This came across the Huffington Post yesterday.  I love Scott Avidon’s approach to a job search.  It is generous and ingenious.  It reminds me of our friend Erick Brownstein’s cousin, Alec, who got a job as an art director in NYC by buying the names of all big agency Creative Directors as Google keywords, so that when they Googled their own names, his C.V. was in the top five results.

In his ‘brand narrative,’ Avidon does a good job of communicating on the meta level, and he speaks well on the emotional level, too.  The images he uses on his job search blog are pure meta, not the least of which is the fact that his own image is balanced with the other five.  It suggests a balanced life.  But not TOO balanced.  Avidon, an industrial designer by training, has laid out the page so that the images and the program description near the bottom are justified left while the rest of the content on the page is centered.  It doesn’t matter whether this is Avidon’s conscious design or an accident, it’s brilliant,  because it uses the meta meaning in design to communicate the INCOMPLETENESS of the narrative.  Something’s missing.  Something we, in the audience, naturally want to fill.  We are coded as human beings to strive for completeness, and the incompleteness on Avidon’s page gets us leaning forward, into his narrative, as a result.

As a systems thinker, Avidon has plugged, somehow, into the HuffPost network in order to expand his narrative in a quantum way that is of his doing, but is now, by his design, out of his control.  His work now consists of channeling the chaos that ensues.  This is good narrative science, and conjures up something that cannot be present in a flat resume.  Energy, vitality, generosity, creativity, dimensional thinking.

Compare Avignon’s narrative to a typical job query or resume, which is primarily cosmetic: information, facts, history, data points, objectives. There’s no comparison.

Employers today are looking to invest in personal narratives, in trajectories, and in generative, ‘Yes-And’ thinking.  Companies hire individuals who can make good moves when faced by unforeseen circumstances.  Who share their own success with their team.  Who can be engines of newness and positive change.  That you’re knowledgeable at what you do is just table stakes that can get in the game, maybe.  Whether or not you can change the game in your favor is what really counts

I hear Oblong Industries is hiring.  They need Scott Avidon on their team.