THE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET: WHERE THE JOBS ARE : TACTICS : They’ll Stop at Nothing : Walking the Extra Mile to Land That Job
Every now and then, Trent Ready gets a tennis shoe in the mail.
The director of recruitment at Mattel Inc. says it’s been happening for years, not just at Mattel but also while he held similar jobs at three airlines.
“The standard line is, ‘Just trying to get my foot in the door,’ ” Ready says.
Wacky job-hunting gambits are nothing new, but in this day of high unemployment in Southern California, job seekers may be tempted to go to even greater lengths to land a position.
An offbeat approach, however, can cut both ways. On the one hand, skywriting your resume can convey desire, creativity and gumption. On the other hand, nobody wants to hire a flake.
One thing a creative approach can do (for better or worse) is bring your name and skills to someone’s attention. Ready gets lots of tennis sneakers, for example, but he has received just one pepperoni pizza with a resume on top (it was wrapped in foil). The lunchtime read was good enough to get the delivery man an interview.
Ready may be more tolerant than many employers. When an eager applicant from San Antonio recently began sending him 25 resumes a day, Ready called him after the third day and said, “OK, you got me. Come in for an interview.”
Great, the applicant said, but the resumes would keep coming for another four days. It was too late to stop the direct mail campaign.
Peter G. Gardner, a former Universal tour guide, tells of a colleague there who decided he wanted a job with Steven Spielberg. So he placed a freshly printed resume on the telephone, inside favored desk drawers, on the computer terminal keyboard, in fact, just about everywhere inside Spielberg’s office on the Universal lot. The man never did get hired by Spielberg.
Strange appeals can often prove annoying to prospective employers.
“We don’t have our clients send crazy colored paper, or pictures,” says David Levin, president of Bernard Haldane Associates, a Los Angeles career counseling firm. “We even researched sending videotapes as a way of sending a resume. But companies didn’t like it.”
Experts advise taking the energy you might have plowed into gimmicks and investing it in a more diligent search.
Take Jill Raiguel, a former New Yorker with a background in counseling who needed a new job when she moved to Los Angeles. Instead of relying on gimmicks, she got a directory of the Los Angeles Unified School District and began calling each and every school.
Her intensive search turned up five positions, all specifying a knowledge of Spanish and prior gang counseling experience in their job descriptions. She had neither.
Raiguel was, however, able to land an interview for the first spot, and then parlay her years of experience in the profession into the open slot at El Roble Intermediate School in Claremont. When funding for that position was eliminated, she was able to draw upon teaching experience from about 20 years ago to go back to the classroom at Claremont High School.
“What started out as a disappointment is now a great opportunity,” she says.
Show business is so competitive that actors and actresses will often do almost anything to get work.
Consider the hair-raising saga of actress Lindsay Bloom and what she calls “The Velda Marathon.” During 4 1/2 weeks, she toughed out twice-daily aerobics classes, subsisted on protein shakes and lost 22 pounds. She also had four make-overs so extreme that at each meeting with the show’s top producer, she had to be introduced anew.
Ultimately, she dyed her hair from blonde to brunette, which did the trick. You may remember her as Velda on the old “Mike Hammer.”
In the movie “Tootsie,” Dustin Hoffman’s character posed as a woman to get acting jobs. In real life, struggling Hollywood actress Carol Ann Francis turned out to be her own British agent, Ann Hollingsworth. Her dual identity was discovered recently, after Hollingsworth netted Francis several acting jobs.
The job market is tough, but you probably don’t need an alter ego to find work. According to Levin, patience and persistence will eventually lead to employment.
When the Mission Inn in Riverside reopened in December, for example, the line of applicants went literally around the block. Within the first few days, 2,000 hopefuls had applied for 80 jobs.
Patience turned out to be a virtue for some who endured the three- to four-hour wait for an interview, but none were so patient as Leann Trott.
“Three years ago,” Trott says, “I took a tour of the hotel while it was closed, and I said to myself ‘Some day, I’m going to work here.’ ”
While reading the newspaper about a year ago, Trott saw that Duane Roberts had recently purchased the hotel. She wasted no time in sending Roberts her resume, and persisted in calling his management team until she was granted an interview.
Her persistence paid off: Guess who those 2,000 applicants were waiting to se? The new director of human resources--Leann Trott.
People can go to great lengths when they are trying to switch careers, which, because of shrinking opportunities, is being done more today than ever before. According to Levin, “When you’re job hunting today in the job market that’s full of unemployed aerospace engineers, bankers, architects and builders, you have to look at your transferable skills.”
Appearances count in the corporate world too, but in a different way.
David Beatty, president of Systems Research Group, an executive search firm in Oceanside, Calif., still recalls the computer programmer who showed up for a job interview dressed as Michael Jackson--glove, sunglasses and all. She didn’t get the job.
