The United States Navy has proved that people absorb up to 35 percent more when an appeal is made to the eye as well as the ear, and that they retain what they thus learn 55 percent longer. Our job-seeking presentation should therefore be a graphic as possible. A Harvard Business School graduate, after 14 years of successful experience, was applying for a still bigger job. Instead of a conventional summary, he submitted a pictorial chart which visualized his impressive experience. This not only intensified the employer’s attention, but made him covet the applicant’s creative power.
A graphic portfolio scores even better when tailor-made to fit the prospect. For example, just after World War II our firm was taking back 160 of our own people from the armed services; we were therefore seeking no new employees. At that very time a young man came to see me, and I hired him on the spot. Why? Because he had completed so many missions over Germany and had been decorated so much? No. It was because he had taken three months to study our business and its needs, had thought up just how he could be of most use to us, and had prepared a portfolio especially for that one interview with us-a job of work which proved to me that he was highly creative and in no way allergic to effort.
The planning of a follow-up campaign entails more creative thinking. The idea follow-up is a crop of new ideas. When we go back to the employer with more suggestions for the good of his business, we will probably find him eager for our creative capacity, and may find him desirous of our services.
A friend of mine, in search of his first job, applied at Macy’s. He was flatly told that there were too many applicants ahead of him. Unbeaten, he walked through the store, then he telephone the personal director.
“I want a job,” he said, “and I’ve jus spent several hours in the store looking for places where I could help. I have listed 10 spots where I think I could be useful right this minute. May I come up and tell you where they are?” He thus secured the interview, and was soon a Macy trainee.
George R. Keith was a Lawyer who retired at 40. As a creative hobby he conducted a system of finding opening for unemployed people at no expense to them. Over a span of 30 years he contrived ways to help over 80,000 job-seekers. By developing ingenious methods of smoking out opportunities, he was able to find more jobs than people to fill them-even during depressions. He thus proved in a big way that creative imagination can secure the kind of employment sought – in slumps as wall as in booms.
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