Look at Me, Corporate America!

When you are looking for a job you are competing with millions of other job-seekers. Take a different route and make that company to find you!

Here are seven ways to do it:

1. Coordinate and hold a job fair. Everyone knows that a standard method for employers to find employees is to meet over the neutral ground of a job fair. In this fair, however, you take center stage. Come up with a glossy pamphlet outlining the annual AAHA (Association for the Advancement of Hireable Applicants) job fair to take place in your local town or city. (You might want to create a website to support this event.) Then, send your pamphlets out to Fortune 100 companies with the event specifics: dates and location, directions, etc... On that morning, before the fair is to begin, set up your "reception" desk (with plenty of extra resumes to go around) in the middle of the conference room floor. When the fair begins watch how these corporate recruiters descend on you, the only job-seeker present, like vultures. None of these representatives wish to return home with empty hands! Be mindful, however, of the position you finally accept. If you are offered a chemical engineering position at "corporation X", for example, you might want to be sure that your background and education suits such a job description.

2. Create the biggest resume ever. ...And when we mean the biggest, we mean THE BIGGEST! A difficulty many job-seekers experience is to get prospective companies to actually view their resumes. By creating "the biggest resume ever" you essentially circumvent this dreary certitude. Just as the Great Wall of China and the Hoover Dam can be viewed from space, so should your resume! Find a large tract (say 100 sq miles) of corn or wheat field in any of the Mid-Western states and get to work. Start up the combine and carve your resume into the great swaths of the North American bread basket! When you're done send the link to MSN's TerraServer or Google Earth to the companies you like and watch as the job offers pour in. Who knows? ...you may even get an interstellar-passerby to shoot you an email!

3. Hack into a computer system. Everyone, even the government, loves a hacker. Therefore, setting yourself up for the ideal environment to perform "hacking" behavior is a sure bet for you to get the reputation necessary for a long career in the software industry. To do this you need to start a company that specializes in software-support for major financial institutions. When your company reaches a certain level of respectability, quit, ...then get to work! You know the code. You've been there at the start, so this shouldn't be that difficult. If you need to, hire an assistant hacker who really knows his or her way around programing protocol. When, eventually, the FBI comes knocking on your door cooperate fully with the investigation. When, after a month or so, after the smoke has blown over, refuse the government job you will be offered and take a position in the private-sector software industry. You're a successful hacker ...you're a shoo-in for corporate employment!

4. Train to be an Olympic athlete. Yes, there will be a lot of videos involving you running or jumping or skiing or swimming ...but the end result is a secure corporate sponsor with all the perks that come with. Everyone loves someone who is training for the Olympics. It doesn't matter how good you are or whether or not you've won or actually placed in any competition. What people do admire is determination, and that fact that you're training for one of the biggest athletic meetings in the world is enough to bring you the attention you need and a near-certain place at the corporate table when your "dreams" are dashed by physical impossibility.

5. Boast your way to employment. The first thing you should do is find a company. The second thing you should do is find the bar nearest to that company. Once you've found the nearest bar, rent a Rolex watch, buy a nice suit and tie and then hire a friend to accompany you to this bar during either lunch-hour or Friday's happy-hour. Have your friend agree to merely nod when you make claims of huge profit-taking on your last stock dump. Have your friend raise his glass in a toast when you mention how your organizational theories out-did all management expectations. Have your friend "howl" with pleasure when you brag about your cost-saving measures in purchasing. Then, after you have the entire bar's attention, allow your friend to weep with joy when you speak of the international "slug preservation" campaign you spearheaded with last year's surplus funds. By the time the bartender calls it a night you'll have every executive in the bar spilling tears of compassion with your tales of corporate acumen and conservationist noblesse oblige. Have several job contracts with a large "signature" field prepared before initiating this method. ...And monitor your alcohol consumption.

6. Make a YouTube video. Procure or rent an iron lung, a puppy and an non-communicative nonagenarian (...you'll need to rent one if you don't have any compliant ninety-year-olds in your immediate family.) Produce and shoot a short documentary film about the travails of your job search during the last 4,246 days while suffering under the grave diagnosis of IDS (Immanent Death Syndrome.) "Sent out six resumes today," you might wheeze from the confines of your iron lung. "Still no luck." Hire a number of people to read testimonials to your hard work ethic, steel will and dogged determination. Get lots of close-ups of the cute puppy. End the film by stating that "...If I could make a wish, I'd get a job in corporate America." When the video hits the number one slot on YouTube watch the offers for corporate employment bowl down your door. When you show up at work the following day, sprite and spry and swift on your feet claim that your IDS symptoms seemed to have vanished along with the good news of your new job!

7. Make a different YouTube video. With this documentary video you come across as one of the greatest humans alive. You'll need to comb the internet for footage, but by placing yourself in the thick of world events you will appear as a statesman, a diplomat and a top-of-the-line corporate go-getter. With simple, low production cut-away shots this is easily attainable. Under this technique you're directing incoming UN planes for landing in Dafur. Your present at middle-eastern peace-brokering deals. You're comforting sick children in La Paz or building homes in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans. Heck, if Tom Hanks can do it, so can you! At the end of the "documentary" simply indicate that all you would like to do is "get a good job at a good corporation. Nothing more." When this video hits number one on YouTube you'll see recruiters lining up to have you on their teams. But be forewarned: when you go into work the day after singing on, you may have to come up with some psychological "disorder", something involving the trauma you've experienced, that now forces executives to reduce their high expectations of you and places you in the rank of regular, rank and file, workers.

Each and every method of gaining employment in corporate America mentioned above has been tested and verified by the FSRI. We recommend, if you choose to follow any of these methods to gain corporate employment, that you fully follow the Faking Smart! guidelines when doing so. If there are any other methods that you think we might have missed or forgotten, we would be pleased (and, to tell the truth, awestruck) to hear of them.

KWA