You’ve probably heard on Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation sharing platform that lets people find cheap accommodation facilities when they travel. Now, one person was particularly interested in working for the company. Nina Mufleh knew that there are hundreds, maybe thousands that also want to work for the company. So Nina thought ‘ how can i be outstanding?’.  Nina Mufleh decided to create a website to showcase her skills nina4airbnb.com. What made her resume interesting is that it did not focus on her past experience, which could easily be found on LinkedIn or her resume, she focused on what she knows about the travel industry, what Airbnb should be focusing on and what she could bring to the company. Here is a screenshot of the website she created.

 Her effort managed to get her an interview with Airbnb and even the co-founder of Airbnb was impressed by her creativity in job application.

Despite all this she actually did not get the job. Quite upsetting but nothing is really a guarantee despite your best efforts. However, her campaign  went viral on the internet garnering over 450,000 hits. She failed but she succeeded in another way. This is because she made a big impression and other companies were interested in talking to her. She ended up at Upwork and got interviews from many other corporations that were impressed by her job application process. She later wrote on her blog about the experiences  here. Check out her blog. She says of how she learnt to deal with rejection and forge her next move. My particular interest in this story is about the creativity being used in job applications. What Nina did showed a new dimension in job application process and I am pretty sure the trend is most likely being reciprocated maybe in a different manner. Particularly Nina focused on what she thinks the company should be focusing on based on her own overview. That to me is futuristic nature of looking at things. Resumes show your past experiences which is good and everyone can see that. But how about what you think about the future. I think that aspect is continuously becoming the focus on many companies in the current times. And creativity in showing that you have knowledge about a certain area of a company’s operations is not bad at all to get you ahead of the pack. I am no career adviser but it’s just an observation and I can bet we are bound to see more of such. Nina may not have succeeded in her initial quest but I think she opened up new ways about the innovativeness in recruiting.  Currently, there are a lot of handles in landing a dream job. The bureaucratic nature of job applications ensures that the process is fully in the hands of corporations.  What Nina did is that she aimed to make a big impression and not just through the normal job application process. She had tried other means like sending hundreds of cvs with little success. However I also believe this largely depends on the type of job. I don’t think the job application process for a high court judge is the same as one for marketing executive or a designer. Many other people are adopting other creative ways of showing their innovativeness during the job application process. Have a look at these ones.

how about a milk cv

Facing some problem in your creative department? How about some pills to ease your creative pain.

I found these here, you can check out more of them. Omondi Abudho was a Kenyan designer, photographer and advertising art director who designed a cv that folded into a box and enabled him to get a job at Scanad Nairobi. His innovative CV design was voted as one of the best creative resumes in 2009 and featured in many articles such as Huffington post and Business Insider.

source: Business Insider.

There are many more but finally Novoresume showed that resumes can be compressed into one page despite many accomplishments. They tried it with Elon Musk.

All in all, depending on your field, I think there is room for new ways in ensuring your job application process is unique and refreshing. In the case of Nina, she said that she had been doing the same thing in job application but did not get the results she wanted. Then she did something completely out of the norm, and she got something completely different. What do you think?