What's keeping you from applying to your dream job? Are you afraid you're not qualified, or that you won't stand out from the other candidates?
Recent graduate Miruna Nitu, 24, felt the same way about landing her dream job in tech at ASOS, a U.K.-based fashion retailer. But she found a creative way to chase the website gig by trying something huge. Like, really huge.
She put her resume on a billboard outside the ASOS office.
Miruna Nitu in front of a billboard with her resume.Miruna Nitu
Nitu recently graduated after studying neuroscience and artificial intelligence, and she really wanted to land a tech job at ASOS because she admired the company.
"I remember telling my mom one day, 'Mom, what if I actually dream big? What if I dream big and apply to a big company,'" said Nitu in an interview with Narcity.
She and a friend put up the billboard, then camped outside the ASOS office for a while and simply watched people read her resume.
"We just wished ASOS would send back an email," she said. "We were just sitting there with a coffee and watching people's reactions [to the billboard], but never actually expected that someone would come to us."
Someone did come to them. An ASOS employee invited Nitu inside for a tour and what turned out to be an unconventional job interview.
"I didn't actually realize that was my interview with them. I was there for three or four hours and meeting the very important people from the tech team," she said.
Nitu joked that she didn't have her resume printed out, so she was showing the interviewees a copy on her phone.
The tour eventually wrapped up, Nitu went home and she didn't hear from them the next day. Or the next.
Then the phone rang.
"I was — oh my God — so nervous!" she said. "[The recruiter] started talking about how everybody was talking about my billboard thing, like the whole ASOS building was talking about me. They were so impressed because at that moment, I didn't realize that those were ASOS' values. Be authentic, being bold, being creative. It was just me."
Nitu recently started her dream job at ASOS and she hopes her success will inspire others to take a similar leap. Her story about the whole thing has generated a ton of positivity on LinkedIn, and she still can't quite believe it.
"If you don't take the risk, you don't have the chance to win," she said.
"Take the risk and be yourself [...] and don't be afraid of what other people can say."