Tech is shook. Entry-level jobs are basically dead. And big companies have canned more than 61,000 techies this year, according to Layoffs.fyi.
Against this grim backdrop, one former Google contractor has flipped the script on the robots, zagging with a DIY approach to the AI revolution. Enter the “please hire me” flyer, with a twist: He’ll pay $2,000 if you, a human being, get him hired.
San Francisco’s lampposts (and even robotaxis) are often adorned with jokes or pleas for love. But Philipp Roessler, at his wits’ end after 10 jobless months, decided this week to plaster his face across downtown BART stations in the hopes of securing employment.
“There was one position I applied for, a senior marketing role, and there were, I think, 2,800 applicants,” Roessler said. “You’re just shooting your résumé into a black hole, into the abyss. And I’m like, ‘This is not going anywhere.’”
Roessler, who was laid off from a contract job at Google in July, said he has applied for dozens of positions and received scores of internal referrals from his network — to no avail. Originally from the Bavaria region of Germany, he’s a marketer with 12 years of experience who has worked for the world’s biggest tech companies. Recruiters are banging down his door, yet he couldn’t land a job. Something had to change.
“I was like, why should I not treat myself, in this case, as the product?” Roessler, 41, said. “Let’s apply the same rules I know from corporate marketing to advertise myself. I’m the brand here.”
In addition to generating conversation, the strategy was designed to make him stand out from candidates submitting AI-generated cover letters. Some candidates are entirely fabricated, he’d read, and some job listings aren’t real either. Making paper flyers was his attempt to distinguish himself from the sea of ChatGPT slop.
“To show that I’m very serious about my job search, to give it a human element, and to show that I have grit, perseverance, that I’m very dedicated and I respect the hustle culture, I was like, let’s get up at 6 a.m. on a Monday morning and go to where my audience is,” said Roessler, who also runs a small consulting firm.
He pasted posters at every BART stop between the Embarcadero and the Mission’s 24th Street, hoping his plea would tickle a transit-loving executive with a marketing opening.
“If this proves successful, I’m gonna do the same next weekend with Muni,” Roessler said.
Not everybody is stoked on the flyers. It was uploaded to Reddit, where anonymous San Franciscans lampooned its sincerity and graphic design style.
“This is a terribly designed flyer for someone in marketing,” one poster wrote.
Some wondered whether the flyer was performance art — or a phishing scam. (It is neither. The QR code leads to Roessler’s LinkedIn page.) Roessler saw the comments but quickly stopped reading, deciding the criticism wasn’t helping him.
“It’s easy to hide behind an anonymous profile,” he said. And besides, the flyer appears to be working — he got a bite this week from a major tech company.
The person there said he’d been unemployed for 15 months before landing his job and empathized — so much so, in Roessler’s telling, that he was willing to forgo the bounty.
“He said, ‘Yes, I’m going to refer you, but I’m not interested in the referral bonus,’” Roessler said.