Sorry about the gravy
Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes
Career Story | Standing out without losing yourself Image by Evelina Wong | Unsplash
Last week I explored what happens when AI makes polished job applications easier to produce. This week, a story about gravy, and why the person behind the application still matters.
There was already coffee on her resume.
Not deliberately.
We were reviewing a printed draft before she applied for a job she was interested in.
She'd been applying for plenty of jobs but wasn't getting the interviews she'd hoped for. We'd been talking about how difficult it could be to stand out when your application was one of many.
Then coffee ended up on the resume.
I can't remember which one of us said it.
“Well, at least it stands out now.”
We laughed.
At the time, it was just a joke.
It didn't stay that way.
What were people missing?
As we talked about her work, I became curious about something.
She'd worked in hospitality and other customer-facing roles, and when she talked about the people she'd worked with, a pattern started to emerge.
Her workmates liked her sense of fun.
Customers responded to it too.
She had a cheeky sense of humour and seemed to have a natural way of bringing some personality into her interactions with people.
It wasn't something she'd thought of as a particular strength.
Why would she?
It was just her being her.
But that's often where I become interested.
Sometimes the things we do naturally are the things we're least likely to recognise as valuable.
I call them our ordinary superpowers.
Not because they're extraordinary talents.
Quite the opposite.
They're often so ordinary to us that we barely notice them.
But other people do.
The problem was that the person her customers and workmates experienced wasn't particularly visible on the page in front of us.
Her resume could tell an employer where she'd worked.
It could describe her responsibilities.
It could show her experience.
But could it show them what it might actually be like to have her serving their customers?
Not really.
Then she told me about a place she loved
There was a local club she was interested in working for.
She knew it as a customer.
And she genuinely liked the place.
The atmosphere.
The food.
And apparently their weekly steak special was particularly good.
We'd already been talking about doing something fairly conventional.
She'd submit her application through the expected process.
But rather than simply pressing send and waiting, she could also follow up.
Print a copy.
Take it in.
See if there was an appropriate opportunity to introduce herself to the manager on duty.
At the very least, perhaps her application could become connected to an actual person.
Nothing particularly radical about that.
Then I remembered the coffee stain.
And our joke about standing out.
And the steak special.
I looked at her.
“Are you up for something a bit radical?”
She was.
In fact, the whole conversation seemed to lift.
What had started as a slightly absurd idea gave her something different to try after plenty of applications hadn't been cutting through.
Her attitude was pretty simple: why not?
Enter the gravy
We printed a fresh copy of her resume and a new cover letter.
By now, she was well and truly in on the idea.
She suggested taking it home, adding the gravy there and delivering it the next day.
So that's what she did.
A little gravy across the top of the cover letter.
Left overnight to dry.
The next day, the cover letter was stapled to her two-page resume, with a sticky note along the lines of:
“Sorry about the gravy. I was checking my application while enjoying your steak special...”
The coffee stain had been an accident.
The gravy definitely wasn't.
She still needed to submit her application through the normal process.
This wasn't about trying to avoid that.
The plan was to support the application with something else.
A follow-up.
A human interaction.
And perhaps something that might make the person receiving it curious enough to remember her.
So she took the hard copy in herself.
And asked for the manager on duty.
It could have gone horribly wrong
I should probably acknowledge that.
They could have looked at the gravy-covered application and wondered what on earth she was doing.
The manager might not have found it funny.
It might have been completely misjudged.
That's why I'm not suggesting you put gravy on your next cover letter.
Please don't.
The point wasn't the gravy.
It was everything we'd discovered before we got anywhere near it.
She genuinely knew the venue.
She genuinely liked it.
The steak special meant something because she'd actually eaten there.
The humour fitted her.
And when I asked whether she was comfortable trying something a little unusual, she chose to do it.
It wasn't something we'd copied from a list of “10 creative ways to get your resume noticed”.
It came from her.
From the employer.
And from the conversation we'd been having about the gap between the person people experienced at work and the person an employer could see on paper.
The gravy wasn't the strategy. She was.
And it got noticed
She got an interview.
And yes, they mentioned the gravy.
They'd noticed it.
They'd laughed.
That's where I'm going to leave the outcome of this story.
It happened a few years ago, and although I have a memory of hearing more afterwards, I'm not certain enough of the details to turn them into part of the story now.
And actually, I don't think we need them.
Because I don't know whether the gravy helped her get a job.
I know it helped her get noticed.
And more importantly, it gave the employer an opportunity to meet the person behind the application.
Standing out isn't the same as making noise
There's plenty of advice telling jobseekers they need to stand out.
I think that's only half the story.
You can stand out for all the wrong reasons.
Being louder isn't necessarily better.
Neither is being quirky for the sake of it.
The question I'm more interested in is:
How can I help the right employer see something real about me that might matter to them?
For this particular person, in this particular situation, the answer happened to involve gravy.
For somebody else, it might be completely different.
A thoughtful follow-up.
A conversation.
A recommendation from someone who knows your work.
A story that demonstrates how you actually operate.
Something you've created.
Evidence of a problem you've solved.
Or simply showing that you've taken the time to understand an organisation rather than sending another generic application.
That's why I don't think there's a formula for standing out.
There shouldn't be.
The moment everybody follows the same formula, we're back to looking the same again.
What doesn't your resume tell me?
I've been thinking about this story again because of something I wrote recently about AI and recruitment.
As it becomes easier for all of us to produce polished applications, I'm increasingly interested in what allows the actual person to remain visible.
This gravy-covered cover letter happened before the current explosion of generative AI.
But the question feels even more relevant now.
A resume can tell me quite a lot about you.
AI can help you make it clearer.
It can help you recognise transferable skills, improve the language and tailor what you've written to a particular role.
But there will always be things that are difficult to capture on a page.
The colleague people go to when things get messy.
The person who can make a nervous customer relax.
The one who notices when somebody needs help.
The person who can explain something without making somebody else feel silly.
Or, in this case, someone whose sense of fun and cheeky humour was part of what her workmates enjoyed about working with her, and what her customers enjoyed about being served by her.
Those are the moments I want to hear about.
The little stories people often dismiss because they were “just doing their job”.
I call them story-worthy moments.
Because sometimes they give us evidence of something the job title never could.
The gravy got their attention.
But the gravy wasn't what they interviewed.
They interviewed her.
And perhaps that's the part worth taking from this story.
Not:
“How can I make my next application more outrageous?”
But:
A question to consider
What is there about working with you that somebody reading your resume would never know?
This is a real client story from a few years ago. Some identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect the client's privacy.