Job-hunting can be brutal. Constantly putting in applications, waiting on calls and hoping an employer will take notice of you can send most into a state of anxiety.

Your hope is that your resume will stand out in the crowd of applicants. But as more and more people are looking, the chances are often slimmer.

But for one woman, she decided paper resumes were a thing of the past ‒ cakes were the future.

Karly Pavlinac Blackburn, 27, wanted to make sure the headhunters at Nike remembered her. So she decided the best way to do that was to have her resume printed on a cake and to have it delivered. Because, after all, who doesn’t like cake?

Kelly Blackburn’s viral resume cake.

Her sweet tactics went viral instantly. And while Nike didn’t bite, other employers found her cake resume to their liking. 

“I will be the director of growth marketing at a software startup called CureMint — we make software that helps dental companies automate their business,” Blackburn told Good Morning America. “To be on the other side of the job hunt feels good. It has definitely been a roller coaster with the virality of the LinkedIn post.”

Blackburn told the reporters that once her post about the resume cake went viral, it opened up a “lot of doors to have conversations with people at companies all over the country.”

“The main thing I wanted to do in a new role is continue to learn and be challenged while working with kind, smart, talented people. I didn’t want to give up on that dream,” she said. “I knew when I met the founder of CureMint … it was the right fit for me.”

Even the Instacart delivery woman found more than just a tip after taking the cake to Nike. Blackburn, who lives in North Carolina, needed to have the cake delivered to Nike, which is based in Oregon. 

After placing an order from a store near Nike, the logistics of how it would be delivered became a concern.

Denise Baldwin took her 8-month-old son when she delivered a resume cake to Nike. Photo by Denise Baldwin.

Blackburn focused on making sure the resume cake would make it to Nike.

Lucky for me Denise (Baldwin) was the person from Instacart that day to pick up the cake, because she’s just so amazing,” Blackburn said.

Baldwin had her own to-do list once she picked up the cake. “[Blackburn] wanted me to take a look at it and make sure it looked OK,” she told GMA.

“Me and the baker were both talking about it, because we couldn’t believe that somebody had gone out of the box and did a resume on a cake … I messaged Karly and said, ‘It looks great. I’m on my way to the campus, and I’ll let you know how things go.’”

Nike employer Mac Myers shows off the cake with a resume printed on it that was delivered to him. Photo by Denise Baldwin.

“She gets there and someone from security was like, ‘OK leave the cake here.’ And [Denise] said, ‘No, I have to give it to Mac (Myers), I have to see it go in his hands,” Blackburn recalled. “At the time I didn’t know this, but she had her 8-month-old son on one hip the whole time ‒ she didn’t even tell me, she was just like, ‘I’m gonna get it done.’”

And her perseverance paid off – Myers came down and picked up the cake himself, even taking a picture with it for confirmation.

“The cool thing afterwards was, [Denise] texted me, ‘You’ve inspired me to go chase after something better,'” Blackburn said.

In an odd twist of fate, the two women have now become friends, which might be the sweetest part of the entire cake scheme. “Denise inspires me to be a better person,” Blackburn said.