Editor’s note: This article was first published in April 2015, as news from that month, when she was granted an interview that week. The outcome of the interview is not reported in the article.
Nina Mufleh is a young woman from San Francisco whose goal is to work for Airbnb, one of the biggest companies for home-sharing between private individuals.
She had repeatedly tried to get in touch with the company by email and by sending her résumé for every job opening it advertised, all without success. Her résumé was forgotten like so many others.
But Mufleh decided to do something different, and her résumé got so much attention that it soon reached the company’s CEO himself, who did not hesitate to grant her a job interview this week.
We always say that one of the most underrated factors in a job interview is showing clearly what exactly you can do for the company. After all, when a company hires someone, it does so expecting that person to bring it some benefit. “Show them the money”, and the company won’t think twice about hiring you.
That was the card this young woman played, someone who considers herself passionate about the travel industry.
Mufleh told Business Insider in an interview that, after wearing herself out with her strategy of sending résumés, she concluded that she had been working hard at doing the same thing over and over, but had never tried doing something different with a completely drastic change of approach.
Her résumé was carefully decorated with Airbnb’s branding, as if it were less a résumé than an internal memo, which in itself makes sure it doesn’t go unnoticed by an HR director who looks at hundreds or thousands of résumés.
It took her more than a week to prepare her new résumé, but this time she didn’t talk about herself; that’s what the link to her LinkedIn profile was for. This time she talked about the company, carrying out a complete market study and advising the company on what it should do in the future to adapt to change and improve its business figures.
(Read: 4 types of people you need to hire in your company)
Airbnb knows it no longer has absolute dominance of the market, so it is only a matter of time before it has to try new approaches and strategies, and many of the approaches this young woman put forward have clearly appealed to the company’s top brass. And like any company, it needs creative people with new ideas and initiative. Mufleh seems to fit the profile perfectly.
With this somewhat risky but effective approach, a candidate doesn’t say what they have but what they can do with what they have, showing that they understand the industry, that they have spent time studying its market and, most importantly, that they would be up to the job and able to contribute to the company’s future changes.
Now all she has to do is get through the job interview. We wish her the best of luck.
Further reading
- The job interview as you’ve never had it explained: the real reasons you’ll get hired
- This is the perfect résumé, according to HR experts
- 12 platforms for creating an online résumé
Featured image: Steve Jurvetson from Menlo Park, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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