Matthew T Grant

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Tall Guy. Glasses.

Apr 9, 2009 Comments Off on I’ll Ask the Questions Here

I’ll Ask the Questions Here

This was one of my first posts on Aquent’s Talent Blog, November 3, 2006

What if you went into a job interview and asked all the questions?

2326448445_254db07d4f_mThe web is rife with tips on how to interview successfully. You can find them here and here and here. For the contrarians among you, there are even tips on interviewing unsuccessfully.

The tipsters all emphasize being prepared, which is unassailably sound advice, as any Boy Scout would tell you, but they don’t point out something that might make you rethink your entire approach to interviewing: Interviewers are often unprepared!

While some companies have thoroughly developed and well-defined processes for interviewing people (and will even provide you with a detailed overview of said processes beforehand), many companies do not. In fact, as these tips for interviewers from Monster imply, the interviewing process subjects interviewers themselves to a lot of stress.

So what does this mean to you as a marketing professional approaching an upcoming interview? It should encourage you to play an active role in the interview and work hard to make it a conversation rather than an interrogation. Don’t be afraid to take the lead and start off by asking questions, especially thoughtful, well-crafted questions that demonstrate your knowledge and experience while simultaneously conveying your interest in the position. As a kind of test, ask yourself, Could I get a job offer based solely on these questions I’m asking?

Asking questions, especially from the outset, will take some pressure off the interviewer and, ideally, provide you with insights that will allow you to present your own qualifications in the context of the role. This is key, for while the interviewer will inevitably ask you what you have done for others, she is most interested in discovering what you will do for her, her team, and her organization. There is no better way to do that then by peppering any discussion of your talents and triumphs with specific references to the challenges she is currently facing.

Ultimately, by engaging in a conversation about the role rather than submitting to an interview for it, you will accomplish two things. First, you will more readily be seen as a colleague or a peer than a candidate. In a sense, you will already have entered the interviewer’s world.

Secondly, and most importantly, if in this conversation you can project a sincere eagerness to learn and contribute to the success of the enterprise, you will send the message that every interviewer wants to hear: Not only can I do this job, I’m already thinking about how I’m going to get it done. Let’s get started right now!

Image Courtesy of Sean Dreilinger.

Apr 9, 2009 Comments Off on Is this Downturn “Less Bad” for the Creative Class?

Is this Downturn “Less Bad” for the Creative Class?

This post originally appeared on Aquent’s Talent Blog, February 23, 2009

2239558273_64efa8f7d7_m.jpgI heard Richard Florida on the radio this morning. You may remember him as the author of The Rise of the Creative Class, which traced “the fundamental theme that runs through a host of seemingly unrelated changes in American society: the growing role of creativity in our economy.”

Anyway, he was talking about America’s post-crash geography and mentioned that, while recessions have been traditionally bad for the working class, the creative class is still doing alright. When I checked the stats to which he was referring, I found that “alright” really means “less bad.”

Turns out, as in the past, this recession is extra hard on the working class. Jobs in production are down 12.9% since last year, and jobs in “construction & extraction” are down 14.2%. By comparison, jobs in arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media, as well as jobs in architecture and engineering, are down a mere 5.4%. So, “down,” but not “as down.”

Where is growth happening? In the sectors Florida calls “eds and meds,” that is, higher education and healthcare. For example, jobs in “healthcare support” have increased by 10.4% year over year.

My question is: Does this mean that marketing, communication, and design work related to healthcare is also or will be on the rise? What are you finding?

Image Courtesy of Buster McLeod.

Apr 8, 2009 Comments Off on “Interweb the Rainbow” or the Rise of Aleatoric Design

“Interweb the Rainbow” or the Rise of Aleatoric Design

This was my last official post for Aquent’s Talent Blog, March 4, 2009. I explored some of the implications of aleatoric design on Marketing Profs’ Daily Fix Blog.

Ms. Pistachio was the first to alert me, via Twitter, natch, that Skittles had gone all Social Media on us. Sure as shootin’, the current (March 2, 2009) Skittles.com is a mash-up of social media sites where the name of the colorful and intoxicatingly concentrated jelly-bean-oidal confection appears.

Of course, Skittles, with the aid of Agency.com, are following in the footsteps of Modernista!, who took their own website in this direction last year. Still, the fact that a consumer brand has emulated a trendy design shop has got everybody talking, including the ever articulate (and strikingly handsome) David Armano, who rightly predicts, I believe, that we’ll see more of this, not less and goes on to link the Skittle move to the emergence of “sponsored conversations.”

But what is this “this” that we’re going to be seeing more of? I think it’s something we could call “aleatoric” design which takes advantage of the fact that web pages, in the end, exist as a set of instructions to be executed by a browser, not a fixed arrangement of text and image (as in the print world). Since these instructions can be linked to dynamic sites themselves (Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.), design now becomes the quasi-symphonic arrangement of fluid elements that resist control or even predictability.

Given this tendency, wouldn’t it be better for web designers to have a background in performance, choreography, or musical composition than graphic arts? Isn’t it time we acknowledged that interactive design is NOT graphic design (or that the latter is an increasingly small and incidental component of the former)?

Apr 8, 2009 Comments Off on Why Culture/Personality Fit May Matter Less to Web Talent

Why Culture/Personality Fit May Matter Less to Web Talent

This post originally appeared on Aquent’s Talent Blog, February 25, 2009

468955567_70268757d8_m.jpgI’m still trying to figure this out. When you ask web professionals and the people who recruit or hire them to evaluate the importance of the various attributes used to distinguish one Web candidate from another, you get some strong agreement – both groups are in accord that work experience and a specialized skill set are the most important attributes – but you also get some interesting disagreements.

To whit, personality/cultural fit is only important to 90% of web professionals, while it’s important to a full 98% of employers. I’ve made my views on the fit issue crystal clear, so I won’t repeat them here, but I will say that, in the staffing industry, there’s an old saw that goes, “Hire for skills, fire for fit.” In other words, fit definitely impacts on-the-job success. So why the gap?

There are two things I mentioned in my last post on this subject that may explain why web folk view “fit” as, if not totally unimportant, then, at least, less important.

First of all, web professionals want flexible work schedules and the ability to work from home (87% see it as important when considering a new job opportunity). Could it be that “fit” declines in importance when you realize that you won’t actually be working directly with others in a particular environment?

Secondly, as we discovered, 43% of working web professionals plan on looking for a new job within the next 12 months and another 35% say they would consider making a move if the right thing came along. It makes sense that fit is going to matter less to you if you’re a short-timer, then if you’re settling in for the long haul, right?

So much for my speculation on this topic. How sound do these explanations, er, sound?

Note: I’ll probably be mining the research on the state of the web profession we conducted with Monster for a while here. If you’d like to dig into it yourself, please do so and then feel free to share your insights.

Image Courtesy of freeparking.