While it is true that agency principals (owners) are interested in hiring talented, creative people with solid training from reputable schools, the single most important factor they look for is whether this person can make an immediate and ongoing contribution to the operation of their business. Will this person's work support the salary and benefits the agency will have to pay? The new employee must be able to come into the agency on Day One with little or no supervision and begin to do work that is billable. Billable work is anything done for a client that can be billed directly to that client. If someone in the agency has to train a new employee, the new employee will be a liability to the agency, and the "trainer" will not be clocking in billable hours, either. So even if someone has plenty of talent, a string of impressive degrees, and an eye-popping portfolio, it does not mean that that person has the qualifications that can be readily utilized by an agency.
So, you may be saying to yourself, 'Then how am I going to get a job in an agency if I've never worked in an agency and have no practical experience to offer?" That, of course, is the age old rub-you need experience to get the job, and you need the job to get experience. But do not be discouraged. You will discover as you read this book that you in fact do have experiences that are valuable to an agency. While that experience may have nothing to do with advertising, it still can be applied to the ongoing, billable work of an agency. And it is that experience, not your overflowing creativity and talent, that will make you attractive to a potential employer.
For instance, you may be interested in finding a position as a graphic designer, but other than a portfolio filled with school projects, you have no actual experience in taking a real graphics job from start to finish. However, when you think back on your past employment experiences-summer jobs, etc.-you remember that you worked two summers and a full semester as a clerk in a clothing store. In that job you had to know about clothing-brand names, styles, and materials. You also had to understand what motivated people (your customers) to be attracted to and want to buy the various styles of clothing your store sold. You had to know how to approach the people who came into the store, to get them to talk with you and to tell you what they were looking for. Then you had to help them make their selections and encourage them, without being pushy, to make a final decision to purchase the clothing. You had to work cooperatively with other salespeople. You were even involved in taking inventory and placing orders with clothing suppliers to replenish stock. Now, how does that kind of experience apply to an ad agency?
Your background would be an asset to an agency because your experience with customers in sales would have prepared you to feel comfortable to call and meet with clients for pick-ups, deliveries, and approvals on art work during various stages of a project. This would save the account executives from having to do a lot of running around to meet with clients when their expertise was not really necessary. That would free them up to spend more time bringing in new business. Your inventory and record-keeping experience was great preparation for calling or meeting with printers, typesetters, and other vendors to get price quotes for projects, maintaining project files, keeping track of prices and expenses, and recording time sheet hours. Your design school training certainly prepared you to handle many different phases of a graphics project, such as preparing paste ups and overlays, transferring rough layout sketches into more finished pieces of work, proofing boards and type, and so on. That work would free up more experienced people to do other billable work. While you were doing all of this, you would of course be closely watching people in the graphics department and making it your business to learn everything you could about taking a project to completion. When you were ready, you would begin to take on more responsibility in a project. In addition, if you were working for an agency that handled retail clothing-store accounts, you would be a valuable addition to the creative team because you would know about styles and trends, brand names, and what motivates customers to buy.
This example illustrates how any kind of experience, whether it is job- or school-related, is an excellent resource for transferable skills that can be put to immediate use by an agency. Even extracurricular activities like working on the school newspaper or yearbook or being a class officer can be an excellent source of employment preparation. You will find, as you look back on your own past with the help of the exercises in the upcoming chapters, that you will have numerous experiences to draw upon that can be applied to agency work. Once you identify that experience, you then need to communicate in a cover letter and again during an interview what and how it can be put to use by the agency. This would show them that if you were hired, you could hit the ground running.
