Customer Reviews

Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters 2.0: 1,001 Unconventional Tips, Tricks and Tactics for Landing Your Dream Job

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First review: March 13, 2010
Now, April 13, 2011, 13 months later...

If you are serious about finding a new career opportunity, this book is required reading. Don't do another thing at all in your job search until you have this book in your hands and read it. It is better that you do nothing at all than to do something without David Perry's guidance, coaching, wisdom and insight.

Do you want a larger paycheck sooner rather than later? If so, invest in yourself. Buy this book. Not buying it will probably cost you thousands of dollars. Buying it will cost you about $[...] (with shipping). If you had the opportunity to buy David Perry a Starbucks, sit down with him for 3 hours and pick his brain, I bet you would do it. That is what you are doing here...having a virtual cup of coffee with the best in the business in job hunting. But it gets even better...with his book you have all of the notes from that meeting, in writing, to review and use over and over again.

Now, with that having been said, I am sitting here at my desk eagerly downloading my preview copy of Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters 3.0. WHY?

I am a "headhunter." I do not call myself a recruiter. I do not call myself an "executive search" consultant. I PLACE PEOPLE into COMPANIES. I help companies "hire to win." I am 100% commissioned in what I do. If I do NOT place my candidate into an open position, I don't get paid. I don't eat! I am in the JOB HUNT BATTLE EVERY DAY OF MY LIFE!

Thus, what I do MUST WORK! All too many job hunting books are written by HR professionals and career counselors who will get their salary or get their "career counseling consulting fee" regardless of whether you get hired or not.

SO WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH GUERRILLA 3.0?? In one word, "EVERYTHING"!

I started my "headhunting" business in 2003. I was very good at it. In 2005, I saw Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters in the book store. I read the bio and learned that David Perry is a "recruiter" so I figured I would buy a copy and peruse it. After just a few pages, I was highlighting, paper clipping, taking notes and devouring the book. The very next day I was in the office reshaping the way I did business.

*I learned how to write powerful cover letters and send them to my clients on my candidate's behalf
*I honed my voice mail scripts
*I started role playing mock interviews with the candidates I presented
*...and the list could go on...

The main point is I learned how to truly differentiate myself as a recruiter. I learned how to be a "guerrilla" and that is when I can say I went from being a recruiter to being a "headhunter." More importantly, I learned how to powerfully differentiate the candidates I represented so THAT THEY WOULD GET HIRED!!! And they did. I was a top 200 recruiter in the MRI Network out of over 8000 recruiters for 3 years in a row. GUERRILLA WORKS for getting hired.

In 2009, I started building my firm and started hiring people to work for me. The first book I went to buy for training my new people was Guerrilla and to my dismay, it was "out of print." I panicked. But with a few clicks, I quickly discovered that, in just another few weeks, Guerrilla 2.0 was coming out. I pre-ordered 7 copies.

When the book landed in my office, we all did a deep dive. That year our entire recruiting firm, with rookies, billed close to a million dollars by PLACING PEOPLE.

So you can see why I can't wait to read 3.0.

David teaches you HOW TO PLACE YOURSELF...HOW TO RISE ABOVE YOUR COMPETITION AND WIN THE JOB YOU WANT instead of letting it go to someone else.

If you get 3.0 and don't get anything from it, I want to know why. Shoot me an email at [...]

Yes, his methods are different. Yes, they can be scary. Yes, you initially will be nervous using them. Guess what!? I have made money using them and you will too....HOW? You will get hired and get your paycheck!!

And here is the best part...he tells you exactly what to do. You aren't left guessing. So unless you are retired or planning on retiring this year, you need this book. Whether you are an introvert, extrovert, salesperson, engineer, manager, accountant, lawyer or just graduating from college, this publication is required reading.

Even though I was feeling a little intimidated by the title of book, I decided that after being unemployed for 14 months and not getting any results hiding behind the computer screen, I had nothing to loose. As an introvert I could continue banging my head against the wall or try something different for a change. I found that the most beneficial part of the book was the suggested warm approach for cold calling. Some of the ideas or concepts introduced are extreme, but so is the marketplace. We do have to step out of our comfort zones, if we really want to get to where we want to be. I have read literally everything I could get my hands on to revamp my job search strategy, but this book was the most beneficial.

