After Getting Laid Off, Her Resume Cake Went Viral On LinkedIn. Now, She's Making 'A Lot More' Than She Did At Her Last Job Karly Pavlinac Blackburn was laid off from her advertising firm, but now she has a better job thanks to a viral moment with a resume and a cake.
By Gabrielle Bienasz •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
A woman who went viral in September after sending her resume on a cake to Nike in an effort to get a job there has secured a new role — and not with Nike.
After months of taking calls, applying for jobs, and managing all the media attention that came with being a viral, feel-good story, North Carolina-based Karly Pavlinac Blackburn, has landed a new job working as a director of marketing for dental procurement startup CureMint, she told Entrepreneur.
Blackburn said her long job search gave her the opportunity to reflect on what she really wanted. While her vital moment likely helped her land a few job offers in October, (which she rejected) she decided to go with a startup over a corporate job because, "I'm a very curious person, and that's what I really love to do is digging in and finding new solutions or doing things a little bit differently," she said.
Blackburn started Monday.
In September, Blackburn was laid off from her job as a brand strategist at a marketing agency. She wanted a job at Nike with its incubator Valiant Labs division, and a friend, Trent Gander, encouraged her to put her resume somewhere it would get noticed — like a cake, or a billboard. With the help of a DoorDash driver, she got it delivered to an operations specialist at Valiant Labs.
In order to deliver the cake, the Doordash driver, Denise Baldwin, had to convince a security guard and a desk associate to let her hang around and make sure the cake got into the correct hands.
Blackburn praised Baldwin in a LinkedIn post with some 5,000 comments and over 130,000 reactions. She and Baldwin also became friends, and Blackburn even helped her look for jobs after the post went viral.
Baldwin, however, told Entrepreneur via text she hasn't secured a new role yet but that she is pregnant and is taking a break. "No luck yet," she said.
Blackburn, meanwhile, declined to specify her previous salary but said she's now making "a lot more" than at her last job, and that she has stock options as a part of her new role – another benefit of working at a startup, she said.
"It's better than I could have ever expected," she said of her new company. "This is the most organized startup I've ever seen."
Blackburn is CureMint's 22nd employee. The company said it raised a $2.2 million funding round in October 2021.
