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“Please send a cover letter and your CV” they say.
“Well that’s pretty boring.
How many cover letters and CVs is this hirer going to read?
How different can one cover letter be from another cover letter?
Should I do something wild, fun, creative, clever, skillful, fascinating, extraordinary…
Is that what people who get jobs do?”
Sending creative job applications is a risk. Ideas that ambush people don’t always delight them. But yes, some people do show off what they can do in clever, creative ways.
In 2010, Alec Brownstein devised a Google Ads strategy to catch the attention of top advertising creative directors. His thinking was that if you're the creative director of an ad agency, then you're going to Google your own name every now and again, so he bought a set of Google ads.
We’ll let him tell the rest of the story…
He became rather famous rather quickly after that.
Young video producer, James Goldie, answered an ad posted by Australian web incubator, Pollenizer, for a junior project manager in 2010. His application became the subject of a Pollenizer blog called, Best Job Application Ever.
Robby Leonardi is a multidisciplinary designer in New York. He turned his resume into an interactive game that showed his skills in illustration, graphic design, animation, and front-end development.
Miguel Durao produced a 90 second video that showed his skill at persuasion. It won him a job. (Watch for the surprise ending.)
Sid Santos’s ‘cover letter’ states that he is proficient at conceptual design, illustration and package design.
Lindsay Blackwell wanted to be hired as the first social media director of the University of Michigan, a US$110k job. She was glaringly underqualified, but her job application, "Dear Lisa Rudgers" showed off her video, programming and social media skills. The site received 22,000 unique visitors in 83 countries in 3 months, and won Blackwell a job at Ingenex Digital.
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