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Brendon Derr of Cella Consulting describes it as “the elephant in the room that nobody knows is there until it moves in the wrong direction.”
“A healthy corporate culture”, Derr explains, “can be one of the most, if not the most, valuable assets to a Creative Executive. The quantifiable outcomes of a healthy corporate culture can be tied to increased productivity, higher employee retention, accelerated learning, and more consistent innovation. If the culture is healthy and has been that way for a long period of time, you may never even realize how much you’re benefiting from it. However, when the cultural health of a creative organization goes south, you’ll quickly begin realizing its negative impact.”
Derr also points out that the creative industry has always had a problem with defining career paths, noting that “creatives tend to reach the highest rung of the corporate ladder much more quickly” then their counterparts in Human Resources, or Accounting, for example. This is something that I’ve experienced first hand; I was hired on at a company in 2005 as a Marketing Coordinator, and in about a year was promoted to Marketing Director. A promotion in title wasn’t possible, so it remained the same (but my salary grew) through my tenure there. To take Derr’s point a step further, when one is promoted quickly and has nowhere to go, one’s learning curve plateaus. Once this happens, morale drops (almost infectiously), and culture is negatively affected.
In Derr’s post, he chats with David Olson, President of Walton Consulting, Inc., who suggests,
“The key word is not ‘advancement’ but ‘contribution.’ Most companies from every industry under the sun have this problem. Intrinsically, employees want advancement so they can feel like they are growing and contributing. In an organization that is flat in the area of advancement, you need to engage the employees in other forms of growth, measure the contributions, and encourage them and reward them when their contributions grow.”
Furthermore, Olson explains that when a creative department is feeling isolated from the rest of the company, that fixing it is a leadership discussion.
“It is the leader’s job to show how each department plays a role toward helping the organization succeed, hit its goals, win the game, reach its vision, fulfill its mission, etc. It’s also important, when relevant, to show each department how they serve one another so they feel like they’re on the same team. Bottom line, leadership in any corporate function needs to define company and departmental objectives and then become evangelists in the effort to communicate it on a regular and consistent basis.”
Both men mention that keeping an eye on the culture of a team (and the organization as a whole) is something that should be done at all times.
Via the CreativeExecs Blog.
According to Tom Dorresteijn, chairman of the BNO (The Association of Dutch Designers) and initiator of the research:
“We can now prove the economic-commercial value of design with independent, scientific research. More attention for design within organizations increases financial performance and the quality of product experience. There has been a lot of research on design, but never before did research show a causal relation between investment in design and commercial return.”
…and one other note from the results of the study:
“Involving designers during the development of a new website or house style for an organization, strengthens the image of that organization in areas such as social responsibility, emotional likability, financial success and good employership.”
CEO’s: Have you thanked your design team today?
Via Edenspiekermann.
Throughout my career, both as an in-house designer, and in running my own design business, I’ve seen businesses that seem to take great joy in the design-by-committee mentality… everyone wants to be part of the process, and there are never benefits to this. Think of it this way: if you hire an electrician, do you follow him around all day and tell him how to rewire your house, or do you just trust his expertise and let him fix whatever is wrong?
“My nephew is good at the Photoshop… why don’t you call him? I’m sure he can help… he’s ten.”
“My wife really likes blue. Can you make the red more blue?”
“I really need this to “pop”. Really jump off the page at the reader. Can you bold and underline this whole paragraph?”
Designers, by nature, are problem solvers. We go to school, we attend seminars, and we work tirelessly to perfect our craft, so why do outside departments feel the need to over-supervise us? Here’s my advice. Whether your client is internal or external, ask questions that go beyond the creative brief. Ask questions until you’re blue in the face. You’re working with this person; make yourself an asset to them.
What are the client’s motives?
Why is this project important to them?
What message is most important to them?
What does the client hope to accomplish with this project?
Can you or the client define a measurement of success? Is it a sales goal, a customer action, etc.?
Even if you’re not familiar with the client’s industry (or business), you can use that to your advantage:
“I’m sorry, I’m not really familiar with your field… can you explain it to me?”
“I’d like to get a better understanding of how you see this project fitting in to your overall sales process…”
Show your client that you (and your team) are a valuable resource to the company by communicating, taking the “high road”, and meeting the client (more than) halfway. Most times, the client will see that you’re truly expressing an interest in their project and they’ll let you be the expert when it comes to design.
Speider Schneider from Smashing Magazine explains,
“The sensible answer is to listen, absorb, discuss, be able to defend any design decision with clarity and reason, know when to pick your battles and know when to let go.”
As Speider mentioned, I suspect that with the proper amount of communication (I’m a trained professional), a little push-back (this is why bold-ing the whole paragraph won’t work), and a lot of patience we might just have a shot at changing things.*
Read the inspiration for this article by Speider Schneider here at Smashing Magazine.
*Of course, there are those “clients from hell” that are probably beyond help…
Produced by the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University (my alma mater), and Harvard Medical School at Harvard University, the above infograph was built using over 300 million tweets and shows density-preserving cartograms for each hour of the day (EST), by U.S. state. According to this data, us New Englanders are indeed a cranky bunch, only tweeting happy things in the early morning and late at night! (It also kind of makes me want to drop everything and move to California.)