I was an enthusiastic reader of the first edition of this book, "Guerilla Marketing for Job Hunters: 400 Unconventional Tips etc. for Job Hunters."

I was about halfway through that book, when I found out that the second edition, "Guerilla Marketing for Job Hunters 2.0: 1,001 Unconventional Tips, Tricks, and Tactics" was about to be released. I was very excited, stopped reading the first edition, and ordered the second edition. When it arrived, I threw out my copy of the first edition.

Frankly, I wish that I had kept the first edition and finished reading that one. OK, it was published in 2004, and much has happened since then -- a recession, and the development of many new online resources like Linkedin. But while the first edition was short, well-organized, and very focused on "doable" -- the second edition is not as well-organized and is much, much longer.

While the new edition has much of the excellent advice contained in the first edition, it has added-on so much technological goobledygook that even an admiring and computer-savvy reader like myself is left with a serious case of TMI (too much information).

We're paying co-authors Mr. Levinson and Mr. Perry for their expertise in narrowing down a clamoring field of job boards, technologies, and tactics to those which are most effective, a task they performed admirably in their first book.

In this second edition, virtually every job hunting technique -- including the kitchen sink -- is hurled at the reader. I'm at page 61 -- and have quickly flipped through the rest of the book -- and I'm starting to tune out as the co-authors breathlessly recommend: sign onto technology X! add widget Y to your desktop! read blog Z! you can't afford not be on network A! join the following 15 networks! -- and you must do tactic B! etc., etc., etc.

Each resource is presented as something indispensable, that a reader "must" do. The reader gets the feeling that if he or she doesn't sign up for all 1,001 resources and tactics, it is his/her own fault that they remain unemployed.

But we're paying the authors to pick the best resources and tactics, which they aren't doing.

Any reader who does even 10% of all these tactics will need to stay awake 24 hours per day to implement them. Now I expect that the co-authors are trying to give us the widest possible array of tactics and strategies to choose from. But people buy books like this to have wise, experienced authors recommmend the top four or five strategies in any niche, not, say, the top twenty-five.

And some parts of this book, unlike the first edition, are written in career counseling and business jargon psychobabble. Here's my favorite, from p. 16, "They [employers] are searching for a person . . . who can explode outward from an open-ended initiative-driven space." What the heck does that mean?

And some statements appear to be out of touch, despite the authors' repeated references to our current recession. My personal favorite on page 46: "Show an employer you have that spark and they will hire you over more experienced candidates any day!"

Uh -- no! Not during the current recession, where employers with 10 points on their job candidate wish list are insisting that candidates meet 10.5 of those points. It's disturbing to see statements that are out of touch, as they break the concentration needed to absorb the flood of otherwise good information in the book.

Another problem is that tactics and resources are recommended without any indication of which industries or job searches they might be most useful for. A job hunter could easily spend hours signing up for the hundreds of recommended resources, and only discover later that perhaps 5% of them are really useful for that person's particular job search. The book is indiscriminately enthusiastic over every single widget, blog, network and tactic.

In the next edition, the co-authors need to edit the book line by line to remove some of the hyperbole, out-of-touch comments, promiscuous resources recommendations, wittle down the recommended resources to a reasonable number, and categorize the resources according to the fields and careers they would be most useful for.

Also, it would be helpful to have a little more space devoted to interviewing and negotiating salaries and benefits, which are crammed into two short chapters at the end of the book. While I appreciate that so much of the book is devoted to finding job leads and securing interviews, it is very easy to "lose" a job during the interview(s) themselves or during salary negotiations.

Now, on the plus side, the book does contain a ton of innovative resources and ideas, which is why I will probably try to finish the book -- if I can get through such statements as (p. 64)"This is a must-have applet." Oh right -- just like the other nine applets, search engines, and other resources on pages 64-66 listed as being good for your "war room" (translation -- home job search office).

Bear in mind, all ten resources appear really, really good! but they're apples and oranges all thrown together in one basket. It would be helpful to have some categorization: This is your home office -- here are (1) phone apps; (2) seach engine apps; (3) etc.

Well, excuse me, I have to start reviewing my "must-have" "applets" -- only 267 more pages to go. I do plan to finish the book, but will likely not adopt more than one or two tactics from each chapter, as I need time to sleep and eat.

David Perry is a super-recruiter. I met him a few years ago and was quite impressed.

