The Creative Party
Whether you want to get hired in the creative industry or are hiring for your creative team, there are a few things to keep in mind. Luckily, the folks at creative staffing agency, The Creative Party (Mathys+Potestio) know a thing or two about hiring.
Below, they share a few tips for those who are building a team or looking for a job in the creative industry.
We’ve been in Austin since 2013, helping creatives find meaningful jobs at agencies, corporations, and everything in between. We started in Portland in 2010 and were founded by two creatives (a copywriter and designer); our longest serving Austin employee Molly Wiley (a designer) has been around since 2014, Nicole Holle (producer) started in 2015, and Britney Jo Styer (developer, designer) joined at the start of 2019.
In addition to finding the community great jobs, we also provide opportunities for networking and education… or we did when we could all be in a room together! Our event series is called RuNT and focused on bringing the creative community together to hear from local luminaries and meet one another. Plus, Britney Jo still teaches at General Assembly and all of us regularly take part in local events as panelists or moderators.
Britney Jo: Be patient. Be proactive — check out your LinkedIn network, attend industry meetups/events. And work on your portfolio! This is your first impression for hiring managers, so don’t let it fall to the wayside. Let it be a place for you to continually show off what you’re working on, even if it’s a passion project, pro bono work for a non-profit organization, or a challenge you’ve set out to meet like Inktober. If you’re making stuff, show it off.
And while this may sound self-serving: talk to a recruiter. It may not immediately elicit a job or an interview, but it will feel like movement in your job search. It can be hard to play the long game but it often pays off.
Molly: I agree with everything Britney Jo said. Something that caught my eye recently was a portfolio that had little quoatables that made me laugh. It showed they didn’t take themselves too seriously, and it was a unique addition to a portfolio that stood out to me in the dozens of portfolios I look at each week.
Britney Jo: Such a loaded question! But we start by learning *cough our ADW event* and then doing.
Molly: Hire people with different perspectives! There are so many different ways to approach a creative problem and if you make it a point to hire people with different points of view, a new perspective will be brought to light. Hiring a team of all the same people is boring.
Molly: I’ve been sharing ADW20 with a lot of people outside of Austin! It’s a unique situation to have so many amazing virtual events that I think a lot of people can benefit from. I’m excited to see how many attendees are in different markets, now that we’re able to do a lot more remote hiring.
This year has had us embracing — can you believe it? — remote work. Just like everyone else. But we have always had remote employees, and this year has definitely helped us to understand what we’ve done well and what needed to be changed. The philosophy at M+P has always been that we didn’t care where you were filling jobs or how you were conducting a one on one or when you were in the office; as long as your work was being done and you were treating people well, we trusted you.
That’s still true, but we’ve also been thinking a lot about what people need to be successful. After all, our long time remote employees had opted into that from the beginning; now we have people who never wanted to work remotely, enjoyed office life, and don’t work as well in this new siloed reality. So we’ve been doing more work to ensure that people feel appreciated, supported, and equipped to get their jobs done.
Molly: I’m embracing the ‘work from anywhere’ lifestyle. For the first time ever, my household is able to drive across the country working from places we’ve never been before. It’s a wild silver lining to be able to take this time to travel safely to new places and get fresh creative inspiration from those around us.
Britney Jo: I love the “embracing remote work.” It’s been so refreshing to chat to people with real life happening in the background - dogs, babies, working partners. This year has been a rough one to say the least, but connecting with people all over the country has been amazing and a good reminder that we can get things done even in the toughest of times.
Thank you to The Creative Party (M+P) for sponsoring ADW20! Join them virtually on Monday, November 9th for their ADW event, Do Better, Hire Better: Building Teams That Reflect Our Communities.