Over many years of receiving unsolicited resumes, some submitted via good and bad guerrilla tactics, I must admit that Matthew Epstein of Atlanta may have pulled off one of the most clever resume submissions of all time.
Matthew set up a targeted website — googlepleasehire.me — specifically to gain the attention of potential hiring managers at Google, the world’s largest information organizer. Other people have appealed publicly for Google jobs, but no one appears to have done it with such tongue-in-check boldness as mustached Matthew. His hope: The right people will love it, although it is a gamble since a large number of viewers may be turned off before getting to his resume. I’m betting media savvy Google will grant Matthew an interview and his gamble will land him a job somewhere, if not at Google.
Before rushing forward with your own guerrilla offensive, make sure you give it serious thought. Unless brilliantly executed and accompanied by an outstanding resume (Matthew’s resume is an excellent model), you’ll be wasting your time and offending those who you are hoping to impress.
Miranda Miller of Search Engine Watch beautifully analyzes Matthew’s personal pitch for a job at Google. According to Miranda, here’s why Matthew’s guerrilla tactics worked:
- He knows his stuff. The website, the blog, the video, the resume… all are well done and obviously took time and planning. Epstein also has a bachelor’s degree in marketing and advertising and a few years experience, which doesn’t hurt.
- The mustache. It’s quirky and kitschy, but it worked. The persona he created in his video, with the neat scotch and that God-awful mustache, carried over through the rest of his efforts and generated conversation and shares. He successfully branded himself overnight.
- He engaged followers/readers, using humor and the charm only a scotch-swilling caricature can, responding to one woman’s tweet questioning his tactics with, “With 9% unemployment it’s starting to feel like putting on a fake mustache & drinking scotch IS the only way to get job today.”
- He attracted the attention of influencers, who retweeted him, blogged his story, and sent (mostly) words of encouragement.
- He thanked the person who put his story on Hacker News; though it generated an onslaught of negative buzz within that community, it became top news and he had several thousand hits to his site.