Writing wise, I would like to have ‘a beat’. A small thematic neighbourhood across which I will meander, twirling my truncheon and frowning at miscreants.
If I did have a beat it may be, through no fault of my own, awkward exchanges with the creative job market.
If you don’t already know my tale of woe (by which I mean, mild inconvenience) let me summarise as quickly and uncomplainingly as possible. My first real encounter with joblessness as a copywriter happened a few years ago when the company where I was Head of Copy – a tech firm with about as much emotional intelligence as the bees who murdered Macaulay Culkin in ‘My Girl’ – abruptly canned the entire creative team.
And so I was thrust into a life of involuntary freelance, which actually should have been a lot of fun if I hadn’t become so strange and terrified all the time. So, eager to return to the warm embrace of a job that offered access to one of those futuristic boiling water taps and all the bank holidays I could ever want (seven), I began applying for jobs.
Admittedly, I didn’t do this well. If you’ve ever felt the boot of redundancy in the ample and complacent seat of your corduroy pants (and who among us creatives haven’t) you’ll know that the need to be re-employed often outweighs small matters like reason and dignity.
So, I applied for a lot of copywriting jobs that I desperately did not want to do – and, in an emotionally catastrophic twist of fate, often never got so far as a first interview with most of them. If you’ve ever wanted to gulp down a heady cocktail of anger, shame, bewilderment and relief, then I can highly recommend giving this a go.
Come with me if you want to live
I was then fortunate enough to be rescued, through no sensible choice of my own, by an old pal who had become Head of Creative at a new place and was looking for a senior writer to join him for 12 months. I took it, partly for the joy of working with one of the very best and nicest creative leaders I know, but also partly to save myself from an irresponsible approach to job seeking that was sure to land me in trouble.
After 12 months at that place – having a good time, working with some excellent people, only fretting about the mortgage to an ordinary degree – I voluntarily returned to the job-seeking life, but with a better (and less manic) attitude.
This time, I had lined up some fun freelance projects, had developed a workshop on creative play and had started selling 1-hour calls to anyone who wanted to pick my brains about their creative practice or career. In other words, I had stepped willingly and preparedly into the freelancing life as opposed to last time where it felt more like falling off an open top tour-bus in a part of town solely inhabited by stranglers and raccoons.
But, I still applied for jobs, only this time with a lot more consideration and a lot less stress-indigestion. And, I’ve had some great experiences – including one place who asked me to put together some ideas as part of the interview process and paid me properly to do it. It wasn’t exactly my full hourly rate, but it wasn’t a million miles away and they paid it fully and promptly. I have an awful lot of time for that particular company and the way they handled the entire interview process, not just the bit where they gave me money just so I could try and make them give me a job. I don’t know if they’d want me to trumpet their name all over the place, but if you ever meet me in real life and want to know who they are I’d be happy to tell you. In a world of dirty chicken bums, they are good eggs.
By now I’d realised that putting time and effort (and usually not enough of either) into applying for jobs I’d hate to do was a waste of everyone’s energy. Why it took so long for me to reach such an obvious conclusion is not to be discussed, but I hope it serves as a small window into the lives and burdens of my family.
Instead I picked out the jobs that I knew I would really want to do and applied using something other than panic, bluster and resignation – creativity.
Uncovering letters
As you’ve surely gathered, I’m in no position to offer any creative professional any sort of advice about getting a job. But if you will permit me to say one thing that isn’t entirely futile – you will have far more luck, and gain far more pleasure, from applying for creative jobs in a creative way.
I’m not talking about ‘zany’ stunts like sending a prospective employer a shoebox filled with polaroids of you standing outside (and, somehow, inside) their office. I’m simply talking about using your talents for storytelling and yarn-spinning to talk about your professional skills in a way that shows those skills in action. Choosing more surprising words, leading with more intriguing openings and generally messing with the rules of how an application is supposed to look and sound all makes a difference – providing, of course, that these flourishes are all in service of The Point. Instead of a covering letter I once sent a list of ‘10 Lies You May Have Heard About Andrew Boulton.’ That got me an interview. For another, I sent them ‘My Brutally Honest References’ – a candid list of my weaknesses as a copywriter and a human that, cunningly, were all actually things that made me ideal for the job. Again, it got me an interview.
(A quick aside. You may be wondering why, if I was getting all these interviews, I am not actually performing any of these jobs. The honest answer is I’m not entirely sure, although one or two of them took a decidedly frosty turn when I announced my (admittedly outrageous) salary expectations.)
But I can’t pretend that bringing a creative knife to a recruitment gunfight is really going to even the odds. The recruitment system, even for creative businesses who depend on creative people, is still built around the (often literal) ticking of boxes. We can, and partially should, blame AI for the dehumanisation of what should be an entirely human process. But the reality is that this system isn’t, and has never been, built for people like us.
Questions of incompetency
The most depressing example of this from my wilderness days was an interview with a company I actually really wanted to work with. The role was creative and the expectation for the person who eventually got it was that they would set new creative standards for a business that had perhaps lost its appetite and appreciation for unconventional thinking. This is so far up my street that I’d have to get two buses just to get back home for tea.
But there was a hiccup, and not just because of the stress-indigestion. The interview was something called ‘competency based’. Now, I do know what these things are – my wife, who has a grown-up job often conducts them – but I had never actually had to sit through one for a creative role before.
I perhaps don’t need to tell you that this competency interview did not go well, and it would be fair to say that my opinion of them can largely be contextualised by that. I’m just not sure that it’s the best way to evaluate someone for a creative role, particularly a creative leadership role. The structure of the questions, presumably designed to keep candidates focussed on specific, measurable points, serve as a highly effective personality shackle – keeping you so focussed on a time you did a thing, and why you did that thing, and what things that thing produced, to the point where you stop thinking of yourself as a real person and merely an underwritten character in a small and uninteresting scene. The more of these questions I was asked, and the more I tried to play by the rules, the less excited I got about doing the job. Perhaps this is hopelessly naïve of me, but the feeling you have at the end of an interview may be exhilaration, or despair or even exhaustion, like you’ve just climbed a slippery mountain or kayaked away from a barracuda. What you shouldn’t feel though, is boredom.
I feel sad about that interview because I feel like we’d all forgotten to invite creativity to the meeting. I didn’t get to show what I can do, and maybe that’s my fault for trying to play my part as opposed to simply playing. And, while the formula was followed and the boxes got ticked, I’m not sure any of the people interviewing could really have got much out of something so sparkless and neat.
So, as you can see, this really is my writerly beat of sorts. I never meant it to be, and I certainly wouldn’t want you to follow my advice or be guided by my muddling, stumbling footsteps. This stuff is too hard and too unknowable and too merciless for anyone to offer you any promises about how it will work. But I do believe that creative people doing creative things will always win you something that matters more than the covering letter and the CV and the form that asks you for everything that’s already there in the CV. And that thing is curiosity. That small itch in even the busiest, most indifferent, minds that says: ‘who is this person?’. Better to roll that particular dice and lose than to be just another form without a face, just another candidate without a canvas.
Some copywriting books I’ve written:
Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter
