In a tough economy such as this, one can’t be passive about their job search. Hiring managers today can receive over 500 resumes for one position. This of course makes it difficult to be distinguished from the stack, if you’re noticed at all. One must instead be creative in their plans to get noticed –

sometimes even more creative than the next guy. Below are a few accounts from those who got the job thinking outside the box.

Business Analyst
For a business analyst position, hiring managers likely get too many emails. As such, I prefer to snail-mail my resume in. For my current job I thought I would mix it up so instead of stuffing it into an envelope, I put it in a yellow box. 4 sheets of paper rolled up in a small yellow box. My boss never mentioned it when he called me in, but it had to have something to do with my current state of employment!
James, S. Dakota

Pharmaceutical Sales
I did something different – I printed my resume out on legal paper – I made it stand out as much as I could. The print at the top of my resume read my name across it in a huge bold typeface.
Cherise, Fresno

Project Manager
I went to my interview with a borrowed projector and a 12 slide PowerPoint presentation. The first half of the presentation broadly touched upon my past achievements while the last half I prepared what I felt could be the new direction for the department. The final slide, meant to be humorous, had an illustration of what it would look like without me.
Danika, San Francisco

Dental Hygienist
My application was to a smaller company so I simply asked the owner out for lunch to discuss the possibility of a job. He said it was the first time someone had offered to take him to lunch for consideration. Although he probably would have hired me anyway, the lunch made him notice. In the end he offered me the job and I subsequently turned it down.
Miguel, Chile

Certified Public Accountant
Turn your resume upside-down. It’s about getting noticed right? So for my job experience I flipped it listing the most recent last. My first job at Jack-in-the-Box was listed first, Carl’s Jr. second, HR Block 3rd, etc. CPA’s aren’t always the funny bunch but they got a kick out of it.
Alan, Connecticut

Designer
I am a print designer and the school I worked for did a lot of newspaper and billboard advertisements. I took my best ad and replaced it with my picture and a message stating my short availability – with the closer to act fast! I made about 2 dozen prints and mailed them to companies I wanted to work for. 4 of them responded and I got a job out of it.
Justin, El Segundo

Web Developer
As a web developer, I obviously have a website to showcase my skills. In the current economy, all of the job ads that I applied to seemed to go nowhere. Every email I sent out went to what seemed – a black hole. So I thought about ways to have them look for me. Out of all of the ideas, I decided to keep it simple and just mail them a standard print out with my website address in small letters. I then tracked the hits and out of the 40 mailers, I received 18 hits. 2 of those were job offers.
Mark, Dallas TX

Email this!

Bookmark this!

This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 5:12 am and is filed under Job Prep. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.