Tepper alumna authors book

Bold: Get Noticed, Get Hired, a book written by a Tepper School of Business graduate and two University of Pittsburgh graduates, focuses on trying to make a meaningful connection with influential people in order to land a job.

The book was co-written by Liz Madsen (TSB ’11), Joshua Siva, and Melanie Feldman, Pitt graduates who took an entrepreneurship course at Carnegie Mellon. It was officially released Aug. 27, and is available in physical or digital versions on Amazon. Bold’s website describes the book as “based on creative strategies from real people who went from the middle of the résumé pile to the top,” promising, “We break down exactly what they did and how they did it so that you can build your own strategy off their success.”

“Especially to the attention span of a recent college grad, this book will be very useful. It gets to the point,” Feldman said.

The book covers examples and stories involving personalities such as ESPN sportscaster Neil Everett, as well as those of Alec Brownstein, who created a social media experiment where top advertising executives saw ads directed at them specifically when they performed a Google search of their own names.

“Our goal was to have a product we can get behind and would read ourselves,” Feldman said.

“We’ve put everything behind this,” Siva said, adding that reader feedback has “new ideas coming up in parallel.”

Madsen added, “the whole idea of the book is to help people land jobs,” and described the possibility of second and third editions containing stories and examples from readers.

Siva explained that their group “had tried all different sorts of tech ventures, but none of us are coders. It just so happened that Mel had gotten a job in a very different way.”

Co-authors Siva and Feldman met in the Tepper class Topics in Entrepreneurship taught by professor R. F. Culbertson. Both Siva and Feldmen were Pitt students at the time, and took the class through the Tepper School of Business. Culbertson described via email that their “book offers example after example of individuals who just ‘went after it’ - got ‘upset’ with the current process (emotion is often what it takes) - and found their own solution […] I think finding the people and getting their stories is great.”

Culbertson went on to describe that “Entrepreneurship is so often a ‘mindset’ more than an exact science,” and the mutual love of sales was “the common element about Mel and Josh.”

“We’ve had a sounding board in R.F. Culbertson,” Siva said. “His major mantra is to focus on the pain that people have and treat it. There’s a lot of pain for recent graduates.”

Junior business administration major Laviniu Filimon feels that the book’s connections to Carnegie Mellon could have a good effect on current students who will enter the workforce soon. “Having a Tepper grad participate in this guide book will encourage CMU students to be more active in their job searches,” Filimon said.

“The book has received really positive reactions. We’re off to a better start than we thought,” Feldman said. “People we didn’t expect had read the whole book and were organically spreading it.”

“We’re young. We just did this,” Madsen said. “We went through that pain, so we’re writing this in real time.”