5 CREATIVE WAYS TO STAND, OUT WHEN APPLYING FOR A JOB.
Recently, Base camp published five new job openings. For these five slots, they received more than 4,000 applications. It should be noted that more than 1,400 people have applied for the position of Head of Marketing, and more than 2,000 have applied for two open positions for customer support representatives. I've followed Base camp’s hiring process with interest via Twitter updates from the company's founders, blog posts on Signal V. Noise, and podcasts on rework. I was curious: What does a person have to do to get their resume noticed when one sheet of paper is in a pile of thousands? Following up on the Base camp story gave me some information, but I wanted more. So I did what writers love to do after asking themselves a question they can't answer: I did some research, talked to a few people, and put together what I learned in this guide on how to stand out when applying for a job.
IMPORTANCE OF KEYWORDS
I've written before about the importance of using keywords in your resume to make applicant tracking systems stand out above others. And while that's a great way to get your resume looked, it's not a way to stand out. What really creative things have people done to get attention, and ultimately get the job? From small changes to your resume to launching big projects, here are some of the best ways to get people to pay attention to hiring managers at the companies they want to work for.
IGNORE THE STANDARD RESUME FORMAT
A typical resume is a text-filled document that lists job titles, dates, grades, responsibilities, and accomplishments. It's practical, but it's not fun - writing or reading Sometimes doing something a little different on your resume can help you stand out. For example, Base camp founder and CEO Jason Fried was influenced by a resume that included a reason to resign/leave for each job. Another way to make your resume stand out is to make your Version more visually appealing. An info graphic, video, or interactive resume inevitably stands out against just hundreds of black and white text documents. If you're brave, you can do it: When applying for a job at the piano company Steinway & Sons earlier in his career, Zippier Platform engineer Regan Starr wrote a song for his job application and filmed himself singing the song as it played.
PIANO WRITING
This is a song for your application makes a lot of sense when applying for a job in the music industry, but it can work in other industries as welling my first job after college, I was an editor for technical publications at UPS. Another person in the team got his job by sending him a video resume where he sang a song and played guitar. Our boss said it was the strangest job application he'd ever seen, which made him, oddly enough, determined to bring the applicant in for an interview.
RUN A TARGETED AD ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Another thing Jason Fried posted on Twitter is one of the applicants who posted an ad on LinkedIn targeting employees Social media sites like LinkedIn and Face book offer advertisers deep targeting options that can help you promote your app - and only - to people in the company you want. Of course, you will have to pay for advertising, and there is no guarantee that you will see it. As Fried said in a follow-up reply to his tweet: "I didn't notice because I don't really use LinkedIn, but some other folks at Base camp mentioned seeing the ad, so I checked it out."
JUST START WORKING IN THE COMPANY
Regan Starr got his job at Steinway & Sons by singing a song in a video app, but he took a different approach when he wanted Zippier to hire him: Instead of applying, I just started working for Zippier in any way possible Starr created an educational website where he was answering questions asked by Zippier customers on Twitter. “After 78 days and 156 hours of free work, I signed a contract with Zippier for a support job,” he says. Want to read more about Starr's journey and how he moved from a support role to engineering? Check out his post on how to transition from a non-technical role to an engineering one. Violin Volker, co-founder of resume builder Enhance, shared a similar story of a candidate they hired who didn't bother with the traditional application process. Volvo said she sent him some data-backed recommendations on how to improve the hiring process, posted comments in the code of one of the company's developers, and edited an article written by the company's editor. "You might think that sounds scary,"
Colin said, "but everyone in the office was talking about it with excitement the next day."
SEND A COLD EMAIL OR MAKE A COLD CALL,
Two people I spoke to said that cold communication (calling or emailing people you don't know) is a great way to get a job. In 2008, data scientist Zippier Sr. Christopher Peters wanted to be econometricians, an economist who uses statistics. He had finished three undergraduate courses in economics and was ready to gain some work experience, content marketing consultant Chris Pipe has also used cold communication to gain new clients for his consulting business. Baby said: “I'm not a big fan of cold calling - which isn't always the most effective way to gain new customers - but it certainly pays off now and then. A few years ago, Baby found a company in his area that had no online presence other than a basic website. "They didn't have a blog, or social media profiles, or a Google listing, or anything," he said. So he decided to try cold calling at work. "The owner was receptive to learning more about content marketing and online marketing, so we met the next day in her office. Within a week, all the details of our engagement were ready." Baby said that cold, swift call led to a client having been with his company for more than three years. Persuading a company to create a job for you A great way to avoid having to be compared to hundreds of other applicants is to convince a company to hire you for a job they didn't know they needed to fill. This one comes from my own experience. My first job outside of college was, as I mentioned before, at UPS. But during the 2009 recession, the company pulled some of its fleets to cut costs, so they needed fewer editors. As the least senior person on the team, I was laid off.
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