Review: Guerrilla Marketing, Part I


I've enjoyed reading Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters 2.0. The authors divide their massive job-hunting treasure map/survival guide/pep rally into four parts. Each section is packed with advice, cajoling and "Guerrilla Intelligence" sub-sections that detail self-marketing strategies. Levinson and Perry's contention is that the job market is so competitive that ordinary job-hunting strategies are defunct. Therefore, guerrilla tactics -- effective marketing principles and tech savvy -- are de rigeur. The book, published in 2009, reflects the U.S. economic climate and pessimism of the time. 

Unfortunately, at least for Part I,  the publishing date also showcases some passe technologies and applications. For example, Alta Vista is listed as a top news search engine. This may be still be true, but they didn't even appear in this article. (To be fair, the article counts both news search engines and individual news outlets as "news sites.") Personally, I hadn't been on the Alta Vista site since 2003. The authors also stress using Google apps, which by now many people have synthesized into their technological consciousness. Storing your resumes on Docs may be slightly different, but using Gmail for professional correspondence is standard procedure.

But Part I of Guerrilla Marketing does have some enlightening material. It proposes using "resume lingerie," that is, adding attention-grabbing (but truthful!) details to your resume. It encourages featuring company logos in place of ho-hum job headings, detailing specific achievements (e.g., increased sales $234,000 in a year by developing and managing 19 accounts), and crafting a personal brand. For those of us who've sat through Marketing 101, it's not shocking news, but the manner in which it's applied is refreshing.

The first part of the book inspired me to re-write my cover letter with the wisdom of my old journalism professor in mind: tell a story. A small anecdote about the names of my childhood pets (strange, but relevant to my career path) in the introduction paragraph grabbed the attention of a public relations firm. I got an interview and was offered an internship.

In conclusion, I think Guerrilla Marketing's Part I offers some great tools for re-thinking your job-searching approach, in spite of some dated apps. I'm excited to dig into Part II, which gets into more specific "guerrilla weaponry"; tackling resume and cover letter writing. 
I'm becoming convinced that I may need to be a guerrilla in my job search. Minus the camouflage.

Comments

  1. Kiki, thanks for taking the time to review the book. You're certainly right - the world has changed A LOT since 2009 [it really does seem so long ago] and version 3 of Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters will be out in May of 2011.

    Now, I may just be an economics grad... but I have learned a little about marketing and this time I've embedded QR Tags through tout the books so I can continue to bring new ideas as well as new tactics and strategies to everyone in near realtime WITHOUT having to rewrite the book :-)

    If you are on LinkedIn - and you really should be by now - please ask me to connect [instructions are on page 189].

    All the best.

    David Perry
    co-author Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters 2.0

    ReplyDelete

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