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First Rule of Job Hunting: Be Memorable

The concept of me writing an advice column about finding jobs in journalism is laughable. It would be akin to me writing a column giving advice on relationships, meaning it’s only possible if you subscribe to the theory that those who can’t do something teach it (a theory that isn’t very popular among professors in a university setting).

I just graduated college and still haven’t found a job.

Nevertheless, I have made enough mistakes to give some pointers to jobseekers, so perhaps they will not repeat my errors.

The most important step is to make the powers that be remember you for at least a week after meeting you. I spent a lot of time in the past going to job fairs, handing out resumes and examples of my work. I sat with recruiters for a few minutes while they looked over my material, said goodbye and moved on to the next table.

At that time, I was convinced the quality of my writing samples would be enough to win me the job of my dreams.

There are a few problems with that technique.

First, recruiters for smaller papers generally consist of a managing editor or someone who has equally significant responsibilities (aside from reading every word of every story that the 200-something college kids handed him or her that day).

The resume and clips I had worked so hard for had become part of another pile of stuff. I should have realized this. I have my own piles of stuff, and I don’t have to hire anybody or run a newspaper.

The next problem is the clips I passed around weren’t nearly as good as I thought they were. Looking back, I cringe at the mistakes I made and wonder what on earth I was thinking. The best of my samples were on par with stories that appear in a newspaper on a daily basis. Being average is hardly the best way to get noticed.

It took a trip to Cleveland for me to see the error of my ways. I was there covering the NCAA basketball tournament, but ended up writing two 1,000-word columns about my experiences in the city that had absolutely nothing to do with basketball.

I was not intending to write a portfolio-type piece. I never thought of it as something I would show to prospective employers. I just had a funny story I wanted to share with a few thousand of my closest friends. But within three weeks, I had e-mails from three employees of The Plain Dealer, Cleveland’s major newspaper. Apparently my columns were passed around the newsroom.

Within a month, one of the paper’s regular columnists wrote a response in which he quoted me for two full paragraphs. I even received a pair of e-mails from the paper’s recruitment and development editor, Marge Frazer.

After searching and hoping for a job with a small daily or weekly paper, a paper large enough to have a recruitment and development editor was interested in me. And it wasn’t because of the average-at-best sports stories I wrote three or four times per week for The Crimson White.

It was because of two columns where I mocked a city and its people, quoted only unnamed homeless people and cab drivers, and created colorful euphemisms for parts of the male and female anatomy. In terms of actual journalism, the columns wouldn’t hold up as passable. I’m not sure if a newspaper would even print them, given some of the subject matter.

And yet, I was receiving feedback from a major metropolitan newspaper.

Why? Because they remembered me. Six months from now, nobody will remember the campus newspaper reporter who “broke” the story that the Alabama baseball team is hoping to make the post-season this year (even though most of my pre-season predictions were pretty accurate), or that the ever-injured Brodie Croyle hopes to have a strong senior season after his second torn ACL.

However, I’m willing to bet a year from now Frazer and her colleagues will at least have a vague recollection of the kid from Alabama who wrote more than 2,000 words in two columns dogging their city.

Unfortunately, Frazer informed me the Plain Dealer is in a hiring freeze, and though she liked my writing, there wouldn’t be a job opening in the near future. I wondered briefly what a recruitment editor does in the midst of a hiring freeze, but thought better of asking her. Although these new developments did not land me a job, they have led me to re-think my approach to the job search.

I will no longer be afraid to submit stories about whore-mongering cab drivers and homeless people just because I didn’t have three named sources, or because “Richard Nixon” is not the preferred way of describing male genitalia according to the “AP Stylebook.”

I’m not sure if this approach will be more successful, but it does have a few upsides. Any publication that hires someone with such a portfolio might allow me to pursue unconventional stories. Working with someone who has a sense of humor is also a plus.

I realize there’s also a risk. The conservative newspaper types might not find it funny. They might read my two columns and decide they would rather drink Windex than publish them in their newspaper.

But at least they’d remember me.