Homeless man hands out resumes, gets hundreds of job offers

[tao]

On Friday morning, homeless web developer David Casarez woke from his park bench in Mountain View, Calif., put on a nice shirt and tie, and carried his hand-written cardboard sign to a nearby highway median.

 

“HOMELESS,” the sign read.

 

“HUNGRY 4 SUCCESS. TAKE A RESUME.”

 

It turned out to be the perfect job search strategy.

 

A passerby’s photo of him standing on the median holding the sign soon went viral on Twitter, and by Saturday afternoon, he’d been flooded with more than 200 job offers.

 

“Google reached out to me,” the astounded 26-year-old told The Post.

 

“So many other companies. Pandora. A bunch of startups,” he said, speaking by phone at a Starbucks near where he’d first gone begging — literally — for work.

 

“A product manager from Bitcoin.com was wondering if I could work remotely of if I want to relocate to Tokyo,” he said, with wonder in his voice as he scrolled through the offers.

 

“But tonight, I’ll be back on my bench in Rengstorff Park.”

 

Casarez grew up in the border town of Laredo, Tx.

 

He earned a bachelors in management information systems from Texas A&M University, landed a good web developer job at General Motors in Austin, but then cashed out his 401-K and drove to Silicon Valley to pursue the dream of his own tech startup — only to run out of cash in June.

 

“I’d been living in my car for more than a year,” he said of his 2015 Ford Transit Connect utility van.

 

“No one was hiring. I had an interview with Apple in January, but the job was filled internally,” he said.

 

Casarez says he did some freelancing — a few web design and logo design jobs.

 

But a month ago, his van was repossessed, he said, and he’s been sleeping in the park since.

 

On Friday, he dressed as best he could — “To be presentable to my future employers,” he explained — and set out with his new sign and a stack of resumes in a FedEx envelope.

 

“It was basically a make-or-break moment,” he said of his job-search breakthrough.

 

“I wanted to keep my head up high, keep looking forward and see what opportunity would come next,” he added.

 

“I was thinking you know, like this was like my last stop. If this didn’t work, I’d go back home and give up on my dream.”

 

He’d only been standing on the median at El Camino real and San Antonio Road for a couple hours when a passing driver named Jasmine Scofield stopped and asked if she could take his picture and post it online.

 

Sure, Casarez told her.

 

“Today I saw this young homeless man asking for people to take a resume rather than asking for money,” she tweeted at around 5 p.m. on Friday.

 

“Please RT so we can help David out!”

 

By mid-afternoon Saturday, California time, Scofield’s photos of Casarez and his resume had been retweeted more than 50,000 times, and liked nearly 70,000 times.

 

“It’s been happening very quickly, and I’m in shock,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting that kind of response,” he added. “It kinda blew up.”

 

Casarez’s story was first told by Bay Area news station KRON-4.

 

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[Ballistic Gelatin]

Nice story. Glad to see a fellow alumnus pick himself up by the bootstraps, swallow a little of his pride and take on the world in a different way that paid off.