Congratulations! You snagged that important face-to-face interview. Now let’s upgrade your potential job offer into a sure thing.
• Arrive first and sit with your chair facing the wall. When the interviewer enters, offer a condescending greeting and turn around slowly while stroking an intern. This transfers all the power to you.
• Accept the request for coffee. Ask for a Keurig Fair Trade Verona Brew (an eco-friendly, and nonexistent, K-Cup brand). This will throw any modern office into a sustainability-conscious panic. In the ensuing fervor, swipe the job offer from the table and flee the building.
• Acquire a sprawling tattoo of the company logo and proudly display it during the interview. Statistics show this raises the chances of your getting the job by up to 15%, or 20% if you supplement the logo with a portrait of the current CEO straddling rising sales figures.
• Bring members of your entourage to the interview. Instruct them to whisper and snigger in the background. This will reduce the interviewer to an insecure mess within minutes. As he sulks, club the interviewer over the head and assume his identity. Allow several months to pass, then offer yourself the job.
• Prepare a manila folder to hand out during the interview. Inside should be a copy of your resume, several writing samples, and an 8x11 headshot of you with your index finger pressed against your lips.
• Say, “Listen, we both know why I’m here,” then hold up your suitcase and pat it knowingly. This all but guarantees a second interview. Because what’s in the suitcase? Insider information on Moody’s upcoming assessment? A comprehensive definition of what Moody’s is? It could literally be anything.
• Challenge the employer to an interview by combat. He is contractually obligated to accept under Article 31 of the Landrum-Griffin Act. But remember: If you die in the interview, you die in real life.
• Negotiate for a higher offer to see how the interviewer responds. If this elicits a negative reaction, remove a swab of cotton from your ear and say “What’s that? Oh, I’ll take the first offer.”
• Entry level jobs now require prior experience. Overcome this loophole by earning a progressive degree, such as a BS in Data Entry, a BA in Showing Eleanor From Marketing How To Use The Scanner Again, or an MFA in Creative Writing.
• Exploit the office’s nesting area. Burrowed deep within every office’s server room lies a hatchery where prospective jobs are birthed and nourished into being. Many of the jobs are newly created social media management positions too weak to stand; they must be kept close to the warm, nurturing servers to survive. If you learn where an office is incubating its most vulnerable newborn jobs, you wield all the power.
David Henne is a writer on Long Island, New York, whose work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Big Jewel, Johnny America, and Yankee Pot Roast. You can follow him on Twitter.
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