Blueink Review
This review was originally published on Blueinkreview.com.
Annie Margarita Yang purports to offer job-seeking advice in this book that offers more personal information than professional.
Yang writes that when she was in her early 20s, she applied for accounting jobs in Boston and received three job offers within five days “without any conventional qualifications or experience” or a single accounting class. But instead of focusing solely on her job-seeking skills, Yang uses much of her book to write about her own life.
Readers learn about her bad relationships: one boyfriend was arrested, another talked her into being a “foot fetish model,” a job where she earned $120 for 30 minutes of letting men lick her feet. She frequently mentions “co-workers who were jealous and passive aggressive” since she “was so good at what I did,” and reveals that “voices in my head” told her to write this book.
The title is misleading, because while Yang discloses that readers, too, can land a new job in five days—she notes that they must first commit to building “a stellar reputation over the next five years.” She cites, by name and website, those who helped her build her own reputation, from her job coach and typeface designer to her makeup artist and dentist.
She provides some sound advice here and there, such as using the same username and URL “across the internet.” But instead of including all her suggestions in her book, she urges readers to click on links to her website. Unfortunately, those links lead to a “The website is not available” dead end.
Yang makes a case that traditional job search books don’t appeal to Millennials. The career shortcuts she recommends — e.g., tell a potential employer “I have many job options,” even if you don’t have any offers because “that’s the truth…you always have choices in life” — may resonate with younger cohorts, as might her over-sharing.
Nonetheless, there are many other job search books likely to prove more useful than this one.
