2. Calling before you’ve had a good sleep.

I know it’s tempting, but if you’ve just been laid off or fired, don’t pick up that phone. Don’t call anyone. Instead go home. And think. And make a plan. And decide what your next steps are going to be. And how you’re going to execute them. And what you’re going to say. And how powerfully and strongly you want to go to the market. And how prepared you want to be, before you do.

3. Calling before you’ve done what needs doing.

Get yourself ready. Execute that plan. Get all your ducks in a row. THEN, make the calls that are on the list you made of people you’re going to call, and why you’re going to call them. People who are possible leads for jobs. What are you going to say? What is the message you are going to leave. People who are your friends. Different story. But hold your head – don’t lower yourself and start carping about your last boss and your last job and your last company and what d*ckheads they all were. It creates energy around you that isn’t going to help you right now.

If you need to, go to Value Village, buy some old plates for $2 and throw them at your garage. Far more effective, and less embarrassing in six months. No one needs to know.  (Also, I’ve learned the hard way, usually more effective than hiring a lawyer to do anything.)

4. Sending your website with an explanation of why it isn’t current.

No one cares. (Insert Charlie Brown teacher sound here.) Wait the extra day and get it current before you send it out.  Exhibit some business maturity.

5. Rambling.

Stream of consciousness rambling because you didn’t expect anyone to answer the phone is not fun and doesn’t make the crisp first impression you want to make. Believe it or not, some people still do answer the telephone, so be prepared. (By the way, it always surprises me too.) Get to the point, tell why you’re calling, explain what you want, and why the listener should want what you want, make an appointment, then hang up. You can have the full conversation you’re dying to get out when the time you’ve just scheduled arrives.

6. Not writing it ALL down.

If you’ve decided you’re looking for a new job, from now on, take a pen and paper with you everywhere you go. You never know where you will be when someone tells you about a lead, or a new business move, or a piece of news you want to follow up with later. NO you won’t remember. Your mind is full right now. You are in the midst of a full frontal assault to find a new, better job. And full frontal assaults take up a lot of RAM. Trust me.

7. Using this opportunity to only fix a short term problem (you’re out of a job) not the long-term problem that caused it (you don’t have a solid, strategic career plan.)

This is a big opportunity. Believe it or not. You have been forced to think about a problem you’ve been avoiding for quite some time now. Because you’ve been too busy right? Okay, now you’re not too busy. Structure your days to include an hour or two each day writing your goals out, and then writing your plan to achieve them.

Right about now you’re probably thinking I’ve lost my mind. Suggesting that someone write a plan about their future when they’re freaking out? What a stupid thing to do.

Really? Some people call it the audacity of hope. Hope and a plan for the future is precisely what you need right now. Hope is what gets us through times like this. Hope, plus a solid plan. Hope alone won’t cut it. That’s for Cinderella. Hope and a plan will always prevail.

8. Lack of structure.

Structure is not confining. Structure is freeing. When you put structure around the things that need to get done, they become automatic, so you don’t need to think about them. When you’re not thinking about them, your mind is free to think about more creatively oriented pursuits. Like how to get that job you really want. Finding a great job is where structure and creativity meet.

9. Not Admitting that you Hate it.

If the “business” is not what you expected it to be, now is the time to do something about it. You chose this profession, choose another one! Use this time to take the courses you need to take, to meet the people you need to meet, to do the research you need to do to figure out if that ‘other’ thing you’ve thought about for years is something you really should pursue. Or alternately, do the research to figure out that it really isn’t as for you as this industry, then throw yourself fully into grabbing this industry by the horns and knocking the snot out of it.

I think it’s kind of hard to jump in with the two and a half feet required to really be successful at a career in creativity if there’s always something else in the back of your mind.

10. The Biggest and Most Common Career Mis-Management Thing Many People Do.

Not knowing what you want. Not having a dream. Not having a goal. Not having it written down. Not knowing how much money you WANT to make. (Don’t leave it in someone else’s hands to tell you what to ask for.) Not knowing which companies you would kill to work for. Not knowing what work you love. Not being able to answer any of the previous seven questions if you’re asked them in an interview.

It’s true. And it’s common. Most people know what they DON’T want, not what they DO want. They move away from unpleasant, instead of toward fabulous. That’s because one is much clearer than the other.

But it doesn’t have to be. Dare to dream, don’t worry no one will laugh at you. And if they do it’s only their nervousness speaking for them. Nervousness that sounds like “Pffffffffffffffff, you gotta be kidding right?” on the outside but sounds like “Oh no. He’s got his sh*t together, and I don’t. That means he’ll more than likely beat me to it. Better make some discouraging noises to freak him out.”

Pffft. Don’t be freaked out. Go for it. Work on all ten points. Then dazzle the next person you contact when you sound like you have your sh*t together

Because if you’re doing all ten of these points, you do.