At the time, David asked me to write a review for the first edition of Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters. I didn't want to but eventually I read it - twice - and gave it a rave review.

Then I started recommending it to job hunters. Most people didn't read it, I'm sure. They wanted me to find them a job (I'm a headhunter). But one guy, Barry, got back to me and said, "I'm reading that book and what he says here about resumes is pretty ridiculous."

"Well," I said, "just ignore that part."

"But I don't agree with this and I don't agree with that either," he went on.

"Well," I said, "I don't agree with everything either. But look, for me, the guts of the book are the chapters on research. He tells you how to identify companies to target, how to find out about them and how to make contact. It's good solid material. Why don't you focus on that?"

He didn't. And he didn't find a job. And he's someone who could have used a few guerrilla techniques because he was a nice guy, a smart guy, athletic and well-educated but he was sixty years old.

In person, he could have passed for 45 but on paper he was over the hill. What's more, he'd run his own company for 20 years and had a few short stays at other jobs as he tried to re-establish himself as an employee.

That said, when I started reading the second edition of David's book I had, at first, much the same reaction as Barry did a few years before.

I wasn't reading it from front to back. I just opened it up anywhere and the first thing I found, on page 280, was a section called The Killer Question.

Here, Dave tells you to ask the interviewer what the competitors are doing that keeps his company up at night and then call those competitors to ask for an interview and use the information you gathered in your first interview to impress them.

According to Dave, there's nothing wrong with this. The interviewer isn't your pal and he's not doing you any favours. The meeting was just a fact-finding mission for both parties and no commitments were involved.

That might be so but I would have to give it some thought because, to be honest, I was shocked and appalled but because I knew the author, I re-opened the book and started reading again.

This time, on page 139, I found Dave advising job hunters to start a blog. My initial reaction to this was negative, as well.

Every career counselor advises her readers to start a blog and it seems to be a mindless reflex action because starting a blog is not a practical tactic for most people.

It takes a lot of time and many people are not good writers and most of the time no one is interested in what they have to say.

The example given by Dave was unfair I thought because his sample blogger was a law student who had a passionate interest in Mixed Martial Arts. This made him the owner of some very unique expertise and he rapidly became known as someone who could discuss contract disputes in the MMA world in a professional manner.

Still, I had to concede that blogs weren't entirely out of the question. I had urged Barry to start a blog many times. He wasn't working so he had the time to write and even if no one found him on Google when they searched "marketing communications" he would be able to use his blog to demonstrate his knowledge of his field to anyone who might be interested.

So, I pressed on.

Next I came to advice about email marketing campaigns. Dave advises you to create a list of 20 companies you want to work for and email it to everyone you know asking if they know anyone who works in any of these firms.

You also ask them to pass the email on to a number of other people they know. I'd never thought of this and if you do it well it might get some results. He calls it the email chain letter and it's on page 221.

The next thing that caught my eye was Dave's advice to use numerals rather than words to represent numbers in your resume (page 116).

I'd always made a point of writing out numbers as words because it looks more formal and dignified but I also know how important it is to make your resume easy to grasp at a glance so he pretty well sold me on that right away.

I had a mixed response, however, to the section on "Warm Calling". Dave's warm call is just a cold call with another name. Even so, if and when you do have an opportunity to speak to someone -- on the phone or in a face to face interview -- his tip to be ready to ask a series of short, diagnostic questions could help you identify a need you might be able to fill (page 206).

So what am I saying here? That when you read this book you're bound to find things you don't like. Just like Barry and just like me. But don't forget the advice I gave to Barry.

David Perry is a very successful recruiter. And his book has a solid core of vital information based on his personal experience researching companies and marketing candidates to them.

Every page is loaded with ideas and there's 300 pages.

There's information that can only be of interest to wild men like Dave himself, a true guerrilla (see his profile in the Wall Street Journal) but it also has a ton of stuff for people who aren't interested in anything too audacious and yet want to do something more than just sit back and comb through the want ads.

So you could toss half of the book in the garbage and it would still be a bargain.

In fact, one of your problems might be that it presents more information than the average person knows how to manage. When there's so many suggestions how do you know where to focus?

My advice is to start with start with chapter 4. It tells you how to find companies to approach. Then read chapter 8 on networking. It tells you how to identify and reach the people you want to speak to in the target firms.

As you read these chapters and the rest of the book, simply ignore the stuff that doesn't appeal to you and explore the stuff that turns you on.

I also encourage people to read David's Guerrilla Job Hunting blog. It has a comment section in which you can pose questions to a very smart and friendly guy.

And, finally, I have to wonder about something. If only the WSJ had published that profile of Dave seven years earlier, in September 2001, George Bush might have hired him to find Osama and history would have been very different. Here's a link to the article http://cli.gs/MzPbRZ).

I actually had sought out this book (which was reserved and couldn't be taken out of the library) after seeing David Perry speak at a job search group meeting. When I starting leafing through the book, I realized that there was too much information in this book for me to keep coming into the library to copy down a page or two for something to try in my job search. I needed a copy right by the computer to use to try some of the tools that I would read about. Although I was on LinkedIn and thought I was using many of the tools available, I found I was quite wrong. I found this book to be very inspirational in its approach, what I needed to get my act together and how to organize a proper job search strategy. There is advice, in the form of scripts, for many different situations when making contacts with potential employers. It is a metaphorical Swiss-Army knife for the job seeker, something that you should not be without.

If you're currently unemployed (or even if you're not and looking to find a new job) this book is an absolute MUST HAVE for you. You will learn numerous strategies for how to make your resume stand out among the rest that employers and recruiters get, how to leverage key points from your resume when talking to hiring managers to make a strong impression and get the job offer you deserve!

The book also delves into how to use social media (specifically LinkedIn) to make job offers come to you and how to find those key decision makers within your target companies who can pull the trigger on hiring you. Simply sending your resume won't do anymore, and these tips will make sure you get maximum exposure. If you create a Guerilla Resume as outlined in the book and follow the numerous strategies mentioned as well, your job search will take on a life of its own and the path to a great job will be clear. Also at the very end of the book is an offer for some additional free resources from the authors which are worth the price of the book alone. I recently completed an outplacement course paid for by my former employer and a lot of the tactics mentioned in their program were the same ones Jay and David cover in great detail in the book. Mind you, outplacement services tend to cost $2,500 to $5,000 per employee. You can get all that info for a mere fraction of that cost from this book....get it today...I promise it will be the best money you spend in your job search guaranteed!

The "Guerrilla Marketing... 2.0" is a very solid book, no question. Even though put together by a lot of authors, a common thread of a governing (editing) hand can be seen. The overall editing, nevertheless, did not fully eliminate:
- content repetition in different chapters, and
- typos (I've seen "entrée level job" instead of "entry level job". Seriously.)

But let's talk about bigger issues. The book has 14 chapters, and towards chapter 6 I began to feel a growing resentment to reading the rest because I realized that, although the content is good, the book itself is a shameless trick for the self-promotion of a group of recruiting industry professionals. Here's why:

PROBLEM 1. Too much sales emphasis.

I am going to use an advice delivered in Chapter 11 of this book on how to write cover letters (or book reviews, for that matter) in "Problem - Agitate- Solve" format. Here's how it works:
"Looking for a comprehensive job search plan? You've been out of the job during one of the worst recessions in the country, desperately trying to get your foot in the door of any employer. Thankfully, there's a ray of sunshine in the form of "Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters 2.0"..." - what does this intro look like to you? Right, that's a nicely put sales pitch.
That is exactly the advice you get throughout the book, and the advice is tried and true in terms of your own job search: YOU are the product, YOU must sell yourself, YOU are your own sales, marketing, and operations team.

But in laying out this very practical and common sense approach, the book is so heavily skewed towards sales, that sometimes you gotta do a double take when you see sentences like this one:
"...you should order fine stationery for your resumes and cover letters (I [the book author] order mine from [...])" (rephrased). The new form of "read between the lines advertising"? Hmmm...

PROBLEM 2. Sales trickery

I am definitely giving a lot of credit to the authors for putting it all together for the job seekers and teaching how to "sell oneself" in the job market. However, some of the self-selling techniques offered in the book are outright trickery (e.g. how to get through to an executive on the phone) that won't do much if there is no substance (e.g. employee experience) to sell. This brings us to the next point.

PROBLEM 3. This book is NOT for every job seeker. It is for those who can pay.

