On one side, I have to hand it to Karly Pavlinac Blackburn for her brilliance, innovation, and originality in her job search. On the OTHER hand, I am particularly angry that I didn’t think of it first.
Recently, the 27-year-old went viral for a LinkedIn post about her recent job application experience and the teamwork that went into it.
As Blackburn explained, with her mind set on a job at Nike, she decided to make a bold choice. A friend suggested that instead of submitting a job application the traditional way, she print her resume on top of a cake and send it to the Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. After some research, she decided to send the cake on the day she knew a party would be at the headquarters.
Blackburn, who lives in North Carolina, placed an order at Albertsons Grocery Store through Instacart. By good fortune, Denise Baldwin — a like-minded Instacart delivery driver — was the icing on top of the cake that her master plan needed.
“I knew navigating Nike’s large campus was a feat, but combining a giant party with tons of people on top of that adds another layer of complexity to this delivery,” Blackburn explained in her post on LinkedIn, which has raked in thousands of comments.
“I talked to Denise on the phone, and she said to me, ‘Karly, I know this is important to you, and I will do whatever IT takes to get this cake to where it needs to be,’” Blackburn wrote.
Speaking with TODAY, Ms. Blackburn explained how Ms. Baldwin (the driver) resolved to get the cake into the right hands, despite being asked to just leave the cake on a front desk. She made her way through Nike Headquarter’s 300-acre property with the sheet cake in hand.
She only had the name of the person Blackburn needed the delivery to reach, but neither knew the person’s exact location. According to Complex, the campus has over 75 buildings. Baldwin even enlisted the help of Security to assist with her mission of locating the executive’s office. After a bit of walking and searching, she got to the right office and found the person Blackburn was hoping to connect with.
She indicated her purpose to hand deliver the cake, and the very person Blackburn had hoped to see her resume and stand out among the presumed pile of candidates, now held the custom made cake in his hands. Mission accomplished. Even getting the executive to pose for a photo with the cake as her “proof of delivery”.
And now it was time to wait. Did the executive think Blackburn to be unique, innovative, most of all did he “read through the frosting” and think her a proper match for the company, based on that resume? Or did he think her to be too aggressive, a waste of valuable time for what seemed like a prank or publicity stunt? Would he be disturbed or even angry that her hired delivery person had been defiant to company rules and procedures, refusing to just leave the cake and instead choosing to interrupt one of the Higher Ups? This was NIKE after all. Known throughout the world, the Brand owns 1032 stores across the globe (as of July 2023) and in 2023 made $33.14 billion on footwear, another $15.57 billion in apparel and equipment, and $58 million dollars from their Global Brand Divisions.
And as of May 2023, NIKE employed 83, 700 people. Eighty three thousand and seven hundred. Think about that.
So, did NIKE call?
“I have a few meetings next week, so that’s exciting,” Blackburn explained. “Now that this has happened, there are a bunch of companies that are kind of involved in the process, so I’m just trying to figure out where I fit in, what’s the right fit…”
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