Resume "Revolution"

I just found a Tweet linking to an article about The Three Things Every Resume Must Have. While, it's interesting advice, I have to mention it also all really needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

ANY resume advice should be, really. Resume and job-hunting advice is out there by the hundreds... nay, thousands... of blogs, articles and employment sites.

I do have some advice to add to the clutter, thank you. But mine is simpler: take what you read and toss 90% of it out the window. It's stuff you already know. And at the point when an employer is receiving hundreds of resumes, that "one thing you MUST have to make your resume stand out" isn't going to stand out anymore, because everyone else is reading that advice too.

What's more, I've read so much conflicting advice on how-to's, that it all really just comes down to tailoring your resume to the job you're applying for.

For an example of conflict, one site says that you MUST have a job objective/summary, otherwise it implies you have no direction for your career. In this economy, I don't think very many people have a direction anymore except to be employed. I've read on multiple other sites that say no employer even looks at the objectives anymore. One site says you have to have a section for "personal attributes" or else you have no way to stand out from the crowd. Others say it amounts to fluffing your resume and taking up valuable space where you could show potential employers what your skills really are... in jobs you've already held, not in the land of "what I wish I was like and want you to think I have".

So what do you believe, and what do you actually write?

Honestly, the Keep-It-Simple-Stupid method has worked best for me. And that's even with adding some graphic kick to mine (since I'm in a creative industry and it's almost necessary to show some of that creativity in a resume. Again, the conflict of the job advice. I've seen articles that say you can absolutely, never, ever, ever, never make your resume creative, because it ruins your chances of being hired. To that I say, "Whatever works for YOU, doesn't work for ME.").

The things that do work for most of us: Keep it simple, clean, and under 2 pages long. List relevant items and show exactly what you've done for a company. Pay attention to the articles that tell you the order to list your jobs or school in order to highlight your strengths and downplay weaknesses. Make sure your grammar and spelling is 100% correct. All the other fluff and advice? Toss it out the window at your own discretion.

There's no scientifically proven method of one extra bit of information being listed over another, no matter who tries to tell you their way is the best or only way to get noticed. Try the things that seem like they're relevant for you or the industry. If it doesn't work, tweak it and try again the next time. There's no magic method or scientific formula for doing this, unfortunately. The good news is, if you're getting interviews, then your resume is fine.

If you're not getting hired after the interviews... well, that's another issue entirely and one that has nothing to do with whether or not you put your objectives on your resume.

Wal-Mart Just Keeps on Getting Worse

Just when I thought I couldn't despise the retail chain any more... they given me a reason.

I've sworn time after time that I will never go there again, and yet keep getting dragged there by others because it's "convenient". Admittedly, it is convenient, but I think that's all they really have going for them. We've gone there because it's easier to run all our errands in one place, household, clothes and groceries all in one location, but it's always immensely frustrating in the end.

First of all, their selection of groceries is awful. They don't carry some of what we buy regularly, so we end up having to stop somewhere else anyway. The meat they carry is simply disgusting, either already turning brown or is the cheapest, toughest, stringiest cuts they can possibly get their hands on. The fruit turns brown or molds within a couple of days of bringing it home, which makes me think they only purchase from people who can't unload their goods at any decent store.

But we've worked around that. We simply don't buy meat or fruit or anything else that's "fresh" there.

However, the other day, they dropped below the lowliest thrift store in my book. Now don't get me wrong, I've shopped thrift before. I like browsing garage sales and thrift stores, because sometimes you find absolute gems there. And I enjoy saving money on something that would have cost me a lot of money in a department store. I don't like throwing money away, and I'm not a shopping snob that will only buy name brands. In fact, I very rarely pick up name brand when I can get the exact same thing for less somewhere else and under a different label.

I was trying to find a couple of little things in the clothing department that I could wear to work. Nothing fancy, really, just a little skirt and a couple of shirts to help extend my wardrobe a little. I usually look things over before I buy them, but this time I didn't, so that part's my fault. However, there was nothing on the tag to indicate it was anything but the standard price or that it was "irregular". I got to the cashier and the skirt rang up as $3.00, which amazed me. I thought "wow... I got a deal." Little did I know that deal meant there was a quarter-sized hole in the back until my husband pointed it out right before I tried to walk out the door on my way to work the next day.

