Welcome to Career Crashers, where we tell the stories of those who are not content to weigh around, follow rules and help me for good things to happen. Great careers aren't found, they're forged. It's time to crash the party. Alright, today on Career Crashers, I'm back with Tim Shurmak.
Again, this time not to talk about his story, but the career crash story of one of your employees to him at platform marketing, somebody that I happen to know, Alicia Vahinkal. Tell me what, and this is a great story because it didn't really go right, but it still turned out okay in the end. Tell me, what did Alicia Vadou to get a job at platform? She wanted a job, she was younger, I think when she applied, she was like 16 or 17 years old or something like that.
So not even college age, but like high school age, right? And she knew that on paper technically, she didn't have the credentials, she wasn't qualified in the traditional sense of having a marketing degree or frankly having a high school diploma. And so she sent a burrito to be delivered to my house because she found out via some friends of friends that I love, Chipotle. I love Chipotle, I love Chipotle, it's like my passion in life.
And so she didn't just send Chipotle gift cards, she actually used one of those like delivery services and actually found out again just by asking people what I usually order when I go to Chipotle. And she actually got my order exactly right, which is crazy. But she had it delivered to my house like in person. And this guy was like ringing the doorbell and at the time my wife was home, I was off like working at a co-working space for the day.
So I wasn't home and my wife starts calling me like three times and I was on a conference call or something so I couldn't take a call. But then I realized she had called me and she had slapped me and texted me like in like rapid fire and I'm like okay, that's not normal, something's probably not right. So I quick hopped off, no conference call and I called her and she's like, someone's outside the door and they keep knocking and ringing the doorbell. And she was afraid that someone was trying to break in or something.
I'm like, well this is weird because it's like 3pm on a Friday afternoon, right? Like usually someone's not going to bust in, you know, right in the middle of the day. But she's like freaking out. So she's like hiding in the back room and then she creeps to the front door after this person left and there's like a box at the front door.
And she didn't know what it is. You know, I didn't know what it was. She was asking me, did you order anything? Was there like no?
And it's not like a box like from FedEx or Amazon Prime or something. It's kind of like a nondescript looking package on the front door. Like I thought about something. So she was convinced like someone left like an explosive and it's like one of those random serial killer murders.
And by the way, all this is happening because I don't know when this podcast will go live. But a couple of years ago, there were these like package bombs in Austin, Texas, right? Where people were getting packages delivered. That's right.
Yeah. It killed some people. People were putting bombs in packages and people died. And so this was all like right happening in the aftermath of that.
So my wife's like, oh my God, someone's trying to like bomb us because it's not FedEx, it's not Amazon Prime, whatever. And I'm okay. Well, don't open it. Just stay in the back.
And so she's barricaded herself and our dogs in like the farthest back corner of the house because she's like, all right, that's out of the blast radius. I'll probably survive with minor injuries. And I come home and I'm like just creeping towards it kind of like, well, I have no idea what this is, but someone has to open it. So I opened it up and inside this box is a bag with like a Chipotle burrito.
And I'm like, so I have no context. I have no idea what the hell is going on. I don't know who it's from, like why there was Chipotle over to our house. I didn't order it.
She obviously didn't order it. And so like a reasonable person probably just would have like thrown it away. But I like Chipotle. You would put your life on the line for that burrito.
It totally could have been poisoned. Like the risk reward of that. Like I was making up money at the time, but if I really wanted Chipotle, I could have gone up and I risked my life to eat this burrito that was left on my doorstep. And so anyways, I found out later an email came like half an hour later saying that, hey, my name is Alisha Buh, I think I pronounced it right.
I just sent you a burrito. I hope you enjoy it. I wanted to grab your attention in a creative way because I know that you love Chipotle. I'd like to interview for a job platform.
I'm willing to work a month for free just to prove how valuable that I can be for your company. And I was like, holy cow, someone wants to work at our company that bad where they're willing to like find out where I live, do some researching and digging and find out what I even ordered Chipotle instead of burrito to our house. And I was like, what money is it in hindsight like we thought we were being attacked by nearly something? What a creative way to get my attention and get a job.
And she, I mean, that's so creative and that whole like strategy of grabbing my attention was so creative that it almost takes away from how brilliant her email was. And that's I'm willing to work for you for free for a month to prove my value. And I think that's actually very underrated as a tactic for young people trying to get their foot in the door at a company because what the public doesn't really understand about hiring is that it's actually less of a big deal being willing to work for free than you probably think. And most of that first month we're just training you anyways.
You're actually not even adding any value to the company because there's not a lot of things you can do with most companies where you can come in and add value. And so for the greater part of that first month, we were just training for anyways and she wasn't really adding value. But we kind of made a decision that, hey, if she was willing to send the burrito, she's willing to work for free, like let's just start training her and we'll probably know by the end of that first month if she's going to work out anyways. Did you have a job opening posted publicly?
No, we've actually never in the history of the company said we're hiring. So that's great. We weren't either. We weren't hiring.
But when someone good that good comes along, it's like all, I guess, increased payroll a little bit, but you can be technically need that person then because if someone's that good and they want to work for us that bad. Yeah. I talked to business owners all the time who say it doesn't matter if we have job postings up or not. If I meet people that I think are valuable, I am always willing to hire.
