The unemployment rate is now 3.7% nationwide, a small uptick from last month but still historically low. With a nearly 2-to-1 ratio of job openings to available workers, why are recent college grads not getting any response from almost 90% of their applications?

Business.com investigated the conundrum and found surprising results:

• With 250 applications submitted per job posting on average — and only 4-6 candidates selected to interview — it can feel like playing the Powerball.
• Many jobs listed as “entry-level” in fact require years of experience.
• AI resume vetting is overselective and potentially biased.
• Some recruiters post nonexistent “phantom jobs” simply to collect resumes.

However, we found a few hacks to get around these obstacles. For example, applying for in-office positions (versus remote) and applying in the afternoon (versus the morning) both double the chances of getting a response. Check out the full study at business.com.

Timeless branding: Never go out of style.

Steven Grasse: Bev industry legend on Brand Mysticism.

NFT Restaurant: Non-fungible takeout?

(Source: Shutterstock)

Certain brands are forever associated with specific time periods. Pan Am took off with 1960s style and optimism. Members Only and Esprit dressed the ‘80s. AOL dialed up the ‘90s internet. And Nokia and Motorola’s phones rang in the ‘00s — back when we were friends with Tom on MySpace. 

Defining a decade can lead to an incredible amount of success, but an important part of branding is longevity; some companies feel like they’ve been around forever, even if they’re surprisingly modern.

Very few business leaders know this better than advertising executive and spirits entrepreneur Steven Grasse, who helped launch Hendrick’s Gin and Sailor Jerry’s Rum, along with revamping Narragansett Beer and Miller High Life with divey retro appeal.

In the exclusive excerpt below from his new book, Brand Mysticism: Cultivate Creativity and Intoxicate Your Audience (co-written with b. contributor Aaron Goldfarb), Grasse breaks down the difference between trendiness and timelessness.

I’ve had people flat-out tell me, “You couldn’t have possibly created Hendrick’s Gin — it’s from the 1800s!”

I love that.

You know you’ve done a good job with your branding when people literally can’t tell what era it spawned from. They see the old-timey apothecary bottle from the 1830s, the penny-farthing iconography from the 1870s, the Monty Python cartooning from the 1960s, all wrapped around a gin created in the late 1990s and now advertised in 2022. It f***s with the mind!

And that’s great for branding.

That’s exactly what we did with Sailor Jerry. It looks like it’s straight off the shelf of your grandpop’s basement bar. We purposely do not look at any design trends. We want our brands to evoke an ambiguous period that they’re inspired by, during which they’re supposed to have been created.

In fact, being right on trend is a sign of failure for me. Great packaging should transcend the ages, not be of the moment. I want my brands not only to last 100 years but to look as if they have already been around for 100 years. This avoids the fate of Ed Hardy’s clothing line, which seemed too of the moment and quickly fell into the dustbin of fashion.

Simply reviving an old label or an old logo isn’t a guarantee of longevity or success. You realize pretty quickly that old stuff, when unaltered, can look a little too frumpy. But when you mash up something old with something else, maybe even something new, it immediately has a cool vibe. It’s almost a trick of the mind.

“Where did that come from?” people will wonder.

Suddenly there’s not just a historical mystique but something that feels modern and as if it has an inherent truth to it. You need to have some degree of truth in order for your brand to resonate with people. Everything branches out from that inherent truth. So that’s the key trick we’ve employed over the years when it comes to our design work: We make it ugly on purpose — to most people in advertising …

But it’s beautiful to me.

Brand Mysticism is available now.

1,400,000

Cases of Sailor Jerry’s Rum sold in 2016

(Source: Spirits Business)

(Source: SHŌ)

Is the future of fine dining on the blockchain?

NFT-based hospitality club SHŌ is set to open its doors atop the Salesforce Transit Center in the fall of 2023. The two-story venue will include a sushi restaurant and rooftop sky lounge, as well as a Japanese food market featuring bento boxes and sake.

Here’s the catch: Those aforementioned doors will be token-gated.

The SHŌ NFT grants membership at three glitzy entry points — $7,500, $15,000, and $300,000 — which offer varying levels of premium perks: priority reservations, courtesy pickup/drop-off service, and even curated trips to Japan.

This isn’t the world’s first NFT-powered eatery; SHŌ joins Gary Vaynerchuk’s FlyFish Club in New York and Andy Nguyen’s burger joint Bored & Hungry in Long Beach. And we were still getting used to the self-service kiosks at McDonald’s.

(Source: Twitter)

“As a history nerd, I didn’t see Sailor Jerry as just some unknown tattoo guy; I saw him more as an American folk artist through the lens of the Smithsonian and World War II. Because of that, even though his name was now on millions of bottles of Caribbean rum sold by a massive Scottish company, it would still feel underground and have a deep sense of authenticity.”

—Steven Grasse

Written by Steven Grasse with Aaron Goldfarb, and Nicholas Widmer.