Career Connection
About this Blog:
Insight and advice to help you carve your way in the cut-throat business world.
The Wackiest Thing You've Done to Get a Job
What won't you do to get a job? A few years ago, a friend who's an actress told me about the chance she had to play the lead female role in a popular movie from the 1970s. We were in Los Angeles, and she was giving me a tour of the city. To get the part, my friend told me that she had to have sex with the high-profile director.
My friend didn't do the deed on the casting couch, and she didn't get the role. Instead, it went to another actress, who according to my friend, was free with her body. This other actress went on to star in many movies and TV shows. My friend, meanwhile, works as an acting coach.
I recall this anecdote about my friend's refusal to have sex with a director to get a movie role because I'm seeing more and more stories in the news about the lengths people are going to get jobs. I'm not reading about anything as extreme as candidates doing sexual favors for hiring managers (at least not yet), but I am reading about some pretty wacky stuff: A guy in NYC wore a sandwich board that read "MIT grad for hire"; a woman in Texas plunked down $1200 to post an ad on a billboard promoting her services as a stylist; and a woman in L.A. donned an ill-fitting T-shirt with her résumé printed on it.
Amazingly, or perhaps not surprisingly (depending on your perspective), these sandwich board stunts have worked. Sandwich board guy is now working for an accounting firm in NYC, and according to WFAA radio in Dallas/Fort Worth, the woman who rented the billboard received two job offers. I don't know about T-shirt woman's fate.
David Perry, the author of the book, Guerilla Marketing for Job Hunters and of the Guerilla Job Hunting blog, says these unconventional maneuvers work because they make it easier for employers to find job seekers: The job seekers who employ these tactics stand out from the legions of other candidates searching for jobs. Finding ways to distinguish yourself from the rest of the job-hunting masses is critical when unemployment is at a 15-year high and when employers are bombarded with hundreds of résumés for the same job.
By using unconventional job search methods, says Perry, "You indicate to employers, 'I have a sense of humor, I'm creative and I'm not afraid to do new things.' Read any job description and those are the things employers are looking for: creativity and the ability to learn new things. That's why these stunts work."
Since the sandwich board, billboard and résumé printed on a T-shirt tactics are no longer novel (anyone who uses them will look like a copycat), Perry has many more ideas for standing out on his website. Among them:
- Sell yourself on eBay.
- Produce a video résumé.
- Send hiring managers a gift certificate entitling them to your professional services for free.
- Get your foot in the door by sending a hiring manager a shoe—not a stinky, worn shoe, but a new shoe that you've bought
Previous Post: Meridith Levinson talks about negotiating a raise during a recession with...Next Post: Software Engineers and Computer Systems Analysts Make CareerCast.com's List...
Most Discussed Posts
Cloud computing has emerged as one of the most significant game changers to hit the technology landscape in the past 20 years. With this massive expansion of the cloud, the perception of the IT organization is shifting from a utility player to a change agent. This eBook breaks down five ways progressive organizations are using cloud-based IT Management solutions to help drive innovation and become more strategic, including: adding visibility and analytics, speeding up time-to-value, lowering costs, improving prioritization, and providing a blueprint for future cloud deployments.
Read the white paper to see how IBM helped Citigroup deliver new services and enhancements to their 200 million customers faster.
There are 3 ways to modernize legacy applications: rewrite completely, acquire packaged solutions or migrate existing code. This paper explains why it's best to migrate and how IBM® Rational® software can help.
Accommodating specific lines of business can result in a hybrid ecosystem of applications and servers. The resulting complexity of this architecture makes for an environment that is costly to maintain and difficult to change when addressing new challenges.
This whitepaper will help you to define a mobile device passcode policy. Security managers must attempt to reconcile two opposing goals. They must: 1) create a passcode policy that is strong enough to protect the device if it is lost or stolen, while: 2) not annoying users with needless length or complexity.
This whitepaper, authored by The Radicati Group, looks at the key reasons organizations should consider moving to a cloud-based archiving solution. Email archiving solutions enable organizations to store, monitor, and collect electronic data exchanged by their users to comply with internal policies and regulations.
ATERNITY will showcase a 30-minute demo on how Fortune 500 companies are leveraging its award-winning FPI Platform to deliver a user-centric approach to Proactive IT Management.
For businesses to move forward and tap into the ever-expanding universe of Internet users and network-enabled devices, it's critical to learn how to make the transition to IPv6. Learn the critical steps your organization must take to make a seamless transition-and keep your business world connected.
Learn how IT teams can protect against spear phishing tactics. Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 offers a frank discussion about spear phishing - the most common technique used in today's advanced attacks.
Learn how to build a solid business case for your migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so you can run leaner, innovate faster, be more flexible and own the New Now.
Social media isn't about you; it's about everything around you. As you consider how your customers want to communicate with you, social media is something that can't be ignored. But what should your strategy be? Is social media "just another channel?" What kind of a plan makes sense for your contact center and for your customers? Join our experts as they share their insight and research results.
Hardware tokens were a popular method of strong authentication in past years but the cumbersome provisioning and distribution tasks, high support requirements and replacement costs have limited their growth. The additional log-in steps that hardware tokens require and the resulting user frustrations have limited adoption and make them impractical for larger scale partner and customer applications.
Sponsored Links
