Instant Interviews: 101 Ways to Get the Best Job of Your Life

Chapter 21. Mining the Yellow Pages

Those Yellow Pages are instant interview gold mines! Any phone is your probe.

As with gold mining, you have to be intuitive and persistent. I was tested on the use of Yellow Pages very early when I was touring for How to Turn an Interview into a Job. TV talk show hosts would invite me on for the first segment, then challenge me to get some really frumpy audience member a job at the bottom of the hour.

It was really no big deal. I'd just take the person backstage, do an instant interview role-play as though I was the offeror, find a phone and YP, then start smiling and dialing with the YP. Then by the time the show was ready to sign off, we'd have an interview or two arranged.

This may sound low-tech, but some form of book has been around ever since man has drawn pictures. The phone's been around a while, too. So has the ballpoint pen.

You can surf, click, and e-mail on the tube for a day and not get the results you can get in a few minutes by looking, calling, and writing in the margins of a YP.

Where else can you instantly find such a diverse list of offerors willing to tell you what they do (and how they can use you)?

There are specific mines and ways to mine them.

This is how it works:

Know the Differences in Yellow Pages

There are major differences in the type of advertisers and reach of these books. If you don't see the words Yellow and Pages following one another, you probably don't have the original AT&T version ("The real Yellow Pages").

The others ...