Chris Harkin, from Northern Ireland, has been job hunting since September 2019 after graduating from university.
The 24-year-old had become a bit desperate to get working, so he came up with a fairly bold solution.
He commissioned a billboard with ‘Please Hire Me’ at the top, with some bullet points of his experience and the name of his YouTube channel.
The grand gesture cost Chris £400… but he still doesn’t have a job.
He got the idea after his sister, who works as a social media manager, spoke about buying billboards for an ad campaign her company was working on.
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Chris said: ‘After searching for a job for nearly two years, I was feeling understandably frustrated and decided that I could make a video for my YouTube channel and create a larger version of my CV and make a statement about the difficulty of the current job market by getting a billboard.
‘After applying for 300 in a week, my next attempt at a solution to my problem was to buy a billboard with the statement “Please Hire Me” emblazoned on it.’
Finding a billboard wasn’t as Chris thought it might be, and he was able to secure one within two weeks.
‘The most difficult aspects were designing the art for the billboard and being able to pay for it,’ he said.
Although the billboard was up for two weeks, he has not yet received a job offer and has mixed feelings about whether he would recommend the move to other jobseekers.
He explained: ‘It is expensive – there’s a lot of designing and paperwork involved, and I was lucky to have people around me that were able to help with these aspects.
‘If you get to a point where you’re also this desperate to expand your search to find work, it might be a reasonable last resort.
‘If nothing else, you’ll probably give yourself a laugh as it appears to have done for many of my subscribers.
‘I’ve had plenty of people come to my YouTube channel and say that they saw it and more commenting on the video featuring the billboard that I posted trying to provide help with my job search, but so far nobody has offered me any work opportunities from it.’
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