Why Working at a Cemetery Was the Best Career Move I Ever Made

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Discover how an unconventional job can boost your career and make you stand out in the competitive job market. | SUCCESS

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Cleaning the cemetery, a hand washes the grey monument at the grave with a rag.

It’s easy to feel like every job you take needs to somehow advance your career in a meaningful, direct way, but there’s something to be said for the “weird job.”

You know the one. The type of job that leaves you with a thousand good stories and inspires just as many follow-up questions.

According to career and leadership coach Phoebe Gavin, “In a competitive job market, most candidates have the right experience, answer interview questions well and check the necessary boxes. So standing out—being memorable—is the real challenge. A quirky or unconventional job can give you a unique edge that sticks in the hiring team’s memory, so embrace that.”

I’ve seen the impact of this firsthand with my own “weird job” working at a local cemetery.

The summer before I left for college, I took a job at a Catholic cemetery, despite the fact that I was neither Catholic nor particularly interested in a career in anything death-related. It was essentially just a data entry job at its core, but an interesting one. I was tasked with converting more than 16,000 records into a database so that there was a digital backup and a searchable way to find where a person was buried.

Easy enough in theory, but a fire in the 1960s had destroyed a good portion of the records and damaged many others, so the information I was documenting was often missing. What could have been a rather mindless, monotonous job often turned into detective work instead. Throughout my time there, I scoured the cemetery for gravestones and searched the paper for obituaries, trying to piece together as much information as I could about those who’d been lost.

While many cemeteries these days have beautiful, bright offices that adjoin other buildings like mausoleums, the office I worked in more closely resembled a garden shed. When I started, it was a single, windowless room with an attached bathroom and closet. The wood-paneled walls were classic 70s slats, and as one of my coworkers oh-so-helpfully commented, made it feel a whole lot like working inside of a coffin.

On my first day, my manager warned me not to reach into drawers without looking first because the office was still recovering from an infestation of venomous brown recluse spiders. That summer, an animal died in the walls in an Oscar-worthy performance that required shutting the office down until the event had passed.

Needless to say, it wasn’t exactly glamorous.

Even so, the job paid well, the people were nice and I was granted the flexibility to work on school breaks like I needed. Most importantly, those summers in the cemetery helped me land my first full-time job as an editor at Hallmark.

One benefit of having a weird job on your resume, according to Gavin, is that it “can break the ice and build rapport with the interviewers.”

For me, this was absolutely the case.

During the phone interview for my internship at Hallmark, the recruiter diverged from the standard questions to ask with clear personal curiosity what it was like to work in a cemetery. This little in gave me a great way to spin what might have been fairly forgetful standard skills into unique stories that stuck with her.

For instance, I demonstrated how I was an adaptable self-starter by describing the time that I found a woman listed only as “Mrs. Husband’s Name” and came up with new ways to research until I was able to identify her. To this day, I don’t know if anyone has come looking for her grave, but I do know that thanks to my efforts, her identity isn’t being erased with the passing of time.

Even once I’d started at Hallmark, I found that my cemetery job was the thing that people remembered most. When I met those coworkers who had helped sort through the portfolios for potential interns, I found that they remembered me months later thanks to my unusual experience.

Sometimes, we just need to earn a paycheck, so the weird jobs happen more out of necessity than planning. Even so, Gavin notes that there are a lot of benefits to taking these unusual jobs, such as expanding your network and getting a “fresh, creative perspective” that can make you “more innovative and adaptable.”

For those looking to more actively shake up their career (or create a memorable start), Gavin advises to “plan it—don’t just wing it. Start by thinking about your long-term goals, both personally and professionally, and assess how your current career aligns (or doesn’t). Then, look for jobs that solve some of those misalignments. Focus on the skills, experiences or portfolio pieces you’ll gain—not just the job title.”

Gavin advises, “No matter which route you choose, play the long game. Consider what this next job can do to set you up for future opportunities. If you don’t know exactly what that looks like yet, use the time in this new role for self-discovery and figuring out what direction you want to go in next.”

Photo by Andrey Sayfutdinov/Shutterstock

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