Question
What do you think of the desperation tactics people are resorting to on LinkedIn to beg others to help them land a job? (I’ve seen offers of cash for job leads!) Does this work? What’s the cleanest way to do this (without looking bad!)?
Nick’s Reply
Early in my Silicon Valley headhunting career, I was passing through an office suite when a singing gorilla appeared. A desperate, unemployed engineer was using a clever tactic to get his resume noticed. He hired a delivery guy dressed as a singing gorilla to deliver a box of pizza to managers he hoped would interview him. Taped atop the box was his resume.
I never learned whether it worked, but that was one very funny gorilla.
Doing tricks to land a job
The purpose of this column is to highlight some of the unbelievable tricks job seekers are playing on themselves so they can pretend someone’s going to find them a job.
What I’d like is your take on these efforts to dress up excuse after clever excuse for how to avoid doing the hard work to find a good job: carefully picking the few right employers and demonstrating to them how you’ll do the job profitably if they hire you.
Desperation Road
Frustrated, frazzled job seekers are keenly aware that what they’re doing to find their next job is not very effective. In fact, what they experience is captured in a complaint attributed to Lewis Carroll: “The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.”
This website is abundant with readers’ stories of endless failures in their job searches. The common refrain is, “I keep applying to more and more jobs, but I can’t get hired.”
That’s why they come here. Because we lay bare the foibles of our broken employment system. We all know that this system is almost purely reliant on staggering quantities of job listings and accompanying fire-hose-style job applications. Employers have created a Sisyphean digital road to All The Jobs that people race along faster and harder — only to find at the end of it a stinking dump waiting to swallow them up and spit them back out.
And in utter desperation they have to run that road again and again and again, because it seems there’s no choice.
Gone down the wrong road
The answer to this hamster-on-a-treadmill quandary is found in a Turkish saying: “No matter how far you have gone down the wrong road, turn back.”
Job seekers just don’t want to turn back. They believe they’ve invested too much to stop now. But that Turkish wisdom is the best advice they’ll ever get.
Rather than question their painfully held belief that some process, some expert, some database or some A .I. is going to help them land a job, they keep running the same road, but each time dressed in some new kind of gorilla suit they’ve been told will make a difference.
They know they’re on the wrong job-hunting road but they won’t turn back.
“Weirdly creative” tactics
A recent Washington Post column reports that “Desperate for jobs, people try new social media tactics to stand out”. The article says “job seekers are getting weirdly creative to land their next jobs.”
They’re not deploying singing gorillas, but they’ve learned to beg like a dog on social media. What we’re seeing more and more is that these social media tricks aren’t working well.
At least the singing gorilla was amusing.
I recommend you read the entire WaPo article because I think it will help you keep your eye on the real objective — a new job — no matter what anyone else is doing. Gorilla tactics (and cash offers for job leads) may seem clever. They’re not. I won’t take up space here suggesting better alternatives because you’ll find them throughout Ask The Headhunter. Let’s take a hard look at how far off the path job seekers have gone. The following real-life stories about (NOT) getting a job are from the Washington Post link above.
A good signal?
One job seeker boasts he’s got a “whatever-it-takes mentality.”
He’s offering $3,000 on LinkedIn to anyone that finds him a job, and he hopes this is “…a good signal for a potential employer that I’m proactive, and I’m trying to solve this problem in a creative way.” If I were his potential employer, here’s my first interview question: “Is paying somebody to do your work a signal that you can do this job for me?”
How’s it working for him? He’s got no job offers but seems excited about thinking up more offers he can make to entice others to find him a job.
The recruiter that can’t land a job
A woman uses her LinkedIn page to recruit friends and contacts to find her a job. She lists nine examples of how good she would be at the job she wants, if only somebody could find it and bring it to her.
Her expertise? She’s an “HR-minded recruiter.” She’s got 15 years of experience recruiting, but “she said she’s only landed two interviews out of hundreds of job applications.” No job offers.
Revealing on LinkedIn that you can’t do for yourself what you want a paycheck to do for an employer. Say what?!”
#Desperate to work
A young guy trying to break into cybersecurity thought he’d found a great alternative to actually pursuing jobs he wants. He added a popular “tag” to his LinkedIn profile: #OpenToWork. It didn’t work.
Then he found a better tag: #Desperate. He says that tag “blew up way bigger than I thought…[it] got about half a million views” and brought him over 1,600 followers. He’s applied to 4,500 jobs.
“But he didn’t hear from hiring managers.” He asks his LinkedIn network: “Why is it so hard to get a job?”
(The #Desperate tag seems quite popular. The WaPo reports that another job seeker “still displays it after two months, eight interviews and 500 applications.” She’s had no job offers.)
Honestly waiting to land a job
Then there’s the guy who says he’s going to lose his house if he doesn’t land a job within a month. He’s sharing his plight with his LinkedIn network as honestly as possible because he’s been “feeling invisible after hundreds of applications.” He feels that the more honest he is on his profile, the better. “I just need someone to see this that has an opening that can help me save my house.”
He’s gotten “at least 3,000 comments and messages” and two interviews because, he believes, he’s being so open and honest. But he’s gotten no job.
How much is that singing gorilla?
I’ll say what the WaPo article doesn’t bother to say.
Cut the crap, folks! The problem is that way too many job seekers have learned to avoid actually picking the right employers and actively pursuing jobs they can do to improve a company’s business. (How to do this is really not so mysterious.)
Social media sites have provided people with the company of millions of other job seekers who are “crafting” clever marketing ploys to get other social media users — and a plethora of digital go-fers — to find them a job. This is not networking. It’s wishful thinking. Read that WaPo article carefully. Not one of the clever job seekers in the story reported they found a job.
Maybe better social media tricks could get someone to bring you a new job. Or you could just hire a singing gorilla.
What tricks have you seen job seekers do to get someone else to find them a job? Have gorilla-like social media tactics really become a thing? Do any of the examples of job-hunting tactics described seem useful to you?
NOTE: The Washington Post is a subscription-based news outlet. I cannot guarantee my link to it will work.
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You want to be fair? What’s that got to do with the interview schedules of two companies? Fairness doesn’t come into it. (If these employers wanted to be fair, they’d coordinate their interviews for your benefit, right? Hardly. This is business.) If you try to control any company’s interview or hiring schedule you may risk any job offer from them.
The unknown factor is HR’s predisposition toward low salary offers. Even though you’ve been told they make low salary offers, you don’t really know how this HR person will handle the matter. So anything you do (or don’t do) presents a risk. Including doing nothing at all. So I’ll tell you what I’d do — but you must use your judgment and any other information you have at your disposal.
HOLIDAY