Handiwork of Getting Hired : Tough Economy Prompts the Unemployed to Try Offbeat Ploys

Out of work for months and tired of mailing out resumes, Lee Snorteland decided to try something new to get a job.

The San Jose electrical engineer, who lives next to U.S. 101, started putting up “hire me” billboards in his back yard. Maybe, he figured, a motorist passing by would have a job opening.

“Some may have thought it was corny and perhaps that’s not the type of engineer they wanted on board,” said Snorteland, 37. But, he added, “I had to try something.”

The ploy was helpful: He landed a sales job in late January with an electrical instruments firm impressed with his resourcefulness. “He didn’t just lay back. He went out and did something,” said Ron Kolstad, president of Instrument Laboratory, Snorteland’s new employer.

Hounded by the recession, job hunters are resorting to offbeat and even borderline desperate ploys to find work. Unemployed engineers and bank loan officers have begged for jobs at supermarkets. Other job applicants are lying more on their resumes.

And even though they may be more interested in handouts than jobs, bedraggled street people clutching “will work for food” signs have become commonplace. Likewise, out-of-work professionals have strolled around advertising themselves with sandwich boards or are doing day labor.

In good times or bad, some people will do anything to get a desirable job. But even amid today’s widespread unemployment, personnel specialists often fault most of the jobless for being too unimaginative, timid or lazy in looking for work. During a recession, many people play it safe rather than risk being regarded as an oddball by a potential employer.

Still, the tough economy has spurred a number of job hunters to try more enterprising--and sometimes extreme--tactics. Selling yourself to a prospective employer “is like selling anything else,” said Gary L. Saenger, managing principal of the Los Angeles office of Right Associates, a big outplacement firm. “The tougher the market, the harder you have to work at it.”

Sometimes creative people are inspired to new heights when they seek work. Take, for example, unemployed Rancho Santa Fe executive Jim Stafford and his “24-Hour Access Recorded Resume.”

Stafford’s “resume” is a fast-paced recording on his voice mail answering system providing a run-down on his business career. He initially attracted callers with ads in several local newspapers headlined “$50,000 Reward.”

The ads say $50,000 “is what you would pay a headhunter to find an executive with my background, track record and reputation. Save yourself the expense. . . . Listen to my three-minute recorded history, and you decide if we should talk.”

So far, Stafford said, the ads have drawn about half a dozen solid job leads--and only a few crank calls. Now he’s sending copies of the ad with cover letters to the heads of about 200 high-tech firms.

“If you’re a marketing guy and you can’t market yourself,” Stafford said, “what good are you?”

An unusual resume worked like a dream for Bruce Perlowin, a convicted drug smuggler who landed a sales manager’s job in Mill Valley, Calif., last month within weeks of being released from federal prison. He drew notice with a resume that was both honest and dramatic, beginning with the headline: “Ex-Marijuana Kingpin Needs a Job.”

Among many job hunters, though, desperation is more evident than creativity. Since Smith’s Food & Drug Center began opening supermarkets in Southern California last fall, it has typically gotten 2,000 to 4,000 applicants for about 200 available jobs at each store.

Applicants have included overqualified but unemployed engineers and bank loan officers who sometimes arrive wearing suits and bearing professionally prepared resumes.

“It’s really sad,” said Jim Carr, the California personnel director for Smith’s. “They’re crying their hearts out and saying, ‘I need a job. I need to get in.’ But you have to see through it and think whether they’d really be happy” working for a supermarket.

Long lines of people applying for jobs, in fact, are becoming a common sight across the country. In January, more than 3,000 people sought jobs at a new Sheraton hotel in Chicago, some of them standing outside in a snowstorm and 14-degree weather waiting for an interview.

Managers at Mazda’s design studio in Irvine recently witnessed a similar phenomenon. A newspaper ad in January for an entry-level testing engineer drew 1,000 responses in two weeks, including many from overqualified aerospace engineers. “It’s just getting out of hand,” a Mazda official said.

At the bottom of the economic scale, desperation often turns to hopelessness. Mike Neely, director of the Homeless Outreach Program serving the denizens of Los Angeles’ downtown Skid Row, said the spirits of the homeless people he works with have sunk to new lows over the last nine months.

“If you’re 30 years old and you get turned down for a job at McDonald’s, that really does a lot for your self-esteem, doesn’t it? But that’s the situation we have today, so people are dropping out” of the job-hunting ranks, Neely said.

Neely contended that most people seen everywhere from freeway ramps to shopping centers with “will work for food” signs aren’t genuinely looking for employment. He said these people generally are looking for handouts, but they are streetwise enough to know that outright begging isn’t “socially acceptable.”

Some genuine job hunters also practice deceit by lying on their resumes--even at the risk of being discovered and damaging their careers.

Information Services Network, an El Segundo firm that performs background checks, has found lately that about 30% to 35% of the resumes it reviews for employers are guilty of a significant lie or omission versus about 25% before the recession.

One flagrant example: A job candidate who claimed to hold a master’s degree had, in fact, simply completed a single correspondence course.

More typically, aggressive job applicants are simply dressing better for interviews, polishing their resumes and following up their job interviews with repeated phone calls. “It’s amazing the number of people who call and say, ‘I don’t know if you were trying to reach me or not, my answering machine isn’t working,’ ” said Carr of Smith’s Food & Drug Centers.

Gary Kaplan, a Pasadena-based executive recruiter, said that lately his office has received resumes with everything from a dime to a dollar taped on. “It’s a little reward for paying a little extra attention to their background,” he said.

For the most part, however, employment specialists fault job hunters for doing too little to find work. A common criticism is that too many job hunters, at a time when most available positions aren’t advertised publicly, are still relying on newspaper ads to spot openings.

They also say that too many applicants focus on big companies and neglect to call small firms, which are providing more and more jobs.

At the same time, many employment experts doubt that truly offbeat ways of sticking out from the hordes of job hunters really work.

“Hiring people tend to be conservative,” said James E. Challenger, president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., a big outplacement firm based in Chicago.

Challenger said he has noticed that a lot of job applicants are sending out video resumes lately. But, he added, “I don’t know how many companies would take the trouble to find a machine to stick them in.”

To find a job, he said, “all you have to do is interview. If you interview every day, you’ll have a job in three months. I don’t care how the economy is.”

For his part, Snorteland, the San Jose engineer who put up the “hire me” billboards, said he is persuaded that job hunters need to find new ways to reach employers because the “traditional paths are pretty crowded.” His only regret about his back yard billboard technique, he said, is “not having done it earlier.”