Well done.

~ heidi

You’re a first time Creative Director, you have a million questions, and you can’t talk to your boss, your spouse, your best friend.
You need a confidante.
You want a promotion and you don’t know how to ask for one.
You want to change jobs and it’s highly volatile and confidential.
You want to start your own business, and you’re unclear as to how to evaluate the opportunity.
You don’t have a career goal and everyone says you need one.
You have a career goal and you’re not sure it excites you all that much.
You hate your partner and you don’t know how to tell them you want a divorce.
You want to know what you are worth salary wise on the market.
You want someone who isn’t your friend (and might blow sunshine up your wazoo) to go through your online portfolio and tell you everything you need to fix, or leave as is.
You are terrified of cold calling.
You don’t know how to market yourself.
You don’t know what to say when you leave a message for someone you want to work for.
You have a colleague who is sabotaging your career and you don’t know what to do to handle the situation with grace, yet make it stop.
You don’t have an online presence and think maybe you should
You don’t understand how recruiters work and what they do.
You hate recruiters, but want to learn how to get them to help you out.
You have an upcoming meeting with a recruiter, and you want some guidance on how to make a dazzling impression.
You’ve been fired, your head is reeling, your guts are churning, and you need some advice.
You don’t know why you never get the job.  You’re always the #2 pick.
You don’t know which of the two new jobs you’re considering, you should take and you need someone to talk it through with.
You have to hire and you don’t know what questions you should be asking when you interview someone for a position.
You run a department and you need help writing a plan for the department.
You just went on an interview and you can’t tell if they are being honest with you, or just telling you what you want to hear so you’ll take the job.
You want to move to, and work in another city.
You want to get out of the ‘biz’ and try something else, but you don’t know how.
You can’t seem to get attention from your boss and recognition for your contributions.
It’s your first job and you don’t have a CLUE what is going on, and there is NO training where you work.
You need a subjective point of view on a situation at work, and you can’t talk to anyone there.
You’ve been offered a raise and you want MORE of a raise and you want to strategize how to ask for it, and get it.
Your boss is ignoring your desire to be transferred to another office and you can’t wait any longer.
You’re working 1000 hours/week and you need to learn how to manage your time better.
They keep hiring people around you and not promoting you, and you want to know how to change it.
You want to quit your job and go freelance and want to know how to set yourself up for success.
Everyone needs one.

~ heidi

Do we have to be in the same city?

No.  92% of the career consulting work I do is with people who are not in the same city as I am when we meet.  We use Skype.

Here’s the link to the quiz.

http://www.heidiconsults.com/quiz/

Five people will win.

What can I say, it’s my birthday.  I’m feeling generous.

You have to do the quiz by December 14th.

That gives you a week.  Should be doable.  There is no studying required.

I’ll do the draw on December 21st.  Either the Mayan calendar is correct, or I’ll be doing some free career consulting in 2013!

If the world doesn’t end that day, I’ll be in touch on December 21st if you’ve won. That way you can spend some time over the holidays thinking about our first conversation. If you’d like, we can make an announcement with your name and photo.  If you’d like it to be kept confidential, we can do that too.  We don’t need to let everyone know that the reason your career has dramatically changed in the past year is because you have a new secret weapon do we?

What if your career is already awesome?

Let’s keep it awesome.

Creative Careers are different.  Creative people are different.  Do we agree?

I’ve seen lots of studies on career contentment.  But we’re different.  Let’s see by how much.

Here’s the link to the quiz again.

http://www.heidiconsults.com/quiz/

Thank you!

~ heidi

P.S.  The illustration in this post was drawn by Jamie Way for my 40th birthday.  It’s framed and on the wall in my office.

Some recruiters will send your work around to agencies in the absence of an active mandate or hire.  But you know what that means?  They’ve just attached a fee to hiring you.  And in today’s market, that’s the last thing you want.  I truly believe and I have been told many times (even two days ago) that agencies will go out of their way to avoid paying a recruiter’s fee.  So will they choose you, who was introduced by a recruiter, or will they choose to hire the candidate who was an internal referral – which means no fee?  Be careful about letting a recruiter make introductions on your behalf and incurring a fee in the process.

Ask if the agency they are about to introduce you to, has in fact, hired them to fill the vacancy.  Ask what sort of relationship they have with the agency.  Is it a contingency relationship?  Or a retained relationship?  The former (contingency) means the recruiter is only paid if the candidate they introduced is hired, and as I’ve mentioned earlier, most agencies are more interested in hiring a candidate that doesn’t have a fee associated with the hire, than one that does.

Agencies have brought much of their recruiting function in-house.  It started to happen around 2007 and it really gained momentum after 2008, the year when 140,000 advertising people lost their jobs.  Again, it’s a way to avoid paying an external recruiter’s fee for hire, preferring to pay a lower salary or annual fee to hire talent via their full time in-house recruiter.

