Get Noticed First – Standing Out With More Than a Resume

A few months ago I met Demetrius Pinder, owner of Get Noticed First. While in college Demetrius used an above-and-beyond tactic to land an internship. This tactic became the foundation of his senior project and, now, his business.

The idea is simple – you want to impress the people that you are interviewing with. I’m still amazed to hear stories about people that send in the same cliche stuff, typos and all!

Get Noticed First has a program where they allow you to develop a website (like what you get on Emurse.com), but there’s more to it. You end up with some tangibles – a CD with your resume portfolio on it, and resumes printed out on resume paper. You’ll have your website (you can see a sample here), and go into the situation with a lot more preparation than the person next to you.

A few thoughts:

First, it looks like the market that Demetrius is going after is the recent college grad market (or perhaps those looking for internships). I think this is an excellent service to introduce at this stage, and one that will help people think about being more proactive.

Second, the pricing is pretty affordable. It comes out to be about $20/year (so you can do the first year and stop… $25 isn’t much to get started).

Third, yes, you can do all this on your own. Go to Kinkos and get the resume paper, burn your own CD, get an Emurse.com account… I think the convenience here is that going through the Get Noticed First program you just do the work online and then wait for the package to arrive in the mail. If you are on a college campus it might be easier to do it all from your dorm room than worry about finding all the stuff you need to do it on your own.

Fourth, MY PROBLEM in my job search was not lack of wow (read about it on a recruiter’s blog, Daniel Sweet from Free Resume and Career Toolbox has a great post on my pathetic problem). It was a huge incongruence between what was on my resume (CIO/GM/VP) and the jobs I was applying to (project manager, product manager). I thought it would be obvious to the person that I was interviewing with (or wanted to interview with) why there were differences, but it wasn’t obvious, and I really needed professional help to figure this out. So getting a very polished, shiny presentation is not a guarantee that you are going to get interviews.

Fifth, I see that Get Noticed First has a professional resume writer and job coach to help with the work (I’d be interested in knowing who it is). This is pretty important, as I mention in my last point, there are some things that even smarty-pants people (like me) need help with, even if we don’t want to admit it (if you are ready to get some real help, consider one of my partners, listed here). I needed more help than just having professionals review my resume… I needed someone who could tell me why I wasn’t getting interviews.

I think Demetrius has a great service and I’m very interested to see how he penetrates into the high school/college market. I’m watching you Demetrius!