I hadn't worn it, hadn't washed it, hadn't abused it. Nothing was done but taking off the tags and hanging it up in the closest. Which means that SOME industrious employee/manager/whoever had KNOWINGLY put this back on the rack, marked down, still with a huge hole in an unmendable location, but without a sale sticker to indicate anything was amiss.

Now I know that Wal-Mart marks down items and advertises their "low, low prices"... but this is just shoddy and completely unprofessional, even by discount store standards. However, I realized that with their emphasis on low prices, nowhere do they ever mention "with high quality". Now I really and finally understand why. They just flat don't care about quality. They have the convenience and prices locked down, but completely ignore everything else. Customer service, quality, and now even friendliness, have all gone out the window.

It's a shame, really. Sam Walton has to be rolling over in his grave, cursing the name of his own creation. I'd think the family that carries on his legacy would want to have some say in how terrible their stores have become. But then again, why would they when they're making money hand over fist? It's always a pity when greed overcomes what a company originally stood for. Here's hoping someone can eventually do something about it, not to put them out of business, but just to get them on the right track again. There's plenty of huge, multi-national companies that can pull it off. So why can't they?

Ignorance and Prejudice

I always have to wonder why people insist on embracing their own ignorance, disguised in their own mind as "superior" intelligence. I've watched it over and over again and it never ceases to be frustrating to not only me, but others around them. That sort of false intelligence is usually accompanied by an ego the size of Texas, which makes it even more difficult to deal with them.

These are the people who are always right, even when they're really not. They refuse to listen to anyone else because their opinions are the only ones that ever matter. The things they don't know are covered by bullying and cruelty (and very often prejudice with racial/gender-inappropriate comments thinly disguised as a sense of "humor") in order to intimidate others into just going along without objection or being able to point out their errors.

It's a sad state when it happens in the workplace, because if it happens to be present in the people in charge, it becomes in them what can really only be described as professional jealousy. The moment someone in the office comes up with an idea that works better, that jealousy raises its ugly head. The ideal workplace (in both culture and professionalism... and therefore success) is one that believes in hiring people that really do know more than you do. One person's ideas without any kind of supplementation of other minds and ideas results in stagnation and producing the same old thing over and over again. When your entire portfolio starts to look like every other piece, no matter how professionally executed it may be, that failure is evident.

Brainstorming is a multi-person exercise, not a single idea without discussion. The most brilliant ideas in advertising didn't come from one person existing in a vacuum. They came from tossing out ideas and figuring out which ones would actually hold up.

There has to be trust and respect among the creative staff and management and not just one person dictating every idea because of the fear of exposing their ignorance. Unfortunately, this kind of "hiding" behind it only makes it that much more obvious to everyone else.

If anyone has any suggestions for dealing with it in other ways than simply leaving that kind of no-win environment, I'm certainly all ears.

Truth vs. Belief

I find it fascinating that fourteen years of experience in the ad business and a lifetime of organizational skills can suddenly be "misrepresentation".

Sadly, it wasn't my "misrepresentation", but the description of the job itself that wasn't right. Although perhaps it would be better to say that the description was accurate to a point, but the goals changed on a nearly daily basis, making any kind of success in the job an impossibility for anyone. I completely understand now why so many other people have either walked out on the job or were let go after such ridiculously short periods of time.

The real problem was that the goals changed every couple of days. First it was a 90-day probation/training period. Then the week after I started, despite being thrown into another huge project headfirst, I was expected to already know everything going on and figure out an intelligent schedule for their entire team. (I'm NOT complaining about the hard work... I much prefer it to sitting there and twiddling my thumbs. I want the challenge of making something out of nothing and I'm very, very good at it, as my previous jobs can easily show.)

Reviews of each project with the boss were mandatory before being distributed to the team... again, no problem. Except that there was always the excuse that the boss was too busy to deal with it... or just flat walked out in the middle of a meeting. The office had a "no cell phones during work hours" policy, but I can't tell you how many of those same meetings were interrupted by personal cell phone calls. A serious double-standard.

Because of the inability to get any projects approved and therefore started, there were times when some of the creative staff didn't have anything to work on. This always brought on a HUGE rant and lots of finger pointing, even though the blame lay in one place only. The times we actually managed to get through a meeting and small portions of a project were approved to give to the artists, the next day it became an issue again. Once it was reported to the boss that a project was given to the creative team to keep them busy, another rant ensued, with more finger-pointing and insistence that the artists were completely incompetent and unable to think for themselves in any way without being micromanaged and treated like they were three years old. (This came despite the insistence on "good" days that *everyone* who was working there was only hired because they were talented and very intelligent. The "best of the best", so to speak.) As a result we ended up back at square one, with no approved projects and a still-angry boss because now they were going to be idle again.