So I took down a few bullets on this one and Lishavita did some research. She happened to know some people that worked at the company and asking around what, you know, learned about you, seen you posting on social media about Guacamole and Chipotle, made it personal. Obviously, I was in the Chipotle and into Guacamole before it was cool to like, like avocados and be a millennial and all that. I was in the poor as cool as well.
I was created the avocado trend. I'm fine. I just want to put that on the record. Yeah.
And Lishavita, even though in this case, like, you know, it could, it didn't go right. The first impression didn't quite hit the fact that she made it personal and figured out, like, what do you care about? I always tell people this, the career market, it's like dating. You don't go to somebody you want to date and be like, here are 10 reasons I'm highly dateable to women or to men.
You go and you think about the specific person, here's why you are fascinating to me. Why I'm interested in you. Employers are people too and saying, I'm interested in you, your company rather than, here's me and why I'm a good person that any company would like. So she went for you and she made herself, she was persistent as well with the calls and emails, but she made herself hard to say no to by making that offer.
Let me work for free for a month. And this is something I tell people a lot, even offering it, what that signals is so powerful. A lot of times the employer will say, well, no, let's just bring you on and pay you anyway. It's not much of a difference.
They don't even always do it. It's not like employers are sitting there being like, oh, I'll squeeze a month of free work out of you, right? Like that's not that high of a value, but it's recognizing anything you can do to make it hard to say no to you. Like that's a really hard person to say no to.
They persisted. They did something for you. They said, you're a nice email. What objections do you have left?
It's pretty tough to say no to that. Yeah. And it's actually not enough to remove risk too, because like I said, a lot of people go, I'll take the risk out. I'll only work for free, whatever.
But just again, to restate it from the business owners, the entrepreneurs perspective, we spend most of that first month just training them anyway. So it actually consumes our team's resources. It's almost a net negative for our company in that first month because we have to train them. Now, Lish has ended up being such a great employee that it absolutely worked out as a win-win, recently just offered her a full-time salary position.
And so she went from coming in, working for free. Initially, we offered her a part-time job paid hourly. And now we just offer her a full-time salary position. And so it's absolutely worked out.
But just realize that it's not enough to send a resume somewhere. You actually have to be willing to add value to that company. And Isaac, you said that we weren't even hiring at that point. But how can I say no to that?
So after you got the burrito bomb and the email with the value proposition, and was your next thought, can I see your GPA and your degree? No. No. I mean, I don't care about it.
We've actually, I shouldn't say we've never asked, because one thing we almost always do in a phone interview is after we talk to someone for like 90 minutes and we've vetted them, and we've basically made the decision like, hey, we're going to hire this person. On the last interview, after we discussed compensation and all that stuff, we'll be like, by the way, what was your high school GPA? And we say it in a dead serious phase, but we don't care. We're saying it as a joke.
It's always funny seeing how people react. Because they're like, oh, well, I mean, honestly, I did so too hard in high school and they start making all these excuses and we're like, okay, we don't care. We love doing that. That's almost mean.
It's funny. I don't remember where the story was. I have to track it down. But the burrito story reminds me.
There was somebody at a startup, maybe an Austin that I've never heard about, who did some similar. He actually dressed up as a taco delivery guy and just showed up to the office saying, hey, I got tacos for everybody and nobody had ordered them and brought them into the lunchroom. And then like had a pitch, hey, I'm a graphic designer or whatever. Here's my portfolio.
I want to work for you and end up working. Again, if you send somebody a cake or whatever, it's not always going to work. It can be creepy. It can go off wrong.
You got to combine a couple of things. The whole point is that Lish had researched and found out that I personally like Chipotle. So obviously the lesson here isn't just send burritos to people you want jobs from. I, she saw that I was obsessed with Chipotle.
So obviously she customized it to me. But it was interesting, obviously I went and posted this on social media. I've shared a story with hundreds of people before. And yet this was a couple of years ago, maybe it was last year, I don't know.
No one has done it since. Right? No, we've hired many people since Lish. No one has done it since.
And so it's pretty easy to stand out if you just prove that you want that specific job. You're not just spamming or resume off to a bunch of people, but you're willing to go above and beyond because you want to work at this specific company. It's really hard to say no to that. The bar is pretty low when it comes to bypassing the typical processes and crashing the market.
One of my favorite examples is Nina for Airbnb, this woman that wanted to work at Airbnb. She just created a landing page, Nina for Airbnb. And she put together like a short PDF study of international markets. And it was for Airbnb exclusively.
Here's where you can break into this market, this and this. Give me a call because if I apply like everyone else I won't get noticed. The thing is she didn't get hired by Airbnb. She ended up getting flooded with other companies wanting to hire.
So even though the company she put in the work for, it's also a signal like, wow, if she's willing to do that for them, I want her to channel that same passion for me. It's broader than you might think. So hey, Tim, thanks again for joining us, man. Cool.
Thanks, Isaac. Better. Like what you hear? Go to crash.co and join the career revolution.
Do you want to share your own career crash story, send it directly to me? Isaac at crash.co.