Corporate Recruiters Don't Actually

Recruiting means something. 

It means going out and enlisting help, or engaging someone to join your organization.

It's active. It's even proactive.

Unless you consider corporate recruiting. In that form of recruiting, it's incumbent on the recruit to be the active one. The corporate recruiters base all their activity on being reactive.

When you read the words “college recruiting” the images in your head are magical.

Trips to campus.

Meals with coaches.

A college showing young athletes that their skills are not just wanted but also highly coveted.

Every aspect of the process is carefully orchestrated to convey one simple fact—we want you more than everyone else does. For the next four years, we'll be your surrogate family.

When you read the words “corporate recruiting” the images are exactly and intensely opposite.

They’re mundane.

They’re exhaustive online forms that are a copy/paste from your résumé—that you must also attach.

They’re a mandatory list of references before you’ve even interviewed.

They’re a requirement to tell a possible employer what your salary history has been—so they can low-ball you or find a cheaper alternative.

As with college recruiting, every aspect of the corporate recruiting process is carefully orchestrated to convey a simple fact—we expect you to beg for a job. And to be grateful if you ever hear from us because we have hundreds of applicants and we can't possibly connect with all of them.

College recruiting is all about spotting, scouting and wooing talent.

Corporate recruiting is all about telling people you know to tell people they know that you have an open position, and they should send a résumé. Or posting on countless job sites. Or spamming social media networks. Or any of a hundred other less active ways of finding and securing talent. 

When you do submit a résumé and fill out the exhaustive online application, 99 times out of 100 you won’t receive a response.

Not even a form letter.

Let’s dispense with the pretense that HR Recruiters actually recruit.

They fill gaps in the corporate structure.

They’re caulk.

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Shaking My Head At Ad Agencies

I've spent many days recently in a state of head-shaking bemusement. I'm bemused by a variety of articles and posts from ad agency professionals about the PepsiCo video debacle. My greatest amusement​ has come from the morally superior voices who claim that it's proof that in-house creative is to blame. 

They all trade on one basic belief, "Ad agencies would have stopped that"!

Nonsense.

Ad agencies can't stop themselves​ from having a lack of diversity. Ad agencies can't stop themselves from underpaying women. Ad agencies can't stop themselves from cashing big checks for digital media that only gets seen by bots. Ad agencies can't stop themselves from rigging production bids. 

I could continue ad nauseaum.

Plus, if an agency had said, "No. We won't execute that idea." their holding company would have executed them for hurting shareholder value and turning down such high-profile work. 

This won't be a death knell for in-house creative groups. I'm sure it will be quite the opposite. It will hasten the process and deepen the resolve of companies who were contemplating it. 

No one wants to hire a know-it-all hypocrite.

Twelve Rules

All of our lives we're surrounded by rules.

"Don't run in the hallway."

"Don't play ball in the house."

"No shoes. No shirt. No service."

All to often, these rules tell us what not to do. And they're usually very context specific. It seems to me there are twelve very basic rules that are foundational to the rest. (Yes, I'm ignoring the "golden rule," all ten of the commandments and every other form of religious doctrine.)

These rules are more about what to do. They apply to work, parenting, gardening, and life in general. The quick list is:

1. Keep your word.
2. Do your best. Always.
3. When you have to eat a turd, don't nibble.
4. Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.
5. When the job is done, walk away.
6. Don't believe. Verify.
7. You panic. You drown.
8. Choices have consequences.
9. Clean up after yourself.
10. Leave room for chaos.
11. Life ain't fair.
12. Be the quiet fox.

TheKiddo™would probably tell you I have lots more rules than that. Admittedly, I do still yell, "Look both ways"! as she's crossing the street. So she would have a point. My counter, however, would be that I'm merely reminding her of rule 2, and crossing the street without looking isn't her best.

Growing Up Too Fast

If you build it, they won't come

While reading an article about a start-up company that had to "pivot" away from the "game changing" app they had been planning to make, there was a sentence from one of their major investors that sums up so much of what is wrong with business thought in the early 21st century.

... it would have to be done in such a way that the restaurants come to you and you don't have to go and sell to them ...

Ignoring the annoying lack of punctuation in that sentence (which is a lot harder than you can imagine), the very hubris of it is glaring.

I don't have to sell. My product/app/jim-crack/gee-gaw will be so blindingly awesome that everyone will want it!

This isn't "Field of Dreams."

If you want to grow a business, you must market that business.

If you want to increase sales, you must sell.

If you want to get noticed, you must advertise.

Creativity Requires Tenacity

Standing in my garden among several hundred onions and garlic, I gazed down at one of the many nemesis I had been facing. The current one was a bit of henbit (or lamium aplexicaule if you prefer) that simply needed to be removed.

Yes, I know, some folks like to eat it. I prefer to think of henbit as a yet another weed that needs to be removed from my vegetables, and fed to the chickens. I'd been at it for a couple of hours wdhen I'd spotted this weed. During that time, I became more and more disturbed by the pervasiveness of the weeds.

This particular piece of henbit was so large, and encroaching on my garlic, that I wondered how I hadn't seen it first.

Then I recalled the first ad I ever wrote.

After I read the creative brief (which I helped write - but that's another story for another time), I began work on the project with headlines.

I first wrote the most obvious and on-the-nose headline I could imagine, "We sell insurance and investment products, and you should buy them from us."

