It takes courage to shave your head. It also takes courage to put it all on the line to get a job.
Eric Romer did both. ?
Romer started a Web site called "Hire Me, HeadBlade " to land the head marketing job at the company behind the head shaving device. "I had contacted HeadBlade a few months prior, inquiring about a Marketing position, but there weren't any available," Romer tells me. "When I saw a job posting through HeadBlade's Twitter account, I created the 'Hire Me, HeadBlade' campaign, including the website."
The cost? $30. The result? He got the job. ?
"Eric has been a HeadBlader for a few years," says Todd Greene, who founded the company a decade ago and is, well, a control freak--"Many times I've watched the movie Multiplicity with Michael Keaton and wished that I could do the same." He's had trouble finding, and keeping, the right marketing person. Turns out the problem may be that none of them were "HeadBladers". Greene says when he posted the position, a hundred people applied, but Eric Romer's website "reminded me a little about myself. I was hiring for a job about online marketing and social media...Eric was using those very tools to not only demonstrate his knowledge of the brand and the medium, he was taking that extra step to actively GET the job. I just connected with the mentality." ?
Romer says he's used HeadBlade since 2005.
"I personally love it for it's ease-of-use, close shave, and most importantly, I genuinely felt like HeadBlade understood what it's like to be a bald man." He was out of work when he applied, his savings were dwindling, and he figured the website was the only way to get HeadBlade's attention. "I wanted to treat it like a business," he says. "The goal is to drive traffic and interaction there. Similarly, the Hire Me HeadBlade website housed my resume and other content related to the HeadBlade brand. I used the other platforms to have conversations and drive people to the site. Ultimately, I just wanted to show them I knew how to create a brand and market it online." ?
Greene was so impressed that he flew Romer to Los Angeles from Indianapolis for an interview--the first candidate for the job. Others were also interviewed, but Greene eventually offered Romer the position, and he accepted. Romer will drive (and blog) from Indianapolis during New Year's. Once in LA, he'll be paid around $50,000 "with built in incentives relating to online sales". ?
As for HeadBlade business in this economy, Greene says "more guys are shaving, not less. It's very inexpensive to maintain the shaved head look versus going to the barber every two or three weeks!" He hopes to use Romer to develop more of an online presence and connect to print and television. "I like the GoDaddy mentality--opportunistic buys," says Greene. "We are in a recession and ad rates continue to plummet, especially for print." ?
Look for HeadBlade to baldly make a splash at the Winter Olympics with a tie-in to skeleton racer Zach Lund. Greene says Lund was number one in the US in 2006 until he was kicked off the team for testing positive for Finestride, a masking agent for steroids "found in, of all places, PROPECIA (hair loss treatment)." Lund now uses a HeadBlade. ?
What did Romer learn from this experience? "The biggest lesson is just ACT," he says. "Everyone respects a person who takes initiative and puts ideas into action. There's so many tools available for free, and so much more accessibility to influencers and decision-makers. I say, make them pay attention to you, and actually DO the role you are going after, in some capacity." He actually got a couple of other job offers based solely on the audacity of his HeadBlade website. "Luckily, I won't have to go bark up those trees, but it was reassuring to get such positive feedback from employers and companies across the board."
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