The number of independent recruiters has decreased.  With more work being done in-house by agency recruiting departments, the number of independent recruiters have decreased substantially.  Or, the number of searches that are outsourced have decreased substantially.  Add to that, the fees that were previously paid to recruiters went from a reasonable percentage of salary to a ridiculously low flat fee, and many recruiters pulled an Ellis Wyatt.

Linked in is the new recruiting playground. Trouble is, the best jobs aren’t posted on Linked in.  The best jobs are still where they always were, hidden inside advertising agencies.  So if they’re hidden how do you find out about them?  Agencies who solely rely on Linked in to source candidates are missing out on the gigantic passive candidate market.  In-house recruiting departments tend to accept submissions rather than going out and actively pursuing the ideal candidate for a position.  It will come around.  But not for a while.

Little wonder you’re feeling abandoned.

So where does that leave you?

Where you should have been all along:  Leading and fully in charge of getting the job you want next.  Not relying on recruiters to make your job hunt happen for you.  Because as I’ve already stated, they never really did.

Here are 10 things you MUST be doing right now to get the job you want:

1.    Research, research, research.  Get on every possible website to learn about the industry and determine what the top five agencies you want to work for are, then apply for a job there. (Don’t just look at their portfolio, read the entire site.)

2.    Build a brand that demonstrates that you know how to build a brand. One that is exciting and intriguing enough to get noticed amidst the sea of submissions great agencies receive daily.  This does NOT mean doing what everyone else does. This means doing what no one else is doing.  Smart marketing right?

3.    Develop a multi-tiered, well-timed and consistent marketing campaign to accompany your spiffy new brand.

4.    Don’t give up after you send one email to a company and it didn’t get a response.  Send another one. Practice Direct Marketing.  Analyze what works and what doesn’t work.  Use different creative to test the effectiveness of one approach against another.  Don’t forget voice mail.  (You would think that when I recruited creatives that my voice mail would have been Comedy Central.  Nope.  EVERYONE left exactly the same message.  ‘Hi this is Name.  I was wondering if you’ve had a chance to look at my portfolio.’) Begin demonstrating your creativity and why you’re someone they HAVE to meet from the very first contact and never forget: NO ONE EVER BORED THEIR WAY INTO SOMEONE’S OFFICE.

5.    Develop a mailing list of 1,000 people.

6.    Stop telling potential employers what you want (to meet for a coffee) and start telling them what they need to hear to make them want what you want – to meet you. Think in terms of benefit, think of what makes you you, and tell them that.  Harsh as it may sound, people always think in terms of ‘what’s in it for me’.  Whether they’re willing to admit it, is another story.

7.    Develop an opinion.  That’s what you’re paid for.  Just this past Friday over dinner, an Executive Creative Director told me that even after 30 years he is still shocked when he interviews a creative and gets a blank stare in response to this question, “So what’s your favorite piece of work that you’ve seen in the past year?”

8.    Build a website for a human (you) not your title.  Your work is only 25% of the reason that a company will hire you.  The more senior you are, the more the company wants to know about you, what you stand for, what you’ve learned.

9.    Include testimonials.

10.  Write hand-written thank you cards.  No one does it anymore.  Do anything that you did to get your first job, that for whatever reason you stopped doing.  Do anything that no one does any more.

Do those ten things and before long you’ll be saying, “Who needs a recruiter anyway?”

Just remember – the person reviewing your work is a person.  A person that, like you, wants to be entertained, delighted, inspired, gob smacked and impressed.  Or all of the above. They want to find that little treasure. In other words, you.  Because finding a treasure will be highlight of their day.

Be the highlight of someone’s day, and make sure they realize it quickly.  Because today one person is doing the job that was previously done by three, so 12 seconds may be all you have before their phone rings, they get a text message, or someone is standing at their door.

1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10 -11 -12.

Time’s up!

~ heidi

 

Now the catch to all this is that Mr. Zweig also went on to say it takes more time.
I believe that.
There’s the time it takes to prepare the questions in advance, the time it takes to get through the questions with a focused agenda in mind (and still allow for some go-with-the-flowness), and the time it takes to review the data.

But I’ll place my bet on the structured interview over the go-with-the-flow technique any day – even with the extra hour or two of preparation work it will require. Because I’d rather spend that hour now on a method that has eight times the effectiveness, than have to endure another go-with-the-flow round of interviews in 3 months to a year from now.

Does your company or department use structured interviews?
Would you be willing to try it in your department?

~ heidi

1. Tell the truth.

Remember when you were afraid to tell the truth, but if you did, no matter how bad it was, you never got into as much trouble, as if you didn’t tell the truth?

The same holds true when you are approached by talent to show you their portfolio. Tell them whether or not you have an opening in the first conversation. Before the interview. If you bring them in, and they are not a candidate for your company, tell them why. Tell them the expectations that you have of people in your department. Tell them what you want to see in their portfolio, in their attitude, in their ambition.

