Honesty proves best policy for job hunter

Tired of trying to impress potential employers with half-truths and exaggerated accomplishments? Swedish job applicant Angelika Wedberg has found a better way.

Fed up with the conventional job hunt, the 30-year-old care worker decided to place an ad in her local newspaper and wait for offers.

So far not terribly unusual, but Ms Wedberg's brainwave was a devastating honesty that let her faults and lack of direction shine through. For everyone trained to answer the classic interview question on your worst fault with nothing more damaging than "I'm a workaholic", Ms Wedberg's approach is a revelation.

"I want a well-paid job. I have no imagination, I am anti-social, uncreative and untalented," she admitted in her advertisement in the daily Goteborgs-Posten on Sunday.

It worked. Within 24 hours the phone was ringing off the hook with potential employers, Ms Wedberg told the Swedish daily Expressen.

"I turned everything upside down. I was so tired of doing things the ordinary way," she said yesterday.

She told Expressen that she had an interview lined up for tomorrow with a company called Map Media offering a salary of 18,000 kroner (£1,360) a month, an increase of more than a third on her current job as a care worker for elderly people.