The posting jumped out from the thousands of others in the resume section of Craigslist in New York City.

“I will give you more than a million dollars for a well-paid sales job,” it all but screamed. I clicked on that and read more. “If you are willing to employ me in a position in Manhattan with a strong salary, I am willing to draw up a legal document making you my sole heir when I die.”

The writer (who turns out to be a real estate salesman named James Kellogg) told me that he owns an Upper East Side apartment worth “slightly more than $1 million” in addition to “more than $800,000 in cash.” And suppose the taker of this deal dies first? No worries. “If I outlive you,” Kellogg explained reassuringly, “my assets can be left to your family.”

Desperate times make for creative measures, and in the current job market, a melee of electronic job boards, resumes sent by e-mail and lots of applicants for limited openings, work comes to those who scream loudest.

“The name of the game is to look like a vanilla chocolate twist with rainbow sprinkles on top rather than just vanilla,” said David Perry, an executive recruiter and an author of “Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters.” “Do you still have a black-and-white TV?” he asked. “No, because it’s dull and boring. We live in an HDTV world.”

One of Perry’s favorite tales is of an applicant (given the pseudonym George Brown in his book) who, after being laid off, knew exactly which company he wanted to work for next. His only problem was making the personnel office understand that this was meant to be. After phone calls got him nowhere, he printed business cards, rounder and larger than the norm. On the front was a photograph of a pizza and on the back was his name, phone and e-mail address along with the promise of a pizza for the first person to get him an interview.

Dressed in a suit and tie, Brown stood outside the company headquarters and handed the cards to anyone who would take them. It took a few days, but eventually one manager decided that anyone who would go to so much effort deserved at least to be heard.

A funny fit

One size does not fit all in the job interview scramble. What worked for Brown (yes, he got the job) would not have worked for Yutaka Tsujino, a copywriter who began looking for work at the start of this year. He spent the first 3½ decades of his life in Japan before coming to the United States last year for a six-month exchange program at an American advertising firm. While his written English is excellent, he worries that his spoken English is more difficult to understand.

In addition, he said in an interview (where, despite his concern, I understood him perfectly), “Japanese culture tells you not to brag; in the U.S., interviewing for a job means bragging about yourself, and I am not comfortable doing that.”

To make headway, he turned to the Web. He created a send-up of sites that applicants use to showcase themselves. The testimonials on his sites say things like “he might be funny in Japan, but unfortunately not here in the U.S.” Each put-down is accompanied by an example of Tsujino’s work, which was impressive enough to land him a job with Creature, an advertising agency in Seattle.

“Not everyone thought the Web site was funny,” Tsujino said. “But that is my sense of humor, and if you don’t get it, then you aren’t a place I should work anyway.”

Allison Brinkman, a public relations executive, also used humor to stand out from the crowd, though less aggressively than Tsujino. After being unemployed for months, she sent a resume last fall to the president of the Eisen Management Group in Cincinnati, who replied with this question in an e-mail message: “What can you bring to EMG and its clients?” Loathe to give “the generic ‘I’m responsible and energetic’ response,” she said, she sent him a David Letterman-style top 10 list, ending with: “No. 1: I won’t leave you alone until I’ve proved myself to be an interview-worthy candidate.”

She got the interview and the job.

Competition

It may be because I have a son who is a high school junior, but all this need to stand out from the crowd sounds a lot like what guidance counselors have been telling college applicants with increasing urgency during the past few years. As admission to elite schools becomes frenzied, students have taken to writing novels, creating documentaries and building schools in Cambodia to stand out. So it would follow that the competitive creativity that worked for college admission would resurface once those applicants graduate and look for jobs.

Not so fast, warned D.A. Hayden and Michael Wilder, the authors of “From B.A. to Payday,” which is to be published in August. The market for new graduates is tougher than ever before. The number of entry-level jobs is down 10 percent this year, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, whose membership includes college counselors and human resource professionals.

And it is now tougher to get a start at a Fortune 100 company than it is to get into Harvard (one in 10 for the school, one in 100 or more for the job, Hayden and Wilder said). But what looks creative and gutsy in an adult with a working track record can look juvenile in a green applicant, they said.

“Stand out and differentiate yourself, absolutely,” Wilder said. “But be outrageous just to stand out from the crowd? No.”

Going to extremes

They definitely would not recommend that one offer an employer $1 million upon his death.

“Not advice we’ve ever given,” Wilder said.

Kellogg is not a first-time applicant. He is 49 and well-established in real estate sales. But he said he was at a point in his life where he would like a job that was largely salary (“at least $75,000 or $80,000”), not commission, and those are rare in his field. He thought a bounty might help unearth a few.

“The economics behind it isn’t crazy,” he said. “Say you were interviewing several employees, and I was one and I was fine for the job. If you chose me, you would essentially have a free employee.”

He said he was past the point of thinking he will have heirs, and he doesn’t care what happens to his money in what he hopes is the distant future. “I’ll be dead,” he said. “I won’t need it.”

Kellogg has had several inquiries about the ad. “None of which piqued my interest,” he said. But he believes his plan will work. “Sales is about initiative,” he said. “This shows I can sell.”