SumZero: This actually works?

It can pay to go old school PeopleImages.com/Getty Images

Mohnish Pabrai: After my daughter had just finished her freshman year of college she wanted to find a summer internship. She had hardly anything on her resume, most of it from high school. Not to mention she made me promise not to contact anyone; she wanted to do this on her own, though I helped her with her process. She made a list of a hundred companies, and we sent out a hundred manilla envelopes and she ended up with ten or eleven calls and emails, four or five interviews, and two offers, one of which she took.

One of the resumes she sent was to Charles Schwab. I mean she addressed the envelope to Mr. Charles Schwab. She ended up getting an email from a somewhat irritated person which said something along the lines of “We received your resume from the office of the CEO, which was forwarded to us to review. We just wanted to let you know that you should apply through our website.” So that person basically did not want to deal with my freshman daughter’s resume, but he couldn’t ignore it because it came from the CEO’s assistant. And of course if my daughter had actually taken his advice and applied through the online portal, she would have been totally lost among ten thousand resumes. So in this case she didn’t get an interview, but her resume did actually get to someone who looked at her background.

One of my younger friends just told me that if you meet a girl and you call her later, she’ll think you are some kind of creep for calling instead of texting [laughs]. So this may be a different time, but going “old school” with physical resumes and is going to make you look different from the rest of the crowd and that's the key in trying to get in front of people.