The Job

Joe is employed now. He can pay his rent without having to think about having to subject himself to strange medical experiments or selling off his stereo on eBay.

Joe is happy.

The End.

The Second Interview

Dejected by the results of interview Day 1, Joe decided to clean up his act.

Joe was proactive for the first time since he ran his lemonade stand at age 14. He remembered somehow that he liked KMBX, a local radio station. He also remembered his buddy Shawn, who had a marketing internship there and was about to get promoted (does this mean a possible job opening?). Joe looked online for tips on how to write a decent cover letter and updated his resume after getting it reviewed by a friend of his who had a good job.

Joe called up Shawn, who gave him a referral to his boss. Joe had an interview lined up for the next week.

When Joe was interviewed, he found that because he always listened to this radio station since he was a kid, he didn’t need to do much background research. Because Shawn was his good friend and would talk about his job, Joe knew what the job entailed.

The First Interview

Despite the less than stellar GPA, lack of cover letter, and lack of research on the company, marvelously, Joe woke the next day with this memo in his inbox:

Joe gave a whoop of delight and promptly called up his buddy Shawn to go out drinking.

Joe still didn’t bother to research the company before he went in for his interview (bad!). Even though the interviewer had very kindly lined up what they would be covering in the interview (very rarely are employers so kind), he didn’t think of answers for any of the questions beforehand.

Throughout the interview, Joe made several major blunders.

First, Joe opened the interview by saying, “Didn’t I read about the stock price dropping for your company last week in the Wall Street Journal?”

Brilliant, Joe. You just insulted your potential employer’s company (which was a startup), by insinuating its valuation was low.

Following this blunder was another, just as horrendous.

“How much are you going to give me?”

Allen replied, a bit bewildered, “This is a commission-based job. Didn’t you read the description? How hard are you WILLING to work?”

Uh, Joe. Just so you know… YOU DON’T HAVE THE JOB YET. You definitely are in no position right now to negotiate a salary.

The rest of the interview was a disaster. Joe had no idea what his personal skills were. He had no idea what the company was about.

Then, halfway through the interview, Allen suffered from a major allergy attack and had to leave the room. “This interview is now over,” he choked.

Oh, yes. Joe, that cologne you put on this morning might have made you feel great as you were getting dressed, BUT it doesn’t do wonders for Allen’s asthma.

On his humiliated walk out the door, Joe bumped into Kyle Dogood. Kyle was to get the internship position because he did all the things that Joe had neglected to do and more.

You see, Kyle always knew that he wanted to do database development. Prior to his applying for the position of developer, he had taken relevant coursework, which he stated clearly on his resume here. He had written this nice cover letter, and arrived 15 minutes early to his interview, to show his punctuality and eagerness to work. He was extremely knowledgeable about the company, their competitors, and even Hasajob’s major clientele.

A decade later, Kyle Dogood was the happy CEO of the now publicly traded and much larger Hasajob Database Design Company. He eventually retired before reaching the age of 40 and moved to Honolulu.

Job Hunting!

Joe awoke the next day refreshed and ready to type up his resume.

“I am invincible!” Joe shouted, once finished.

No. You’re not, Joe.

Just look at this sad resume he submitted. What’s wrong, you might ask?

First, you need to have a cover letter to go with your resume. You might have a generic cover letter, which you can modify for each company.

Second, if you are a senior or graduating senior, employers don’t care about what you did before college. What have you done since you graduated from high school? Any other accomplishments other than operating that lemonade stand when you were 14? Otherwise, a rushed employer glancing over your resume might think you’re a high school kid and pass you over automatically.

Third, your resume should be no more than a page long. Superfluous pages tend to annoy busy employers and get thrown in the trash.

Fourth, you should list your clubs and activities so future employers know you have a life outside of school and work.

And here’s a little secret, Joe. If your GPA is less than stellar, after a few years of real world work experience under your belt… very few employers care about your cumulative GPA.

Joe logged into this website for the first time ever, and publicly posted his resume.

Post-Graduation Panic Attack

Name: Joe Unemployed

Skills: Word, Some Excel

Objective: Get a job using the stuff I learned in Business School



As Joe glanced between his latest bank statement and the cover letter on his screen, he wondered how much he could get for his computer on eBay.

Meet Joe Unemployed. Joe entered the Michael G. Foster School of Business two years ago by incredibly good luck and setting up a complex network of mirrors in all the examination rooms before each major exam.

Joe is pleasant enough, though has barely eked by the past two years on whining and good looks. He graduated a few weeks ago with a minimum 2.5 G.P.A. and realizes that he’s

1. $40,000+ in debt.
2. Soon to be unemployed from his student job.
3. In deep financial trouble, because after rent, bills, and daily Top Ramen allowance for the following month, he has only $36.70 left in his checking account.

Joe looks back at the past few years and wonders how he got into this predicament. Ah, yes. It might have had something to do with the fact that he didn’t visit this career center’s website sooner in the school year, or even better, visit the center to check out those career workshops on job hunting, resume, and interviewing tips.

Or maybe it was the fact that he had a hard time learning to say no to all those parties he went to over the years when he should have been studying for finals instead. And Joe never went to his professors’ office hours, so none of them even recognize his face, let alone know him by name. Good luck getting those very important letters of recommendations from any of my esteemed professors who know Joe as a slacker at best from angry peer group evaluations. Yeah. Definitely should have learned to say no.

Speaking of learning to say no, at that moment, Joe realized that he probably should have said no to that really nice man he met in the Quad four years ago who gave him a slice of pizza in exchange for signing up for a card. But that was before Joe took Econ 200.


“My current debt could have bought me at least 3000 pizzas!” Joe wailed, quoting a freshman Econ 200 lesson on opportunity costs.

Somewhere in the distance, in an obscure Seattle coffee shop where they give you too much java and not enough sugar, Joe’s former Econ 200 T.A. heard the anguished echo, paused in the middle of correcting a gargantuan stack of finals, and smiled. “I taught him well.”