Is This What It Takes to Get a Job These Days?

"British graduate scores in sandwich-board job hunt" Reuters

Every other week now it seems that I turn on CNN, Headline News, or CNBC and find a story about some, "creative", "industrious", "go-getter", who straps a board to him/her-self advertising his or her desire to find employment, and I become awash with a creeping sense of doom.

It takes a person who is completely bereft of ego to walk up and down the street prostrating himself before the masses in order to give executives (and/or glomers-on seeking to derive a marketing benefit for their company) the opportunity to discover your tenacity, so that they may offer you a job.
However, homeless people, and pan-handlers have been doing this since Lucy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(Australopithecus), and it does not seem to have done much for most of them. I recall years ago seeing footage of people holding up signs saying, "Will work for Food" during the Great Depression. Is this what it takes to get a job these days? I hope not! However, I suspect that we are in for another several months of hurt my friends.

Like many of you I subscribe to a myriad of job sites, which tell me when jobs fitting my criteria are available, and occasionally, I receive a notice about a career fair in my area. Usually, I peruse the list of companies and come to the same conclusion that I don't want to join the Army, the Navy or the CIA and I forward the notice to my spam folder. Recently though, I decided that I should take a close look, and perhaps attend. To my dismay, I soon discovered that the notice, which was about three days old, linked me to a career fair in Chicago, IL that was BOOKED SOLID! Worse, it was not at a hotel, where one could expect capacity to be rather limited. Nor was the event scheduled to take place at a more adequately equipped convention center. It was to be held at Soldiers Field. Huh?... Rut Roh! How could soldiers' field be booked to capacity with jobseekers??? Yikes!
At the beginning of this recession I had heard that 20,000 people had showed up in Manhattan--forming a line that extended over a dozen city blocks--in order to attend a day-long first-come-first-served career fair that only had boasted, "dozens of employers". Since then, there have been several such occurrences, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezxJAs0TI54



Now, I'm not encouraging people to give up. I'm just saying that you might want to pre-register and show-up REALLY early if you don't want to wait in line all day at one of these career fairs. Make sure that your resume is (positively) impressive; where your best duds; make sure that the coiffure is perfect; and for gosh sakes get some professional associates to do mock interviews with you before you bother to show up to one of these things! (A nervous, bungling candidate will get nothing from a job fair.)
Will you have to attend a grueling career fair, or don a sign in order to get employment in 2009? I honestly don't know. So, you tell me, what you did to get your last job? Or, what are doing now to get the job that you desire?