Sent: Fri 03/28/2008 5:13 PM
Thanks for doing the write-up about my online artistic nudes business [“Naked Hunch,” Mar/Apr 2008]. It’s given me a great source for pointing people towards when they ask the “oh, what do you do?” question. I even had my grandma in Ottawa pick one up.
For years after I started the business, I never told her what I was doing and she worried that I wasn’t doing anything with my life. When she finally found out, she was actually relieved.
I was just informed by my aunt, however, that grandma thought the article must have edited a lot of what I said because she didn’t think most of it was true. She did love the opening picture but thought that the woman behind me took away from it. “She’s a funny lady,” my aunt said. “She’ll probably cut out the pictures of you and trim out the ladies.” Funny, those grandmas.
Sean Devine
Edmonton
Sent: Fri 03/28/2008 4:13 PM
It was great reading through unlimited issue No. 3 [Jan/Feb 2008, The Transformation Issue]. Congratulations on creating a great, distinctive new magazine.
I do have a comment, though, about your style section. As someone who interviews people for a living, I’m not sure that you fully understand the impact that your advice can have on a potential job seeker. For all of your arguments and biases that ripped jeans are fine for a corporate environment or that wearing a suit lumps you into the land of faceless drones, the simple fact is that to succeed in many areas of professional life it’s extremely important to project a professional, polished image.
As recruiters, if a job seeker was to come to us to interview for a sales, management or executive role wearing ripped jeans and a spray-painted suit jacket, the natural tendency would be to assume that they’d only be a fit for an extremely casual environment. We know that no matter how capable their skills were, they’d have a huge set of assumptions to overcome with a hiring manager before an interview was barely started.
By contrast, there was once a member of my Rotary club who was probably 22 at the time. This was a young entrepreneur who was always wearing a well-cut suit and tie in professional settings. The result was that everyone consistently guessed him to be older – and probably even more successful – than he actually was.
So I’d be aware of what kind of information you give to readers – because despite isolated exceptions, the fact is that first impressions still mean a lot in the business world.
Rick Harcourt
Harcourt Recruiting Specialists
Edmonton
Sent: Sat 03/22/2008
Flipping through the pages of unlimited is almost enough to make you forget that the good people of Alberta have elected something like 10 consecutive Progressive Conservative (sic) governments.
James Adams
“On The Stand”
Globe and Mail
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