Resume and Cover Letter: How to Get Creative for the Extreme Job Search!
As the economy takes a turn for the worse, job seekers are putting on their thinking caps and coming up with ever more creative ways to get noticed in the job market. From renting billboards to writing a resume, getting your potential bosses drunk, and even offering cash incentives, the employment game has changed forever.
The real question is whether all of these extreme job search stunts and strategies are effective in getting you the ultimate reward: the job! Or will it damage your credibility in a way that you can never recover from even if you get an initial interview?
One technique that has worked, I like to call it the Cash Incentive Method (with a Viral Marketing side). A young entrepreneur sent an email with a resume and cover letter attached to everyone he knew. The catch, he offered a $150 search fee to the person responsible for taking him to the position. He only took one forward email for him to get a job offer. If you look beyond JUST the resume and resume cover letter, how to get a job can become fun and interesting!
Unfortunately, the streets are littered with desperate attempts to get noticed or initial interest that never goes anywhere. That leads me to believe that even if you try a little creative stuff, the tried-and-true basics had better be rock-solid. Curriculum vitae, resume cover letter, job interview!
So how do other experts get involved in this? A vice president of Monster Worldwide believes that while it IS important to stand out from the crowd, it’s best done through conventional methods. A staffing company surveyed its clients and found that 26% of advertising executives and 52% of marketing executives thought these types of tactics were unprofessional. And these are the guys who get creative for a living, so go figure.
The only thing that unites the winning extreme chasers from the losers remains true to the traditional methods…one of the most important is the resume cover letter: how would you feel if I told you that it could be even more important than the resume itself!