🎭 Theatrics

No one is ever 100% honest in the recruiting process. In competing for your talent, recruiters and hiring managers have to advertise why it’s better to work at their company versus their competitors. They’re paid to make sure they hire someone, so it makes sense that they would make their company sound better than it is, to encourage you to accept their job offer. Only in rare cases has a recruiter ever been honest with me. “Our company sucks, but you should come work here!” will never be uttered.

And job candidates talk with inflated egos too. You’re almost incentivized to make yourself sound better, more intelligent, and more capable than you are. I get it! You want to look good in the eyes of people who are going to judge you. It’s almost human nature to inflate your qualifications.

So both recruiters and job hunters present themselves with an inflated value. Recruiters don’t want to admit that their executives are difficult to work with or that the healthcare plan is shit. Candidates don’t want to admit not knowing the answer to an interview question or that they don’t actually volunteer at the pet shelter every weekend. If everyone is never honest, then the whole recruitment process is a joke. But you can fix it.

Beautifully honest

One of my favorite true stories is about the worst hotel in the world. It’s a true story about a hostel in Amsterdam called the Hans-Brinker. The Hans-Brinker story is similar to your job hunt: They were just one of the many hotels in Amsterdam, and you are one in a sea of many job seekers.

One of the secrets to success for this ultra low-budget hotel was in their advertising. So instead of marketing themselves as the best, cleanest, friendliest hotel…they did the opposite. Obviously, no one would be interested in competing with them to be the worst hotel in the world, so the Hans-Brinker would be sitting in their own empty ocean, standing out from everyone else. There were no other “worst hotels” to compete with!

Secondly, their advertising was really fucking honest. The Hans-Brinker was a cheap hotel and they never lied about it. They didn’t replace the toilet paper. Chairs had three legs. There were unknown stains on the walls. The marketing used honesty in a way that was refreshing. They didn’t lie about who they were. Instead the Hans-Brinker doubled-down on being beautifully honest. Like a standup comedian, they made themselves the joke and everyone laughed.

Use creativity to bring the world towards you like a magnet. Humans are drawn to unique people, because they’re unlike everyone else. You can be a job seeker with a unique persona, witty writing, and whatever freak flag you want to fly. Bonus: The more unique you are, the easier it is for recruiters to find and remember you.

What if your resume was designed on pink paper with sparkles? What if your resume were delivered via a Mariachi band? Beautiful honesty is about having fun in today’s modern chaos by leaning into the characteristics that make us all human. There is no reason any of us have to job hunt with a serious persona because everyone else does it. You wanna add jazz hands? Jazz it the fuck up. You should be your weird self. If the Hans-Brinker can be weird, honest, *and successful,* you can too.

Irreverence

In all my job hunts, the best thing I could ever do was not take job hunting so seriously. The more I laughed directly at the absurdity of the recruiting process, the more success I found in getting hired. My own success followed in a vein of irreverence: Showing a lack of respect for things that are generally taken seriously. This irreverence made me appear more confident to recruiters and revealed an ability to embrace humor in the face of seriousness.

No one wants to work with a serious person every day. The people interviewing you would rather meet someone refreshing than boring. You can be fun and somewhat serious at the same time—and I bet some of your favorite teachers in high school followed this mantra. It’s called: Confidence.

Remember this is the bad place: You can literally do everything right and still not get hired because of some bullshit excuse like, “You had an employment gap.” So laugh at the absurdity of job hunting. So what if you took a little time off between jobs. You’re not a pawn in someone else’s game. You’re a human being. Pointing out things that are taken too seriously is a cornerstone of comedy.

You might even make friends with the people who are offering you these jobs because your common ground is this shared experience of humor and absurdity. You’d be surprised to see how often recruiters would agree with you that their jobs are centered around absurdity. Say goodbye to being serious. Embrace irreverence. Your biggest competitive advantage in the recruiting process is being different and confident at the same time. Laughter is a good thing. It’s a great way to disarm serious people.

Human after all

If you’re coming from a recent graduation, it’s a very strange time to go from being graded by your professors in your final semester, and then immediately start believing in yourself. Your life is changing abruptly and it’s difficult to know what to do next. You might feel like you need to transform into a salesperson in front of complete strangers. It’s not an easy transition.

And you’re probably a little afraid, insecure, anxious, or all three. It’s normal to feel like a lot is going on right now. Embrace the feelings instead of escaping to Insta or TikTok or YouTube. Take a breath, acknowledge that you’re human and that nervousness is expected when you job hunt. Totally normal.

Recruiting is not a robotic process, even though AI is having a major impact. You still have to speak with recruiters using your own voice. You still have to present yourself in front of strangers for job interviews, on video or in-person. None of this can be handled by AI (yet). Recruiting is (for the moment) a deeply human-based process, supplemented by technology.

Acting like a human being during your job hunt will take you further than you think. And by that I mean being a little irreverent, sarcastic, silly, weird, and honest. Laugh when you want to. Smile when you want to. Job hunting is a human thing all of us go through. And being human in this moment is about believing you are valuable and then presenting that value to others. Humanity runs through you. Show how human you are.