Burke Devore places a fake job ad and collects applicants’ résumés as the practical beginning of a scheme that converts unemployment into a search for rivals. After being laid off from Halcyon Mills, he invents B. D. Industrial Papers, advertises a paper-industry management job that does not exist, and uses the replies to compare other job seekers with himself. What looks like an ordinary recruitment process becomes a private method of locating people he considers serious competition.

Background: A Crowded Job Market

Burke’s deception grows out of a labor market in which the number of companies dismissing workers exceeds the number hiring them. People who expect unemployment to be a brief interruption instead find themselves competing for fewer openings against a growing pool of experienced applicants. The paper industry’s latest contraction had occurred two years earlier, around the time Burke lost his own job. The résumés he later gathers come from people laid off within a period extending roughly six or seven months on either side of his dismissal: a defined cohort whose members are pursuing the same scarce work.

Burke believes that his knowledge of paper products and production could qualify him for almost any managerial position in the industry, given modest training in a particular specialty. But employers, faced with a surplus of experienced candidates, have little reason to train someone whose skills are only broadly applicable. They can instead hire a person already familiar with the precise job, often for lower pay and fewer benefits. In Burke’s account, the shortage of openings does not merely frustrate his search; it changes how he judges other applicants. Most résumés, he thinks, are poorly aimed or show unwarranted self-importance. The dangerous cases are different: applicants whose backgrounds resemble his own, or whose education appears slightly stronger.

Constructing a False Employer

Burke began preparing the scheme in February, almost three months before the point from which he recounts it. His first step was to rent a post-office box in a town more than twenty miles from home. His second was to use the family computer in Billy’s room to produce letterhead for B. D. Industrial Papers. The company existed on paper alone, but Burke gave it the appearance of a small, plausible business.

The address was designed to look more substantial than it was. The box was actually number 29; Burke added two zeroes and used box 2900, turning a modest local mailing address into a more imposing business detail. At the post office, he joked with the clerk that the branch would have no trouble putting mail addressed to 2900 into box 29. The clerk found the arrangement amusing. Burke later gave a cover explanation for his activity, saying he was trying to start a trade journal about trade journals, a story that made the stream of business correspondence appear ordinary.

His advertisement was tailored to the experience he wanted to attract. It described a manufacturing-line manager for a northeastern paper mill specializing in polymers and capacitor materials, responsible for a new product line on a rebuilt machine. It required at least five years of mill experience and invited applicants to send both a résumé and salary history to the fictitious company’s box in Wildbury, Connecticut. The specificity made the opening look suited to people with Burke’s own industrial-paper background, while leaving room for applicants with closely related qualifications.

Placing the Advertisement and Gathering Replies

Burke chose The Paperman because he believed it carried more advertisements of this kind than Pulp. He arranged for the notice to run in three consecutive monthly issues, at a total cost of forty-five dollars. When the advertising clerk asked about payment, he explained that the supposed small mill had little experience hiring outside its geographical area and would use petty cash. She accepted a money order instead of a company check, and Burke bought one at the Wildbury post office, signing it with the invented name Benj Dockery III in handwriting he made deliberately unlike his own. He used copied letterhead to send the advertisement and payment.

The first advertisement appeared in the March issue, which was available in the final week of February. By the first Monday in March, Burke found ninety-seven replies waiting in the box. The postal clerk remarked on how many letters the extra zeroes seemed to attract. Burke’s excuse about launching a trade-journal venture helped keep the mail from drawing suspicion, while his unease about possible exposure remained part of the scheme: he worried that the activity might be mistaken for mail fraud, or become embarrassing and damage his employment prospects if discovered.

The flow of applications fell after its initial surge, then rose again in the days following each issue of The Paperman. By the time the May issue—the last carrying the advertisement—was current, Burke had received 231 responses. He expected another ten to fifteen before the replies stopped. The collected résumés gave him a view of the people competing for work: he saw fear, courage, and determination alongside what he judged to be inflated confidence. More consequentially, the papers allowed him to distinguish applicants he dismissed as unsuitable from those whose experience and education made them genuine threats. Edward George Ricks was one such rival.

Consequences and Significance

The advertisement reverses the usual direction of job seeking. Burke had sent out his own résumés and often received no answer; now, under the borrowed authority of an employer, he makes other applicants disclose their work histories and salary expectations to him. A false vacancy creates an information advantage: candidates reveal who they are, while the supposed company and its recruiter remain concealed. The practical details—the remote post-office box, invented business identity, altered signature, and carefully targeted job description—serve that asymmetry.

The scheme also reflects Burke’s understanding of employment as a contest rather than a process of mutual matching. He considers the applicants against the job he might have held if the advertisement were real, and the strongest similarities sharpen his sense of rivalry. As he later explains, the pool comes from the same wave of layoffs as his own; if he does not move quickly, another round of dismissals could send still more candidates into the market. The fictitious job therefore does more than collect paperwork. It gives Burke a way to map a finite-seeming field of competitors, and the distinction between a résumé that merely disappoints him and one that threatens him becomes a basis for action.