By Simon Houpt

From The Globe and Mail, Saturday, August 28, 2010

One Toronto woman's unorthodox approach to landing a job garners much interest

If necessity is the mother of invention, sometimes it also gives birth to sheer chutzpah.

Late last year, Nicole McPhail left her job with a small Waterloo member services organization and lit out for Toronto, where she'd been offered a business development role with a small communications firm. But when she and the firm went separate ways after only three months, she smacked into the realities of the current job market. For the following seven months, she filled out online applications, worked the phones, networked with members of her pick-up hockey team, and sent out more than 140 resumes. The net result? Not a single interview.

And then, late last week, she and her boyfriend were driving through downtown Toronto when they saw a panhandler with a sign that was so witty she felt compelled to give the fellow some money. "I said, 'I wonder what it would be like if I tried that on Bay Street,'" she recalled on Friday afternoon. "We started talking, and I said, 'I'm gonna do that!'"

Which is how it came to be that Ms. McPhail, a chipper 26 year-old with an eye to a job in communications, found herself at the southeast corner of King and Bay streets during lunchtime on Tuesday, clutching an almost self-consciously rudimentary Sharpie-on-cardboard sign that read: "Can you spare me a job interview... inquire within. Thanks!" Standing there for about 90 minutes, she handed out about 15 resumes, scored a score of business cards from executives at firms located in the tall towers surrounding her, and landed three interviews for the following day.

She was back at it around noon on Thursday, though her sales session was abbreviated after an hour when a security guard pressed her to move along. And Friday produced similarly sunny results: a steady stream of business cards, thumbs-up from passersby, and a fully depleted stock of resumes. "People are exceeding my expectations," she said with a smile around 1 o'clock, as the lunch crowd surged around her. "My mission is, I will have a job by Aug. 31st. That's going to happen."

One research analyst at a nearby brokerage said people send resumes to his firm all the time without any response, but he and his buddy felt compelled to stop, chat with Ms. McPhail for a few minutes, and take a copy of her resume back to the office. "It's unorthodox," he acknowledged, "but you've got to pay attention to new forms."

For Parvez Tehrani, something about Ms. McPhail's story hit home. A few years ago, he moved from Bangalore to Toronto and had trouble segueing from a successful career in computer consulting to the banking industry, where he wanted to be. But after working for a year as a teller and completing an MBA at the Rotman School, he landed a job at one of the big Canadian banks.

"It's difficult to change careers," he explained, adding that he'd asked Ms. McPhail to forward her resume. (She'd run out of copies by this point.) "I would definitely go out of my way to help somebody like that, who has the guts to stand over there with a sign. I'm very impressed."