Jul1620092:27 pm

Please bid on the right to hire me

A senior at Penn State put himself, and “the right to interview and potentially hire” him, up for auction on eBay, says the Chronicle of Higher Education today:

As a finance major, [John] Pereca had taken a course in marketing and knew that if he wanted to stand out to a potential employer, he would need to differentiate himself from the crowd. So he took out a $60 ad on eBay, starting at a 99-cent bid for “the right to interview and potentially hire” him.

“Things like this get noticed all the time,” he said. “I thought, ‘Hey, this could work.’”

He posted pictures of himself and of his résumé on the Web site and included a link on his Facebook and Twitter accounts. Realizing that celebrities often have hundreds, if not thousands, of fans checking their Twitter pages, Mr. Pereca started to post on the walls of Oprah Winfrey, Jimmy Fallon, and Shaquille O’Neal, among dozens of others.

“I graduate in 3 days from PENN STATE! My Auction ends on Friday!,” he wrote on several celebrities’ home pages, with a link to the eBay listing. “Help me out!” Kevin Spacey’s account responded, encouraging Mr. Pereca and his unique idea.

The experiment yielded a few offers—photographer in Ocean City, Md., a sales job in Atlanta, and an offer to be in a porn film—though he accepted none of them. eBay eventually pulled his auction from the site, as it violated their terms of service.

Pereca’s experiment reminds me of this guy job hunting outside the DC metro with a sign around his neck. Doesn’t look like these outside the box methods have netted either one a job, but you’ve got to give them credit for pulling out all the stops.

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2 Responses to “Please bid on the right to hire me”

  1. Alanna says:

    Honestly, these kinds of stunts seem lazy to me. It’s probably easier to hang a sign around your neck than to squeeze your network for leads and informational interviews. There is a drudgery to job searching, to putting yourself out there constantly, and I think that people use gimmicks to try and avoid it.

  2. Error: Unable to create directory /home/content/m/a/o/mao32/html/wp-content/uploads/2024/03. Is its parent directory writable by the server? Mark Overmann says:

    You have a good point, Alanna. At first I found these efforts endearing in an odd sort of way—brave souls willing to give just about anything a try to succeed. And maybe if paired with actual networking and informational interviewing, these stunts might indeed be interesting and creative ways to try to get yourself “out there.” But if done instead of the, as you aptly put it, “drudgery of the job search”–if done in the hopes that you won’t have to do the networking and informational interviewing–then perhaps these stunts are just lazy.

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