How To Get A Bad Job That You Really Need

Here’s advice on how to get jobs for which you may be wildly overqualified in case you have a useless college degree-jobs as diverse as running salad bars and stamping envelopes. The watchword is: Dress For the Job You Need, Not the Job You Totally Don’t Have Right Now and Oh Man You Are So Screwed. Also don’t tell them that you’ve had good jobs, in case you ever actually have. Pretend you’ve been at home taking care of some kids, in case you haven’t been.

• “When you’re applying for a crap job you’re only planning on holding long enough to make progress on paying off debt, you don’t give them a complete resume, just your high school graduation and any other filler jobs you might have had.”

• “Don’t dress up like you’d dress up for a professional interview: go for business-casual and avoid wearing higher-end brands. You don’t want to tell any overt lies, but you don’t want to set off any socioeconomic-indicator alarm bells that might lead the hiring manager to suspect sneakiness on your part. Be good at being sneaky. (I worked minimum-wage and low-wage jobs in college, due to not getting a work-study award (despite needing one) and therefore being ineligible for a lot of the on-campus jobs. Whenever I listed my student status, I would never get called in for an interview. When I didn’t list my student status on my application, I would get called in for an interview about half the time. I would wear a pair of khakis and a polo shirt I got at the local Target, and I would usually get hired.)”