I provided everything that was asked for in the position and more. I was told that I didn't provide any kind of schedule, but I provided more than one, in very detailed methods, including the "working backwards" schedule that was initially requested (ie: working out deadlines by finding the final due date and going backwards with each piece of the project to determine when each segment would have to be due in order for the next to progress). I gave them schedules in Excel, detailed descriptions in Word and calendars in MS Project, over and over again. It was enough of a challenge just to figure out some of the pieces of each project, in order to make an INTELLIGENT schedule and not have to revise it every two days (which was apparently another huge sin there... having to redo any work at all).

Not that a schedule mattered in any way. Deadlines were ignored as if they didn't matter, more finger-pointing at the clients who "didn't know what they wanted". Every time a client sent in new or requested information to help a project go forward, additional time was tacked on to the end rather than meeting the original deadlines. There were some projects that had been paid for up front and yet had been "extended" this way for nearly a year (sometimes despite not needing any "new" information). Yet somehow, it was always someone else's fault, but never the agency's.

I was told that I didn't know what the artists were doing, but I have to confess that a part of it was that I didn't agree with the micromanaging, "our employees are stupid" method of working. I was supposed to be their boss and get the best work out of them. Making them despise me for the difficult requests that were made of me wasn't the way to do it. I wasn't there to be their best friend, but I wasn't there to make enemies of the entire creative staff, either. I was told ahead of time that they'd be difficult and surly when I asked things of them, but that never happened. Not once. They *always* delivered what was requested without attitude or talk-back. At least to me. I've always found that if you go in expecting people to be pissed off and impossible to work with, they'll start to fulfill your expectations. If you give them ground to actually create and treat them like thinking, feeling people, they'll give you more than you expect.

There were admittedly several occasions that I really didn't know what they were doing, either because I was brand new and had no idea what they were *expected* to do... or else my job was overruled when other projects were given to them that I had no idea of and no control over. Things were shuffled around behind my back after I gave them projects. I had a schedule down, yet it was constantly yanked out from under me and then changed. There was a constant need to know what everyone was doing every microsecond of the day. The only real solution to this would be to remove the offices, put them all in cubicles close together, have cameras placed in every cube and monitor every second of what they did all day long. Welcome to prison.

I commend the rest of the staff there, because they were attempting to be professionals despite the issues. I only hope they don't get canned in a few weeks either, because I heard more than a few complaints about all of them, from how much they were making to their attitudes to their incompetence, but only ever from the boss and that opinion is the only one that matters (even though the pretense of asking for other opinions was sometimes made, in the end it never made a difference).

Sadly, they don't need the staff they have in order to "manage" anyone or anything. The rest of the employees were so cowed by fear of the tirades that no effort was ever made to speak up about anything that was a problem or anything that was disagreed with. Because of that, all they truly need in order to function is the boss and a few contractors, because no one else will ever satisfy the constantly changing needs and the inability to let go enough and let the "intelligent" staff actually do their jobs. The irrational demand for absolute perfection went so far beyond reasonable that it was impossible to meet for anyone. I'm a perfectionist myself, but I also recognize that sometimes you have to redo things to get them to that point. Sometimes you have to have a false start to reach that zenith or else you just stagnate and don't produce anything new or original... and then your competitors start to take over. It doesn't matter if you have the secret recipe and it doesn't matter if you're the only one who provides a service to a certain level. If you act like you have everyone by the balls and you can't be touched no matter how poorly you treat everyone else, you will eventually fail and fail spectacularly. At some point, customers will prefer to go to a "lower" quality just because it's not such a pain in the ass to deal with.

As for me, I'm actually *very* happy to be out of there. It was an unhealthy situation, and more than one of the employees was making themselves ill to try to keep up with the circular logic that rules the place. I'm glad I'm out before I was made sick over it... and it wouldn't have taken long to burn out. I don't want to be burned out. I want to still be able to say I love what I do. I've loved what I do for fourteen years, and there's no reason to stop now. I'm more than willing to put in the hours for the right job... and I have. I'm more than willing to put in the blood and the sweat and the tears... and I have.

