Sometimes you come across marketing creativity that really makes you sit up and take notice. When faced with the unenviable task of searching for a job, and marketing yourself, the web and social media provides a variety of opportunities that wouldn’t work with other mediums. This collection of creative job hunters have thought outside the box and leveraged the web to get themselves noticed.
David Wood.
David Wood, an unemployed Sales Representative from Bristol decided enough was enough after spending the last two years writing up to 30 job applications and scanning newspapers and websites for paid work.
He decided to put an advert together on auction website Ebay auctioning himself off to the highest bidder. After some initial exploration on Twitter of using the medium of Ebay to sell himself, David was approached by a PR firm who helped him create the campaign.
Although his first advert didn’t make the cut (Ebay don’t currently allow services to be auctioned on the site) he amended the advert to become much more product focused. His tongue-in-cheek advert reads: ‘For Sale an Experienced Sales Representative’ and describes him as a 1965 model who is ‘enthusiastic’ and ‘motivated’.
Whilst to my knowledge he hasn’t yet received any offers, the exposure he has received has been phenomenal, with many mainstream newspapers and blogs picking up on the story earlier this month, a fine example of what finely crafted PR and social media can do for job hunting.
Alec Brownstein
Alec Brownstein, a writer, needed a job. So he chose the names five top NYC advertising directors that he’d like to work for. Knowing that large bigwig executives would probably (like all of us) Google their own name, he bought an advertisement in Google that would be displayed when each person searched for his own name.
He got two job offers. The cost was just $6, a fine example of creative job hunting. He later published this YouTube Video explaining how it all happened, which itself went viral on the web – with nearly 1 million views at time of writing.
Victor Petit
Victor Petit is a french graphic design student looking for an internship. His recent Video on Vimeo shows perfectly how a little creativity in your C.V. can really grab the attention of your audience. His combination of mobile QR codes and an interactive experience is quite brilliant, taking the traditional C.V. and turning it on it’s head.
