Make Money In Hot Rodding - Hot Rod Your Resume

There's never a good time to have a crappy job. Why pursue a career in catering if what you'd rather be doing is cooking up engines? Why work as a forensics technician when the only chalk lines that interest you are the ones on the garage floor laying out a new lakester? What's the point of going to law school when in your heart of hearts you know you'd rather be fabricating race cars than alibis? If you're a hot rodder, then your job ought to be hot rodding.

The hard part in establishing a hot rod-ding career is busting through and getting a job in the racket. Go to the SEMA or PRI shows and the business of high performance can seem huge and daunting. But it's really a small, insular world made up of a few big players, hundreds of small companies, and thousands of individual shops. Some of them spend their days churning out awesomely powerful engines. Others are always in the midst of building another AMBR contender. And, yeah, some of them are hellholes built to rip off customers and exploit their employees.

But you'll never work at any of them if your resume doesn't get you through their doors. Hit Google with the word resume and in less than a second you'll call up dozens of sites telling you how to format your own. You know, center your name at the top of the page, make sure the margins are so big, include this information, and be brief, focused, and compelling. There are services that will put your resume together for you and even generate a cover letter. Follow all that and you'll wind up with two pages of generic garbage-a resume that looks like everyone else's and is as easily discarded as anyone else's.

Chris Jensen recently opened Hot Rod Depot in Santa Maria, California. "You wouldn't believe the number of people coming in looking for work," Chris told us just three weeks after his new shop had opened. "A local newspaper article got us a lot of attention." Troy Ladd at Hollywood Hot Rods in Burbank, California, says he typically gets two to five résumés a week.

When even a small start-up like Chris' is inundated with pieces of paper, pieces of paper aren't likely to get a lot of attention. And Troy's too busy with actual work to spend time searching through piles of unsolicited pleas for work.

Yes, you need a neatly typed resume that lays out your steady work history and explains your intensive training, but that's just a supporting document. You need something far from generic: a hot rod resume-not something that rises to the top of the pile, but a compelling job-seeking presentation that never gets thrown on the pile in the first place. You need a presentation that doesn't just tell a shop you can solve its personnel problem, but one that proves you can solve the problem.

Know Your Goal
If you can't be honest with yourself, with whom can you be honest? You know your talents, training, aptitudes, and deficits better than anyone. Now you have to ruthlessly assess which of those are best applied to the hot rodding world. If you want to assemble engines, don't waste your time with body shops. If racing is your passion, aim for a race team, not a rod shop. And if you're a drag racer, don't beg NASCAR teams for a job.

"I don't care to hire people who are shopping the industry and don't know what they want to do," says Greg Anderson, whose Summit-sponsored NHRA Pro Stock team runs out of Mooreseville, North Carolina, amid dozens of NASCAR teams. "I want someone who wants to make this a career."

Decide on your career path and then focus on it-relentlessly.

Apply yourself
If you know someone-anyone-who works in a job anywhere close to what you want to do, call that person. No matter how awkward it may be reminding him or her who you are, there's still no better way to get a job than through informal networking. The best jobs, after all, show up on the rumor mill long before they hit Craigslist.

If you don't know anyone, then get to know them. Networking can start with something as simple as a fan letter (not a job inquiry-just a fan letter from a genuine fan) to a race team. Maybe Jimmie Johnson won't personally answer your email, but dig deeper into the Hendrick Motorsports website and you're likely to find someone who will. Just start the conversation-ask them about what they do and how they got their job. Get to know them.

Research, Research, Research
"I hate it, hate it, hate it when I get a Resume that's addressed to 'Whom it may concern' or 'Shop manager,'" Troy complains. "Google it! Do a little homework. You don't respect me or my company."

You're unemployed, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be working. You have plenty of time to do research. By the time you've read through magazine articles, newspaper articles, and every mention on the Internet, you should have a good lead on what your prospective employers do. Then simply ask yourself what it is that they likely need. Fabricators? Mechanics? Assemblers? Marketing guys? If you can't realistically help them, don't waste your time. If you think you can, be ready to explain that as specifically as possible.

The Internet is a good start for any research project. In fact, there's so much information available on the Web about virtually everything that finding out simply who to address a query letter to can be tough. So don't be afraid (or have too much pride) to ask that simple question through an email or phone call.

Stand Out
The core of a great hot rod Resume is a project that goes beyond mere words; it's something that actually demonstrates your talents. "Guys say they're welders all the time, but MIG welding doesn't count," Troy explains. "Everyone can MIG weld, and it's a good start, but you need to do TIG, aluminum, and stainless. If you want to play with the big boys, you have to bump up your skills."

In a world overstuffed with digital cameras and home computers, there's simply no excuse for not sending along a portfolio of your work with every Resume you send out. You may not know it yet, but we're all in the media business now.

"Send pictures of your work," says Troy Trepanier, whose Rad Rides by Troy in Manteno, Illinois, has become one of the best known rod shops on the planet. "You can really pick through it quickly. When you see a standard Resume, well, that's a standard Resume. What I look for is talent."

If you've built cars, you should have documented those builds. Put together an album of your best work, lay it out with as much professionalism as you can muster, and explain in each photo how that experience will directly benefit the person who is looking at the photos. Be specific, be focused, and be exhaustive-but never be boring.

This is the 21st century, and if you don't have the computer skills to put together a decent-looking portfolio of your work, find a class that will teach you those skills and take it. It doesn't matter what field you're going into; today, basic computer skills are just the minimum buy-in. And your portfolio ought to be as slick as any hot rod you've ever built.

But a portfolio is just a start of the possibilities. Do everything you can to impress with your skills. Post a well-edited video on YouTube that shows you know how to use an English wheel or a time lapse of you cutting the top on a '49 Merc. Put together a sample of different welding techniques on some scrap metal and send that along. If you're looking to do high-end paintwork, then send out a cheap model-car body you've custom-painted to every shop you'd want to work in. Don't just say you're a creative problem solver-creatively solve the problem of getting a job.