Advice for a brutal job market.

I swear to god if I see another post on LinkedIn about AI and ‘em dashes’ I’m going to throw my laptop into the sea.

I’m not sure what motivates someone to see the 715th post moaning about the same topic to go ‘that’s it, I’m going to do the 716th annoying post about this, that’s what everyone will love’, but it seems to be how a lot of people operate. Content to fit in with the chorus of noise, rather than stand out from the crowd.

Then this hit my feed from Loz Maneschi @ Cocogun.

Finally, like in much of life, amidst a sea of meandering and pontificating - a creative person DOES SOMETHING. They see a problem, a moment in the cultural zeitgeist, an annoying obstacle in their path - and choose not to add to the nothing pile, but instead turn it into a simple, funny, subversive, attention-grabbing opportunity. (And some quite nice art direction to boot.)

It’s a nice little analogy for this post/newsletter that may at first seem like a lot of harsh truths, but I promise it’s being written with empathy and effort aimed at helping people navigate a rapidly changing and brutally cut throat job market at present.

We recently put up a couple of roles that understandably hammered our DMs and e-mails. It’s tough out there. It’s competitive. And that’s why I’m writing this - not to lecture, but to hopefully provide some perspective that might help someone get their shot.

Two years ago I wrote a post titled “Trust me, I’m creative” isn’t going to cut it., and it’s probably twice as relevant now as it was then. Thrice. Quadrice, even.

Budgets are shrinking. The economy is slow. Global tensions are causing ripples everywhere. When it comes to time and money, people running agencies are living on a knife’s edge. There’s just no time or resources for passengers. And that’s not to say that anyone reading this is one - but we don’t have the bandwith to fill in the gaps. We’re in the problem solving business. We need people who run towards the fire. We need to know you can do the thing and hit the ground running.

Because ‘Trust me, I’m creative’ isn’t going to cut it.

There were a lot of common themes.

People declaring they were stuck in creative ‘purgatory’ and ‘hell’. (This is some of the actual language people used to describe their in-house roles. Perhaps a peek behind what’s often presented as a glossier veneer than agency land.)

A lot of ‘not getting any good briefs’ and ‘just needing a chance to show what they can do’ in response to their frustrating agency situation.

Experienced creatives who took an easier role at a more conservative agency, or client-side, 7 or 8 years ago, now wanting to ‘move back’ after that situation dried up - but now had very little new work in their folio.

I can totally empathise will all of these situations, and I’ve felt them myself to a certain degree somewhere along the way, but the truth of the matter is - you can’t be 1 of 100 people saying ‘I just need a chance’.

The era of sitting around waiting for opportunities to fall in your lap is long gone. Agencies are not drowning in great briefs, even the good ones. They’re smaller and leaner and stacked with more industrious talent that proactively hunt down and extract those opportunities. And those are the people we’re looking for.

That’s the penny that needs to fall, I think. That no one is sitting around ‘waiting for a chance’ on the greener side, either. There’s not a teeming well of opportunity inside a different office. There’s just a different group of people with a different mindset. The most recent hire we made was a creative that had a big, clever, subversive proactive idea in their book that they fought to get made. Something that no one asked them or briefed them to do.

Your best bet moving forward, junior, senior, CD, whatever level you see yourself at - is to run at the problem like that. Run at it like Loz, Lewis, Ant, and Mollie did at the em-dash. See the crack in the door and kick it down. You don’t need permission to create. You don’t need a brief to ‘show what you can do’. We’ve never been surrounded by more tools to help us make things, and quickly, and platforms to project them out to a massive audience.

This is something I’ve been talking about for years.

Recently, I wrote about how the future of creative agencies will be about ‘creative agency’. (Not just a clever play on words, but something we’ve embraced by creating our own brand. All of it. From the ground up. And I mean all of it. Formulated, designed, manufactured, shipped, illustrated, animated, voiced, acted, we’re in EVERYTHING.)

Here’s the story of how I got a job in an agency with a proactive idea. 

Here’s a piece I wrote off the back of a proactive idea that bled into various forms of culture. 

Here’s a proactive piece of work I created in 2020, while running an agency, during a pandemic, that was acquired by the Melbourne Museum and State Library.

All of these ideas, much like the one that influenced our recent hire, much like the ‘am-dash’, could light a fire under your folio and career. And none of them required a brief or a chance.

Just creative industriousness.

It’s always been what separated the great creatives from the good. But moving forward, in an era of automation squeezing a shrinking talent pool, it might actually be what defines one altogether. 

Go and make some shit. Put a dent in the world. Who knows, you might even end up with more than ‘a job’. You might end up with something even better.