonymous
March 15, 2006
Frank-I'm not sure I understand your point. I don't feel "on the bottom of things" and I don't see that as the reason why people ask me to connect them. I think it's because they want to connect with a real person and here I am. I don't think it's an HR thing
Jim- Yeah, probably. He's got a team of people that handle the random e-mails. Sometimes they trickle their way over to recruiting. I'm not sure where your dinner invitation would trickle but I could guess ; )Anonymous
August 23, 2008
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December 05, 2008
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December 09, 2009
The comment has been removedAnonymous
December 10, 2009
The comment has been removed