Welcome to my first blog post of the series, which will be talking you through the entire process of landing your dream job.
Part 1, Searching For A Job.
I’m going to work with a few examples here of why you might currently be looking for a job:
- You’re new in the industry and you want to land your first job in the creative industry.
- You’ve just been made redundant and you’re keen to land another job soon.
- You’re currently employed, but you want to move on. Maybe you hate your boss, or you’re looking to work on more exciting projects, progress up the career ladder, better work life balance, higher salary..the list goes on!
But where do you start when you’re searching for a job? First off, do a bit of soul searching and find out your ‘Why?’ and then your ‘What.’
Your ‘Why’s’ are.. Why this company? Why this salary? Why this location? Why this sector? Because once you know ‘why’, you’ll apply all of this to your job application when reaching out to hiring managers.
The ‘What’s’ are.. What am I hoping to get out of this role? What can I offer this company that will make them hire me? What direction am I hoping it will steer me towards?
Whenever I start working with a creative, what I really want to know is what they are looking for and why. So if you’re representing yourself, you really need to ask yourself these questions.
Where a lot of job seekers go wrong, is they get a bit Gung ho about the whole job search thing. They will put together a standard CV and portfolio send their application to absolutely every job they see that relatively matches what they are looking for. This approach is pretty ‘spray and pray’ and it very rarely ends up opening the right doors.
Then people get disheartened when they start to receive rejection emails, or even worse, no reply’s. Then they go to their family and friends and complain that they didn’t hear back, even from the jobs they didn’t want!
So my advice is do yourself a really big favour and just slow down for a minute. And start with a 10-15 company wish list.
Then go on the companies websites and see if they have any jobs that match your experience, read through the job descriptions carefully and check all the things they are looking for match your experience.
If a job needs digital skills or someone from a branding background and you don’t have any of these skills, this might not be the right company for you (yet) but it’s one you can work towards having the right background for, by creating a side hustle/ passion project, that reflects the type of work they do and the skill sets they are looking for (I’ll get onto side hustles and passion projects later.)
Another good place to look is jobs boards, you can start here at www.graphicdesignjobs.co.uk or a good list to get you started is:
https://www.ifyoucouldjobs.com/
https://the-dots.com/feed
https://www.linkedin.com/
Once you see some jobs you like the look of, you need to take a look at your own cv and portfolio and think about how you can present yourself to appeal to these companies.
I’m going to get onto that next week, when we go through all the ways you can package yourself up and market yourself to the companies you really want to work for!
Until then, get looking and ask yourself ‘why’ and ‘what.’