Download a high-resolution PDF here.
…comes from the Miller Brewing Company and Landor San Francisco. As much of a beer snob that I am, there’s nothing like a frosty High Life on a hot summer’s day, because sometimes a man just likes to kick back and relax with a cheap beer.
Via the DieLine.
“Often the identity of an organization that has many subsets can best be brought to life by the use of its supportive materials within the systems (promotion pieces, packaging, websites, signs, merchandising materials). This is an especially effective methodology because it can allow for a logo or identity system to gain resonance and recognition over time in connection to materials that are capable of being far more expressive than logos. For example the Nike logo, which has evolved over time into its current form, became a powerful symbol to the masses because of its effective use in advertising campaigns. The “cool” of the logo happened in connection to some brilliant campaigns by Wieden & Kennedy, and the effective positioning of the mark on merchandising materials. As pure form, if the “swoosh” appeared alone in a design school critique (or on a design blog) it would most likely have been dismissed as too thin, weak, and pointy, looking like a checkmark and not really conveying motion.”
Via Paula Scher’s article What they don’t teach you in design school, on IdentityWorks.com.
I can hardly believe how fast time goes by when you’re unemployed. Personally, the worst part about it is the amount of downtime I have; there are only so many episodes of ‘Law and Order’ out there, and I’m getting to the point where I can probably pen an entire season. Dick Wolf, if you’re reading this, please call me: I can guarantee you another Emmy.
I’m the kind of person that needs to have something (a job or hobby) occupying his mind at all times. For most of my life, a job was there to keep me engaged in something (with hobbies filling in the gaps), and when I lost my job due to layoffs, my calendar suddenly cleared right up. Again, Mr. Wolf, if you’re reading this, call me.
In any event, as the job growth numbers still don’t look promising, I thought that I might try to sum up my current strategy and share it with my fellow job-seekers. Here’s how I’ve been going about my search for the past few months; I hope that you can find at least one useful idea from my experiences.
Still employed? Have a plan.
At my previous place of employment, I saw the writing on the wall for quite some time and I was already forming a contingency plan for a layoff situation.
If you’re currently employed and it looks as though layoffs are eminent, take this time to get your résumé in shape. While your current responsibilities are still fresh in your mind, start jotting them down and rephrasing them to fit into your résumé. Comb over your previous job descriptions, and at this point it wouldn’t hurt to reconnect with some of your former co-workers or supervisors (if you’re planning on using them as references).
Otherwise, just try to be aware of what’s going on in your industry, your company’s competitors, and your company. Read industry blogs, magazines, and set up news alerts to keep abreast of what’s happening. Arm yourself with as much information as possible, and start preparing your résumé now so you won’t be caught off guard. This goes without saying, but if you suspect that your company is in layoff-mode, start preparing yourself financially, as well!
I just got the axe. Now what? Networking!
Your first action should be to notify those in your personal and professional networks that you’re seeking a new opportunity. These are people that have known you for years, know what you’re capable of, and know your reputation. In other words, they are the people that will go to bat for you. Reach out in person, or even online through sites like twitter and LinkedIn. Nothing can take the place of having a strong network!
Where do I want to work?
If you didn’t make the cut, at least you’ve prepared yourself for it… but now isn’t the time to rest on your laurels.
In my case, I moved back to the Boston area. I made up a list of companies that I wanted to work for- companies whose brands or product I respect- and started bookmarking their websites’ hiring pages in my web browser. When I started, I had about seven companies on my list; now there’s about sixty, and I make sure to visit their hiring pages every week to search for new job postings.
Another tool that I found useful was to visit sites like Boston.com or the Boston Business Journal to read about their annual “Best Places to Work” surveys. This is a great way to find companies in your area who are healthy, and more importantly, hiring.
Personal Branding
The next step, and if you’re looking for a marketing or creative role like I am, is an absolute must.
Design an online portfolio, participate in social networking sites like Facebook and twitter, and make it easy for potential employers to find you. Go ahead, toot you own horn, but be careful not to over-expose your brand. Make sure that if you do have a Facebook page, you have customized the privacy settings appropriately… after all, you don’t want a potential employer looking at all the pictures from your last party, do you?
Sites like Brand Yourself.com and Personal Branding Blog will give you a better idea on how to get started, but the main takeaway here is:
- Be consistent
- Be yourself
- Stay engaged
- Give it time
Inbound Marketing: Getting Others to Notice You
As for inbound marketing, it starts with creating relevant content. Write new things, post things that interest you, or respond to other people’s ideas! Make yourself an expert, and write about what you know.
A good friend of mine, among her other duties, writes press releases and articles for an architecture firm. Often when she writes these pieces, the name of one of the partners of her firm gets attached to the article (as the author) and sent in to various industry trade magazines and blogs. My advice to her was to start her own blog to showcase her writing talents, previous work, and more importantly her extensive knowledge on her industry. By creating her own content and showing her expertise, she could expose her talents to other industry experts, which would lead to the expansion of her personal network, and possibly lead to a job offer.