What the author should have told the reader upfront is that the book is written not for an ordinary job seeker. Nor is it written by an ordinary recruiting industry veteran. This book is shining with subtle and not-so-subtle examples of writing by an author who spent a good chunk of his career doing 100K+ executive searches. That definitely skews the perspective of how you see the job seekers' goals. Sure, there are good stories to tell about VPs quickly finding jobs, but what if you are in the shoes of a laid off non-managerial level employee, or one with little experience and little but realistic life expectations?

PROBLEM 4. When 2.0 is not Web 2.0

If you are a web-savvy job seeker who has no trouble following the advice of this book on what to do advertising/networking/selling yourself online, you will do just fine. However, I have personally checked EVERY SINGLE URL that this book contains and discovered that:
- a few of the referenced web resources no longer exist (a very minor number, thankfully) due to no fault of the authors;
- most web sites belong to the authors' industry peers who are so eager to sell you their own services that they have placed the "buy Guerrilla Marketing ...2.0" link at least in one place of their own web site;
- some of the suggested advanced Google queries don't work.

Again, a bow to the authors for putting it all together and emphasizing time and again the importance of sales and marketing in the job search. Nevertheless, this book is out there to make money for the authors, and although they are trying to be subtle about it, it comes through loud and clear.

From the moment you open this book to well after you've read it and visited their website, it's SELL, SELL and oh yes, more SELLING. All in all, there are some very crafty ideas in this book -- some of which are potentially unethical, depending on where you draw your personal line. Nonetheless, Levinson & Perry do a good job of flipping the coin to expose the other side of the recruiters' tips & tricks and some of the things you can do to hook HR and hiring managers. To see some of the other side, Google "Don't Hire a Liar" and look for the PDF file that Perry wrote on exposing job candidate liars -- another crafty, occasionally questionably ethical piece. The real distraction, however, is the seemingly endless selling the reader has to endure from the authors and a plethora of their cohorts. Hint: take a look at the back cover. One gets a strong sense that 20-30 different companies paid Levinson & Perry ad placement fees. I don't recall ever reading that much spam in a book before. Even the Guerrilla Intelligence stories strewn throughout the book smack of self-promotion. I didn't intend to buy an infomercial. So why did I give it 4 stars? If you're able to filter out most of the promotional pieces, turn on your email spam filter, and focus on the most important selling -- of yourself -- I think that you'll get a lot out of this book.

I just finished up Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters 2.0 and I thought it was a terrific read. Full of insightful thoughts and ideas. Sure, some are common sense and some I had already thought about. But what I did take away from the book was that it convinced me I was approaching my job search in a positive direction and it provided me with an arsenal of new ideas too.

Networking is such a useful and yet under used tool. David Perry is spot on with his review of Linkedin being such a powerful way to reach out to people but into companies (pages 187 - 193). I gained an interview with a company because I knew a lot of people who knew the person I was meeting with. He simply had to see me! David Perry and I are also now connected via Linkedin.

I also thought his chapter on "Creative Ways To Find A Job (Chapter #10) was intriguing. One really stood out; I should send a letter to potential employers stating I am overqualified for the job - all the more reason that we should meet; an interesting and unique approach to a very real problem.

I borrowed a copy from my library but I will be buying one (from Amazon.com) so I can highlight those items that caught my attention.

I want to first preface my review by stating I am not getting paid to review this book, and I rarely review anything on Amazon. That being said I have been in the recruiting industry for 11 years, and am used to giving out job hunting advice. Due to the economy I was out of work for 6 months, and trying utilize "old school" methods of obtaining a job. (Job boards, calling on friends etc)

The months went by, and I needed an effective and strategic way of job hunting. I picked up this book after reading an interview with David Perry on a whim, and read it cover to cover. It is not for the faint of heart, and will require you to put a little elbow grease in the game, but the tools and suggestions are very effective. I bought the book, read it, traded a few emails with the author and landed a position less then two weeks away. I can gladly show the receipt of the book, compared to my actual start date if you need proof. Though I did not use all of the tools and suggestions in the book, the ones I did try were effective, impressive and set me apart from the pack.

I highly recommend this book for any job hunter looking to be noticeable, any salesperson looking to break into new accounts, any recruiter looking for unique ways to attract talent. Most of the suggestions can be used in a similar fashion in other areas besides looking for a job.