I started with the obvious, because it focused my attention on what the ad needed to convey. It was a conscious effort to reduce the creative brief into something more the length of a haiku. Plus, I knew it could only get better.

Then I started writing more headlines.

And more headlines.

Page after page of headlines on my legal pad. And I had a whiteboard filled with words that struck a nerve with me.

Most of them were awful. Just limp, little, half-formed ideas begging to be tossed in the waste.

So I started weeding. Pulling and cutting and getting rid of the ones that were just taking up space and getting in the way.

After the weeding, I had to plant. So I wrote more headlines.

Another page on the pad filled quickly.

As I wrote, I kept weeding until I had a dozen or so headlines that I thought were worth sharing with my Art Director partner. (Yes boys and girls, back in those days there were still copywriter/art director teams.)

When I showed him what I had, he looked at the one I had written at the top of my pad, and said, "That's brilliant. Why'd you bother writing more?"

The reality was, that I'd written that particular headline as one of the last ones. I just happened to like it so I wrote it at the top of a new page on my pad before showing him. Sure, I'd written a few more after; however, it was hardly the first one I wrote, regardless of how it must have appeared when I handed him a notepad with that headline at the top.

Just like the henbit that perturbed me, the headline we settled on to pitch to the client wasn't the first one. It just became more and more obvious as I weeded a lot of others out of the way.

I didn't stop at one ugly headline, any more than I'd stop after pulling one ugly weed.

I kept working until I'd found something worth writing.

The weeds will always return. There will always be more for me to yank, and feed to the chickens or toss into the compost bin.

And I'll be there, just as I was when trying to write that first ad.

Because I'm far more tenacious than any weed.

Potatoes Growing & Cucumbers Planted

Time And Patience Are Powerful Allies

Each spring when the flowers bloom, the garden reminds me that you cannot rush beauty.

We forget this far too often, especially when it comes to businesses such as advertising. Conversations and thoughts and meetings and articles always seem to be about the newest shiny object, or the next offer, or the promotion to end all promotions.

The work suffers as a result. There's no time to let it grow and mature. There's no space to let it root and develop. Ideas are sown and harvested in matter of hours or days.

I'm as guilty of this as anyone. I've written video scripts in just a couple of hours, and developed second and third versions is half the time (or less).

I get it. Clients sign the checks on the front, Service providers sign them on the back. We have to keep clients happy so we can keep the lights on.

So clients have incredible power to dictate timelines.

Clients have needs. Clients have deadlines. Clients want it fast and good and cheap (so much for the days of only being able to pick two of three). And with crowdsourcing, design outsourcing, and a gig economy that rewards the lowest bidder more often than it rewards craftsmanship, the competition for clients' attentions and budgets is increasingly fierce.

We don't take the opportunity to sort the seeds of ideas by hanging them all over the office wall (ignoring for a moment the fact that office walls themselves are vanishing in favor of the creative-killing idea of open-floor-plan collaborative environments).

We don't let the seeds germinate by taking walks. Going to a movie. Having a beer in the afternoon. Anything but staring at the seeds.

We don't sow them, fertilize them and water them well by adjusting each syllable so the poetry and impact are both maximized; kerning the type so it welcomes the eye; adjusting leading and line spacing to remove unsightly widows and random breaks.

We don't prepare for a bountiful harvest by diversifying, preferring specialized monocultures (POP, email, content management, apps, social media) instead of holistic, integrated campaigns.

And that creates lifeless, listless, less-than-memorable creative work that is as commoditized as the majority of products they sell. The moments when I see a piece of creative work and think, "Damn. I wish I'd done that." are fewer and farther between than ever before.

Because we simply don't allow time for the harvest to ripen.

When we do have the opportunity to stop and plant the roses, as well as smell them, we must cherish and celebrate it. For with time and patience, great beauty will emerge.

More Tomatoes

 In addition to the plots in the community garden, have dug some area in the backyard this year. We're using old pallets as the borders.

Five more tomato plants, peppers, and herbs are the beginning.

Going to experiment with not using cages on these tomatoes, and see if they can be simply tied to a wire fence.

Another Attempt At Potatoes

Over the last few years, I've made several unsuccessful attempts at growing potatoes. Did have a few purple potatoes grow when I planted rows one year; however, those few spuds were the exception to the rule.

After taking a year off after the ill-fated efforts with building potato boxes, I stumbled across a method using hay and compost.

Create a wire cage about 3' in diameter.
Pile up some hay about 10" deep.
Top with a few inches of compost.
Place seed potatoes around the edge with eyes facing outward.
Cover with a layer of hay about 10" deep.
Repeat layers as desired.

Created two layers.
Here's hoping all goes well.

From Grow Lights To Greenhouses

With the success of the DIY grow lights, we realized we needed to transplant the majority of the tomatoes so we could put them in a greenhouse. There were, however, two immediate problems.

1. There are almost 100 plants needing more space.
2. We don't have a greenhouse.

Since we didn't want to build a greenhouse in the back yard (yet), we opted to try portable greenhouses - clear plastic bins that could hold 20 to 25 tomato plants in red cups (our preferred container for the growth from seedling to plant before it is placed in the Earth).

We mixed our potting medium. Transplanted the seedlings. Gave them a soak in compost tea - there are holes drilled in the bottom of the cups so osmosis ensures that the soil absorbs the moisture. Then placed them in a portable greenhouse.

Less than five days have elapsed.

The results have been astonishing.

We're going to need a bigger greenhouse.