David Dallecarbonare, a rail-thin, glasses-wearing husband and father of two, isn’t by nature a showboat.

He wears khaki pants and button-down shirts. He’s an engineer. And he’s been out of work since January.

So there Dallecarbonare was Thursday, drawing attention to himself. He spent seven hours walking around Downtown Indianapolis wearing a sandwich board that said, “HIRE ME.”

As the economy stagnates, job seekers increasingly are doing unusual things to stand out: They advertise themselves on billboards; they have their resumes magnetized and affixed to their cars; one newly minted MBA, making ends meet by driving a cab, posted his resume for his fares to see.

“Putting this sign over my shoulders, it’s humbling,” Dallecarbonare said. “It reminds me of those pictures you see from the Depression. First time I did it, it was hard.”

That was several weeks ago. This week he did it twice: Tuesday during the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, and Thursday, all morning and into the afternoon.

“The parade took courage,” he said. “There were so many people. I wasn’t sure what they’d do.”

People react differently to the sandwich board: Some are encouraging, offering a thumbs up or saying, “What a good idea!” Some look away. A few snicker. About midnight on St. Patrick’s Day, one youngish-sounding man left a drunken, profanity-laced tirade on Dallecarbonare’s voice mail (his phone number is on the sandwich board). “Go drown yourself,” the man suggested.

Dallecarbonare, who is 42 but looks younger, said his strategy is “not desperation,” but simply a way “to market myself and step outside the box, and sending out resumes is just not doing it.”

The tactic might be unusual, but it’s not completely unreasonable, said Karl Ahlrichs, a partner with local hiring consultant ExactHire.

“The current method our society uses to hire people is flawed,” Ahlrichs said. “That concept of sending out thousands of resumes is not working.”

Still, Ahlrichs musters little enthusiasm for the sandwich board method: “I’ll give (Dallecarbonare) points because he’s the only one doing it, but once there’s six people doing it, it’s over.”

Dallecarbonare was laid off in January from Valeo Sylvania, an automotive lights manufacturer in Seymour, where he was a packaging engineer.

The state’s jobless rate that month hit 9.2 percent; 300,692 people were classified as unemployed, the most since 1983.

In the first week of March, Indiana’s jobless claims jumped more than 5,600 to 22,494, the nation’s biggest rise.

Although blue-collar workers have been hit hardest by layoffs nationally, white-collar unemployment is up considerably — 4.6 percent in December, compared with 3 percent a year earlier.

Dallecarbonare had been making “in the low 70s” when the ax fell, he said. He’d built a solidly middle class life for his family: a four-bedroom home in a Franklin subdivision (built by the recently bellied-up C.P. Morgan), two cars. His financial position was, and is, sound: no credit card debt, both cars paid for, the equivalent of more than three months’ salary in the bank.

He’s getting $390 a week in unemployment insurance.

Still, the clock is ticking.

Dallecarbonare is on LinkedIn, a Web-based professional network; he attends meetings twice a week of the Business and Professional Exchange, which aims to help white-collar professionals re-enter the work force; he has sent out dozens of resumes, has applied for 100 jobs.

The sum total: two interviews, zero offers.

He plans to continue networking and sending out resumes. And at least once a week, he intends to hit the streets with his sandwich board.

It gets easier the more you do it, Dallecarbonare said. The weather is warming — “another plus,” he said.

Being without a job is like having “a monkey on your back,” he said. “It’s always on your mind.”

But as he learned Thursday, some people have it worse. At the corner of Illinois and Ohio streets, Dallecarbonare, wearing his sandwich board, came upon Doug Ayres, unshaven, shaking a cup and holding up his own sign that said, “Down but not out.”

Dallecarbonare gave him a dollar.