I’ve read about several people “blogging their way to a job” by having potential employers find them through their personal branding initiatives. Check out blogs like HubSpot’s Internet Marketing Blog (@HubSpot) for great ideas on how you can adapt their principles of inbound marketing (to gain leads and customers) to your personal branding initiatives (to gain the interest of potential employers).
If you have a website or blog, it would be in your best interest to deploy some sort of hit tracking software as well… after all, how are you going to know who is visiting your site, and who is sending traffic to it? There are many ways to do this, but few easier than Google Analytics (it’s free, too).
In my case, if I send out a résumé to “Company X”, and I know that “Company X” is located in Waltham, MA, I can monitor my site traffic to see if anyone from Waltham, MA, or from “Company X’s” network has visited. In sales terms, I found the lead (the job posting), reached out to my customer (the hiring manager), and now the customer has responded to my call to action (“visit my site at joerib.com to view some of my past work…”). This gives me a good indication as to if I should expect a phone call from “Company X”, or at the very least, that my résumé was compelling enough for them to visit my website.
Online Job Posting Sites
Once you’ve established your personal brand, and you’ve got a solid résumé designed, it’s time to post it online. Monster.com (who has recently acquired Yahoo! HotJobs), and Career Builder are still the job-search mainstays, but dig deeper than that. Every industry has specialized job search sites… for creative/marketing folks like myself, take a look at sites like:
- Please Feed the Animals (from the creator of the film ‘Lemonade’)
- Coroflot
- Creative Hotlist
- Authentic Jobs
- Krop
- AIGA
- the Ad Club Job Board
- MITX Career Exchange (New England)
- Koda
Job Delivery
Have an RSS feed reader like iGoogle or Netvibes? Good… time to put it to work for you.
The job posting pages of some companies actually have RSS feeds that you can subscribe to, and most job-search sites do the same. Gather these RSS feeds and make yourself a job-search dashboard on your favorite feed reader. As new opportunities are published, you’ll be alerted to them with no searching involved.
Remember how I mentioned personal branding and creating a network through twitter? This is another area where you can make technology work for you. What I’ve done is to create several search agents through popular twitter dashboard, TweetDeck. Each search term (#boston, #jobs; #boston, #design; #boston, #hiring; etc.) gets it’s own column.
Furthermore, I’ve started following my companies of interest (when applicable) and several twitter accounts that post jobs (or advice) like @Coroflot, @MITX, @AuthenticJobs, @BrandYourself, @JobsBoston, @CreativeBoston, @MonsterCareers, @BrazenCareerist, @JulieSimsTCG, @TalentZoo, @CBforJobSeekers, and @TMJ_BOS_ADV (Tweet my Jobs) to name a few. As content gets published, I’ll get them in my dashboard- live.
If you’re new to twitter, TweetDeck actually has a pretty comprehensive directory to get you started.
Résumés and Cover Letters
By now, you should have found a few places to apply to. Remember that résumé that you started working on back when you still had a job? It’s not finished. It’s always good to have a “generic” version of your résumé, but this should not be the version you send out to a hiring manager. Tailor your generic copy to fit each job you apply for.
Moreover, never use a generic cover letter. Do your homework to find the physical address to the company you’re applying to, and see if the job description mentions a “this position reports to Manager X”. Hop on over to LinkedIn to see if you can find “Manager X” at said company, and you now have an “in”. I’ve found it beneficial to not only apply through the company’s website, but to send a résumé and cover letter directly to the hiring manager and recruiter. LinkedIn has proven itself to be a valuable research tool.
In your cover letter, don’t re-write your résumé:
- Reference the job posting and where you found it
- Introduce yourself to the hiring manager
- After you’ve studied the job posting, write about your past experience and how it fits the need of the hiring manager/company (this is the bulk of your letter, and this should be specifically written for each opportunity)
- Close your letter with a follow-up date and method (and actually do it)
- Don’t forget to spell-check!
Remember to research this company as much as you can. The better you understand their product/service, industry, and challenges, the better you can tailor your résumé and cover letter to the specific needs of that hiring manager and company. Don’t forget- they’re looking to hire someone to fill a need. Explain in your letter that you know what that need is, and how you can fulfill it!
Keep Yourself Busy
Treat your job search like a full time job; if you put effort into your search it will show, and it will yield results. Don’t get complacent, either. If you send out a résumé to one company, don’t sit by your phone. Be proactive, take the initiative, and start looking for new opportunities to apply to!
In your downtime, why not work on your personal brand, do some “just-for-fun projects” (easier to do if you’re a creative), or do some consulting/freelancing to keep your skills sharp?
Successes and Failures
So what’s working for you; what hasn’t worked? Did you employ an unorthodox strategy to gain employment? Share your story in the comments below.
Being a bit of an aviation buff, and an even bigger fan of clever design, this Kulula Airlines Boeing 737 is right up my alley. The design, while very unique and eye-catching, cleverly explains how this particular jet works (and what’s inside of it). I mean, how many of us knew that the famed black box is actually orange?
Via Shanairpic’s Flickr gallery
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