Let me begin by saying I am not currently actively or passively seeking a new place of employment. In fact, I experience all-time high levels of elation at my current position as a search engine optimizer with Overdrive Interactive on a daily basis. But if I may be so bold, I do want to share some advice for anyone currently on the prowl for a job in e-marketing. I will not exhort for paragraphs, and I dare not offer advice about writing the perfect interactive job resume, but I will distilled my words of wisdom down to the following: You have to stand out online.

As a candidate for a job at a search marketing agency you must be able to point an employer somewhere on the Internet where you have displayed your creativity and self-marketing prowess. After all, if you cannot effectively market yourself, how can you expect to garner online attention for your clients seeking instant ROI? But too often, I have seen applicants supply the standard coverletter and resume package, but negelect their Internet credentials. And to be honest, the candidate pool for jobs in the interactive marketing field is just too competitive to not have all three tools working on your side.

I first conceived of the "resumercial" (resume + commercial) during my senior year of college, and with the help of a brilliant business student tried to monetize it. What made our little product different than the standard video resumes that were speckled about the Internet at the time was the fact that we purposely didn’t feature vapid "talking heads" singing the same ole’ "ideal candidate" song. We took a new direction and tried to sell the person as a quality name brand. This approach communicated to employers that this was no ordinary hire through both the use of multimedia and style of the production. Hence the mantra of my resumercial "Going Above and Beyond is Part of the Job" and the dramatic 2001: A Space Odyssey opening theme. Unfortunately, this was only a part-time enterprise for the two of us and eventually we conceded that we couldn’t produce custom made resumercials at a rate to sustain our new business.

The video glued to this entry is the prototype that resulted from our brief entrepreneurial endeavor. An interviewer once told me, speaking of my resumercial, "You’ve got a hell of a landing page… that’s why you’re here." As campy as my resumercial maybe, I have been able to dazzle perspectives employers time and time again simply because it’s not one of a thousand emailed resumes, but goes a few hundred steps further to offer an engaging preview of my employment with their organization. Plus the Stephen Hawking voice is good for a laugh. Enjoy!