Do not tell them to keep in touch if you don’t want them to keep in touch. Don’t say, “We may have something in a month.”, if you aren’t 100,000,000% certain of that fact. (That’s when the trouble begins. For both of you. Not fun.)

It’s an interview. It’s like an audition. The Director doesn’t tell every starlet she might get the part. Okay maybe the Director does.

2. Clean your room.

Agencies need business. Which means agencies are pitching business. Which means people will be taking tours through your agency. Which means, if your office looks like a bomb hit it, your agency looks like a bomb hit it. No one wants to give work to an agency that looks like a bomb hit it. “Is this your agency brand?” the CMO thinks. “Chaos? I’m not looking for chaos, I’m looking for calm.”

Tidy up your reception. Precision stacked, current,  relevant, and fun magazines say more than a $400 flower arrangement. If you have an Ad Age from September 2008 lying there, a rainforest won’t cover it. Clean your kitchen. Especially if it’s an open part of the tour. Make it ONE person’s job. If you don’t have that person, make it your next hire.

3. Say thank you.

Imagine if you could find 100 reasons to say thank you in a day? You can. In our industry they are endless reasons. What a job, what a job, what a job. There are so many places to work in creativity in this world that most people have never heard of. There are more places that we’ve NEVER heard of, than we have heard of. That fact alone is worth 62 reasons to say thank you.

Thank people that make you think. Thank people that challenge you. Thank people that tell you the truth. Thank people who make you smile, who think of you, who remember something you said, who point out a spelling mistake, who are polite and do their jobs well, and make you do your job better.

But more importantly, mean it.

4. Say sorry.

Not in that annoying start every sentence with sorry way. The “I’m sorry I got to the door before you and opened it.” sorry. That is not even a “Sorry”! It’s an “Excuse me please”. I mean the sorry’s that need to be said. The hard ones. The ones that shouldn’t be on email or Facebook, but in person. Eyeball to eyeball. Let the moment come, but when it does, do it.

5. When you fall and scrape your knee, stand up, brush it off, and keep running.

But take a moment to acknowledge that scrape, feel it, then get up. Don’t spend too long there. Or you’ll turn into a cry baby. Besides nothing is better for a wounded knee than to keep it moving. No one can spend 10 hours a day looking for a job. Or another piece of business. Use the rest of the time to DO something you have not been able to do until now. Do EVERYTHING you have been putting off. You want balance. Just keep moving.

We are smart. Smarter than most people. We know how to work hard. We are creative. Because those are skills that are valued in this industry. They are valued in any industry. Because it’s what all industries need to keep running. Intelligence and hard work and creativity. Pffffft, easy for us.

There are more lessons our mothers taught us that are just as relevant today in our adult childhoods. Many more, and I’m sure you can think of a few of your own.

Enough with this new reality crap.
There is no new reality. Just a reminder that the old reality was preferred. What we do is new. How our clients want us to do it, is old.

Clients are voting with their feet, and their pocketbooks.

What if the same principles that applied in 1960 and the successes of that era, were what we need now to renew that success?
These would be the same principles practised by legends that included Bill Bernbach, David Ogilvy, and Phil Dusenberry.

Not “Party hard, screw tomorrow.”.
Not those principles.
The principles their mothers taught them.
Which are the same principles our mothers taught us.

What if we remembered them, and starting doing it?

~ heidi

Call me Chicken Little.  Okay.  Now that we have that out of the way, let me add that it has been my experience that creatives who have their ‘everything’ in order, ready to mobilize on a moment’s notice bounce back faster should something they weren’t expecting happen. Seen from the other side, those who proactively work on their brands land the best jobs even before it’s officially announced that the agency is looking.

Still with me?
Good.

Let’s get busy.  Before you need to, let’s make your brand stand out when it’s alongside all the other people applying for the same job you want.  Let’s create something irresistible.  Something that won’t stay in the black hole otherwise known as the HR’s inbox, or the Creative Director’s inbox, or the President’s inbox.

Something that kicks some serious – I Need to Meet You TODAY – butt.

Let’s do more than that even.  Let’s figure out what you really want out of this career in creative.  Then let’s figure out what the first step is that you need to take  in order to make that career happen.

Let’s get you to stop applying for jobs that you don’t really want for the sole reason that they happen to be available.
That’s no way to build a career, and it’s not the recipe for Happy.
Anywhere.

We’ve had the Summer to daydream.  We’ve thought about what’s next.  If you know that what you really want isn’t what you have now, then let’s change the second half of that clause, shall we?

If, while daydreaming, you’ve realized that your career is where it’s supposed to be right now, and you’re happy with where it’s at? Perfect! Let’s get you ready anyway.

~ heidi