When even going to extremes isn’t getting you the job of your dreams
Monday, 29 June 2026
An experienced marketer set herself a 100-day challenge to create an eccentric marketing campaign to capture the attention of would-be employers - but almost 100 days on, she has yet to secure fulltime work.
Napier-based Anna Catley has catalogued her extreme, funny and full-on efforts on LinkedIn, generating more than a million views and impressions - but only a handful of job interviews.
Catley’s efforts have ranged from dressing as a cow to make a video job application for agricultural technology company Halter, to building a giant paper mache Moodi protein ball and creating and sending out self-promotional mugs.
“Next week 100 days is up, and I honestly thought that I would have had a job by now, but I did not realise how difficult the job market is,” said Catley, who estimated she’d spent $1700 and one hour daily on the campaign.
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An industry professional with more than 12 years’ experience, Catley has applied for 10 jobs and had interviews for seven, along with about 20 coffees with influential people, including businesswoman Anna Mowbray.
There aren't many job ads for senior level marketers, which gave the 35-year-old the idea for the 100-day campaign.
“I almost wanted to bypass the traditional hiring platforms and market myself so that people approach me about work,” Catley told The Post.
Her “bingo card” for her challenge was to create content for charity, coordinate a charity drive or fundraiser, make or refresh a website, and produce viral video engagement from a top NZ leader or CEO.
“I wanted to take my LinkedIn audience on a bit of a journey and follow the ups and the downs. I use humour a lot, and there's some funny, relatable posts in there; I've had a lot of job seekers reach out to me saying that my content is refreshing.
“It was all about promoting myself as a marketer, and some of the crazy things I've done to get attention of business leaders.”
Catley sent out mugs with the message “Hire Anna Catley before someone smarter does”, and the Moodi-branded protein ball had a list of her skills and attributes in the nutritional panel.
“I'm going to quite a lot of lengths to get attention, because it's really hard these days. AI does a lot of filtering at the application stage, so sometimes people might not even get a look in.”
The former general manager of marketing and sales at Kiwi Crunch admits it’s not ideal to be job-hunting at a time when most businesses are tightening up.
Alongside a growing preference for freelancers, she says “a lot of job seekers I'm talking to are taking quite massive pay cuts, because they need work”.
“In another month or two, if I haven't landed the dream fulltime role, then possibly I'll just do freelancing.”
New Zealand’s unemployment rate was sitting at 5.3% as of the March quarter, with employment confidence currently at a 22-year low.
Auckland, Bay of Plenty and Wellington have the highest unemployment rates.
Tom O'Neil, managing director of career coaching consultancy cv.co.nz, said the job market was especially tough at the medium-to-higher end of the market for experienced professionals.
“We’ve been going for 20 years and this is one of the worst times we’ve seen.”
An economy that had been continually hit over four to five years had left businesses in unfavourable situations that had contributed to an employment market that was notoriously tough, O'Neil said.
He said the market was crowded with highly skilled professionals all struggling to secure roles at their previous level.
Many were overqualified for the jobs they were applying for, leaving employers reluctant to hire them. Employers could “get a Ferrari for the price of a BMW”, he said, but feared those candidates would quickly move on when a better offer came.
O’Neil said many employers were taking a conservative approach, unwilling to shoulder extra risk or cost in a weak economy and a period of ongoing uncertainty, particularly ahead of November’s general election.
AI was not helping the matter, making CVs all too similar, and making it harder for applicants to be seen through the clutter, he said.
Catley said one of the things that irked her about the state of the job market was when a would-be employer asked for an applicant’s salary expectations.
“I feel like they're just going to compare it and then go for whoever's got the best skills for the cheapest. That's why I wanted to develop my personal brand and put my best foot forward to attract the opportunities that don't even hit the job market.”