jenny.kincaid@roanoke.com 981-3235
   
   Want this job?
   It's boring and repetitive. Co-workers are lazy, and they complain about everything from the weather to their coffee. Your skin had better be thick and scaly like an alligator's. And be ready to handle difficult customers and long hours.
   While you're at it, try to be a little obnoxious. Managers like that.
   This is the kind of salesperson that Erie Construction in Roanoke wants to hire, based on a help-wanted ad published in The Roanoke Times' classified section last Sunday. The rectangular ad, clustered among the typical job advertisements for companies, sought "a highly motivated professional" and promised "great pay and working conditions."
   Brad Coontz is the sales manager at Erie, which is located on Peters Creek Road and has offices in other states. He said it was becoming difficult to find "quality" candidates to fill two to three sales positions. So he pulled the alligator ad from the company's Lansing, Mich., office, which has used the advertisement and similar others as marketing ploys to attract job candidates. This is the first time the ad has been used in Roanoke, Coontz said.
   "A successful salesperson generally has the quality of being tenacious," he said. "And that could be personified by an alligator or a bulldog, if they could picture themselves being that kind of animal."
   Coontz responded to the same ad when he began working for Erie about three years ago in its Lansing office. He said he fit the job description perfectly.
   "I said, 'I know I have thick skin,' and I had been through a lot personally and professionally," he said.
   The ad is working in Roanoke, Coontz said. About 40 people had responded, most of them males and former military personnel. The advertisement hasn't drawn more applicants than a regular job ad often does, Coontz said, but the "caliber" of the applicants is higher.
   The job doesn't require a college degree or extensive sales experience, but Coontz said he's looking for people with "the right attitude, a high degree of integrity and high energy." Salespeople sell the company's products, such as windows, siding, cabinets or sunrooms.
   The punchy advertisement is necessary in a competitive job market, especially for sales, said Virgil Thompson, a supervisor at the Virginia Employment Commission.
   "Even though the economy is not booming, it's still a difficult thing to get the right individual for a job," he said. "If a person is truly a good salesperson, he can get a job. But to get that individual, you are really competing against people who want the same individual."
   Thompson added that there are many reasons an applicant may respond to the humorous ad. Some may think the company sounds "innovative," while others "may look at it and say, 'They are looking for somebody who is aggressive, and I'm that kind of person,'" Thompson said.
   That the ad would draw higher-quality applicants is a stretch, said Joe Sirgy, a professor of marketing in the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech.
   "I'm not sure where the humor thing gets the message across," he said. "It's the credibility. This is the reality of what a salesperson goes through. They have to have thick skin. They will be turned down a lot, but you will make a lot of money."
   Sirgy said the ad works as a type of reverse psychology, known as the discounting principle.
   "You talk about the negatives and then you talk about something which is positive," he said. "If it comes across as credible, the positive will sink in in a big way."
   For the positive, Sirgy referred to a plug at the end of the ad for a $50,000-plus potential salary. He said he doesn't believe this type of ad presents the company as very professional.
   But Thompson said the idea is clever.
   "I would sort of applaud them for being so innovative," he said. "If a lot of people started to do that, it would lose its effectiveness, but out of a bunch of bland ads, that would obviously stand out."
   The ad didn't take long to grab attention, as was evident with Coontz's schedule this week. He was difficult to reach by phone, bogged down with back-to-back morning and afternoon interviews with job candidates.