I won't ever be the person who has to spend hours every day exercising to vent my frustration and overwhelming stress because I'll still have a life and still have time and the emotional reserves to actually enjoy my family. *I* will still be happy with what I'm doing for a living and never have to look back with regret because I was only ever in it for the money. Sadly, I realized two weeks into the job that this was only going to be a "money" job, because there was no way I'd be able to pour my soul into something that physically and emotionally draining without irrevocably damaging myself in the process.

Despite the fact that I really could have used the money for at least a little while to cushion our relocation, I'm glad I'm out.

And that is absolutely the truth.

A Day (or a Week) in the Life

If you’re like most people, you have no idea what it really means when someone says, “I’m a Designer.” (Or Graphic Artist, or Art Director, or Overworked Peon… or any other industry term for a professional artist.

So today, we’ll correct some misconceptions and remove that blank stare from your face when someone tells you that after you innocently ask “So what do you do?”

A day in the life of a typical graphic designer goes something like this:

The alarm blaring its cacophony to the heavens, you throw your sketch book at it…
And either A) stumble out of bed just in time to see the sun rise… if you’re lucky enough to have even gone to bed the night before… or

B) saw the sunrise already before you dropped, still fully clothed, onto the covers for an entire ten minutes before the alarm went off. If you’re lucky enough to have gotten three or four hours of sleep, then it’s a miracle of epic proportions and worth noting in the margins of your notepad next to last night’s project sketches.

Or C) never left the office, and wake up to the imprint of the keyboard on your cheek (which will stay with you through your first few meetings of the day), and try to find a napkin to soak up enough drool from the same keyboard so that you can actually get some work done without electrocuting yourself.

You stumble to the kitchen in hopes that someone else has already brewed a gigantic pot of coffee strong enough to cut slices off and eat with a fork.

After a few slugs of coffee and whatever you can pry out of the bottom row of the vending machine because you used your last bit of change for dinner out of the same vending machine last night, you’re back to your desk and working.

This commute could be twelve feet from your bed to the desk in the other room, still in your pj’s and hair sticking in every direction, or across town to your cubicle, realizing after you arrive that you have a dress shirt on over your pj’s , mismatched shoes and your hair sticking in every direction. But since you’re an artist, you claim the eccentricity of the true creative and so no one really even looks twice in your direction. They’ve obviously seen you this way before…

After sitting down, turning on the computer and staring blankly at the brilliant idea for your client’s new ad campaign that you came up with last night at 3am… and realizing now, in the harsh morning sunlight, that it’s the worst idea you’ve ever come up with in your entire career and if you presented this is the 10am meeting, you will most likely be fired very quickly after the clients (or your bosses) walk out the door in a huff.

So now you have two hours to come up with a brand new idea to show your clients how you’re going to create the biggest load of: junk mail that will be thrown away as soon as it arrives in a mailbox, web clutter, billboard eyesores and television noise that will be skipped over as the customers fast-forward through their Tivo’s... and more importantly, how this version of the completely mind-numbing and generally ignored advertising glut will earn them enough money to make it worth paying you for the idea. (Because the bottom line is the most important thing, and if this glut of ads won’t make them more money, it will never ever fly, and you’ll find yourself just as unemployed as if you’d given them that 3am proposal.)

If you work for an in-house marketing group, this talk is usually given in front of the CEO, who you have to convince you are worth keeping on the payroll because you are not bleeding the company dry with your outlandish ideas… because after all, marketing is the first group to be cut when finances are slim, despite the fact that its when a company needs it the most.

Now… imagining that your client (or your CEO), loves the idea you finally threw together five minutes before the presentation, you now have the task of actually putting it into production. So you sit down for a few days and hash out the details, putting their logo on everything under the sun, making enough mailers to completely overflow the local landfill, and coming up with a TV jingle that’s annoying enough that people will NEVER forget it… and which will finally end up with an angry mob picketing the TV station to pull it because it’s making them insane after hearing it during every single commercial break.

So now all of your works starts going through the Dreaded Approval Process. If you’re very, very, VERY lucky, you’ll have a few minor revisions, the projects will go to print, get sent out to the unsuspecting public, and you can sit back and wait for the client’s check and the local Ad Awards so you can collect a few more guilty accolades when your five minute project wins over someone else’s months of slaving.

