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Think outside the box when building a résumé

Anyone who has ever sent out a résumé knows the anxiety that goes along with it.

There can be weeks of waiting to hear that your résumé has been noticed among the hundreds — or even thousands — of other people applying for the same job you are. When you don’t hear a word, your emotions range from frustration to anger to depression. How come, you wonder, is everyone else getting a job but you’re not?

The truth is, not everyone is getting a job. In fact, many people are desperate for work, no matter their skill level. And it’s that hard reality that has spawned some creative ways to get the attention of potential employers.

Take Larry Kinsmore, who lost his job a couple of years ago after being a database programmer for 15 years. He sent out more than 100 résumés and had only a few interviews. He said he felt like he had done all he could think of to find work.

“I was thinking: What’s left? What have I missed? What else can I do?” he recalls.

That’s when the idea hit him that probably everyone he saw knew of a job opening somewhere. But, how to let them know that he was available?

Kinsmore then donned on a T-shirt that read “Damn, I need a job,” and listed his qualifications on the back. While he garnered some strange looks, people also seemed taken with his ingenuity and willingness to pull out all the stops to find a job. Coverage by the local media led to a job.

Since then, he’s launched a Web site where anyone can order a similar T-shirt with his or her individual qualifications, and post jobs or their need for work.

The bulletin board on the site is peppered with a variety of posts, including one from a 12-year-old girl who says she really needs a job “so I can pay my cell phone bill so my parents won’t ground me every time the bill comes.” But there are also more desperate pleas from those who say they are jobless, nearly homeless and trying to support children.

“My Web statistics tracking software tells me that 98 percent of the people who come to my site have arrived there by typing ‘I need a job’ into a search engine. That in itself smells of desperation,” Kinsmore says. “If I was frustrated, at my wits end, plopping down at the computer and just typing ‘I need a job’ (that) is a reflection of my state of mind, I think.”

Kinsmore says he hopes he’s inspired people to “think outside the box” and be creative when searching for work.

Someone else who agrees with that job-search philosophy wholeheartedly is Michael Holley Smith, a résumé writer for some 30 years and the man behind résumé “action” words and “The Résumé Writer’s Handbook.”

“The problem with résumés is that everything is about the past, about what you have done, not what you will do,” Smith says. “And trying to make one of today’s traditional résumés exciting for two seconds is like trying to breathe life into a sock puppet.”

Enter Smith’s latest idea: the bioblog.

While no one has used his idea so far, he thinks this new kind of résumé is just what the marketplace needs where some 20 million résumés are posted online through the big job boards.

Specifically, the bioblog is a sort of a personal ad for a person, complete with eye-catching artwork. Instead of just listing the qualifications, the individual writes a couple of lines about skills and capabilities, possibly adding “blurbs” from others — sort of like what authors put on their book covers.

“These aren’t for everybody,” Smith says. “Of course, that used to be said for a lot of things: résumés, cover letters and even e-mail.”

Smith says the strength of the bioblogs is that the focus on “I can,” “I am” and “I will,” along with the graphic, catches an employer’s eye “and opens the door a little wider — and that’s what you want is for the person to stop and say ‘what’s this?’ ”

“Employers want something different these days,” Smith says. “They want someone with character, someone who is willing to show off his or her potential, to show confidence. The key is showing them not what you’ve done, but what you can do in the future.”

Anita Bruzzese writes the On the Job column. She is author of “45 Things You Do That Drive Your Boss Crazy.” Write to her at anita@anitabruzzese.com.