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Wednesday 13 March 2013

Extreme job hunting - the new normal?

When I mentioned to a colleague that I was starting this blog, he suggested I should write about the UK graduate who spent his last £500 on a billboard in London begging someone to give him a job. Adam Pacitti, who got a first class degree in Media Studies, had sent out over 200 job applications without success, so decided extreme measures were called for. The billboard immediately got picked up on Twitter and his website got 20,000 hits within 24 hours. It took a few weeks, but the investment paid off and Adam's now employed.

I thought I'd see if there were any other examples of this kind of thing, and discovered that not only are there examples - there are loads of them. Nick Begley from New York printed his resume on a chocolate bar wrapper and sent it out to potential employers. Ulrike Schultz from Vienna asked her Twitter followers to help her find a job in London by putting the hashtag #HireUlrike on all their tweets. And in 2009, Alex Kearns, another UK graduate, managed to secure an hour on a plinth in Trafalgar Square to promote his job search.


All these are brilliant examples of using creativity to stand out from the crowd, and it's no surprise that the majority of these 'extreme job hunters', as they've become known in the media, come from marketing, communications or advertising backgrounds. By thinking outside the box, they're proving to potential employers in those industries what they can do.

But it does make me think - how far are we from the day when submitting a regular paper application for a job won't be enough any more? All these ideas sound great and really original, but in my first few minutes of research for this post I'd already found two other examples of people hiring a billboard in order to get noticed by employers. It might be out-of-the-box thinking today, but in a few years' time (or even less) will it only be possible to find a job if we're willing to take such a drastic step? And if everyone's doing it, then it's not a gimmick any more and instead of standing out, we'll just be blending in. Billboards will be the new printed CV. And so it goes on.

Incidentally, there's one more example of people going to extraordinary lengths to find a job - popular BBC TV show The Apprentice, in which candidates battle it out in a series of gruelling 'business tasks' to impress The Boss, Lord Alan Sugar. And yet Stella English, who won the show in 2010, has been in court over the last couple of weeks, telling an employment tribunal that in fact the dream job she competed for never existed and she ended up as an 'overpaid lackey'. So maybe it's not always worth going that extra mile unless you know what you're getting at the end of it.

If anyone does fancy giving extreme job hunting a try, though, Adam Pacitti is now using his Employ Adam website to offer help to others in a similar situation. And he might even make you famous. You never know.

6 comments:

  1. Hi Liz, really enjoying this blog.

    Perhaps a little less extreme than this, but a friend of mine used to attach individually wrapped tea bags to the top of CVs with a note saying "Have a cuppa on me while you read this".

    It certainly seemed to work, and he was applying for jobs in accountancy, not even marketing / comms.

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    1. Thanks Tom! I'm enjoying writing it :)

      I like the teabag idea! That's a nice touch without being too much of a gimmick.

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    2. Wow, I like that idea. I would certainly be happy for people to attach tea to CVs they send me :) A little harder over the internet though! I think it is possible to stand out by doing something smaller than hiring a billboard though. I've noticed candidates who just add a tiny splash of colour to their CV to make it different, and especially one awesome girl who linked to her own website of photography and writing. Anything that makes someone remember you, or look at your CV for more than 10 seconds.

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    3. Funny you should say that - I just discovered this article about creative CVs which make an impression without going to the lengths above: http://mashable.com/2011/05/20/social-media-resumes/ I particularly like the hamster example :)

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  2. I love the tea bag and chocolate idea. Soon people will be sending fruit baskets and gift cards. Would be good to be a boss then :p.

    For teaching it's completely different as the CV doesn't matter as much as the interview lesson. We have to showcase our teaching skills in a 20minute lesson using ICT, differentiation and piles full of great resources! All in 20minutes! Insanity!

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    1. I look forward to that day, Abby!

      Teaching interviews sound pretty intense; 20 minutes doesn't seem like enough time to show all that. It's interesting though how the focus varies between professions. I'll be talking about interviews next week as I have a few things to say on that subject too ;)

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