If it’s a more normal project, it will go to the client, who begins to second guess everything you’ve done and everything they told you they want. They make revisions, which you correct and send back to them. They make more revisions, but this time it’s not just wording. They’ve decided they don’t like the cool blue you picked and want to go with fuchsia. More changes… This time they decided that they want a photo of the CEO at the last company party, because it will “humanize” the corporation. More changes… THIS time, they want to pull the photo because they were threatened with their jobs if they ran it, but they want to have custom photography done instead. So you hire a professional photographer, all the models, get a dozen releases signed and cleared by Legal… and the day of the shoot, they decide it’s out of their budget and cancel.

Now they start calling you on your cell phone at midnight to make changes, and by this time you understand why the windows in an office building don’t open.

The project is now overdue because they keep making changes… the printer is calling you up every day asking where the project files are because they can no longer meet the deadline to have it in the mail, and the clients are yelling at YOU because they’ve missed the deadlines and they want to know where their project is, even though they haven’t provided you with the missing information yet.

And finally, at the point when you’ve started crying every half hour, the client calls up with the final change… they want it to look just like it did the first time. And they approve it within five minutes of the reversion.

And since you’ve been up for the last 72 hours but the project is done, you finally get released to go home, crash on the covers with your clothes still on… and wake up ten minutes later when the alarm goes off.

Discomfort

I'm posting this essay I did for my English Comp class (yes, I'm going back to school after all these years), because it fits with everything that's been going on for the last week.

It's hard sometimes to just let go of your comfortable life, even if it's not so comfortable.

It's happened to me on more than one occasion, and I keep wondering why I fall into those same habits, despite the warning signs, despite the urging of friends and colleagues, and despite the gnawing in my own gut that says it's past time to do something.

You would think that the self-knowledge alone would motivate a person, but there is something to be said for safety, even when it's hanging by nothing more than the proverbial thread. I saw the warnings and just had that gut feeling that something was about to be terribly wrong. And yet I still sat and did nothing.

There's not really a lot you can do when a company decides to downsize, and I've been through two of them now. It's not any easier the second time around, because it still means that you're jobless. When you're the only breadwinner in the family, it's even harder, because the pressure is there to regain employment immediately, often at the expense of the rest of your life.

But what about when the job was the thing that was stealing your life away? When two long years of what could very easily be termed slavery because of the way it strips away every free moment, every bit of enjoyment of life and family, suddenly comes to an end, the emotions are surprisingly mixed. There is a feeling of betrayal, for all the work that you've done, for all the dedication and hard work that you did put in... when it's stripped away, there is anger and frustration as well as the shock. But there is also relief. Relief at not spending week after week of fourteen hour days, relief at finally getting to spend time with your son and watch him grow up, relief at not having to spend two weeks away from home in order to work eighteen hour days instead. And there is relief that the nightmare is finally over.

Breaking out of those annoyances, the things that drive you absolutely out of your mind and make you snap at your co-workers and your family, is the real challenge. To escape from that familiarity before it drives you to illness or worse. Sometimes to pursue the thing that will make us better and stronger and not simply break us is the hardest thing of all.

Sometimes it takes something drastic to break us out of our comfort zones, no matter how uncomfortable it may be.

So many months since the last, it's hard to remember the reasons I started this. Part of it was a release, but a lot was to try to make a difference someone... to teach something of what I've learned and maybe make it easier for someone else along the way. Just because I (and so many others) had to suffer without realizing what was in store, doesn't mean that everyone should go into this field blind.

But it's been so long since I've written that it's become rusty and I wonder if it's worth coming back to... but reading back over what I've written before, it's just as relevant, and nothing here has really changed.

So... here I go, right back to it. Hopefully more consistently this time.

And for starters, and maybe to jumpstart the process, I submitted one of my earlier articles from this blog to Talent Zoo, and much to my surprise, they accepted it! So, I guess at some point in the near future, I will be a "published" designer. (Hey, at this point, I'll take whatever publicity I can get.)

And one more day of freelance projects, and I'll be caught up, at least for a few days. I'm kind of looking forward to the break... something I haven't had in a very long time, and it's much needed.

We just went through a HUGE rebranding launch, combining three companies and all of their logos and collateral into one division. It was a nightmare, and quite frankly I never want to go through that kind of deadline again. We had 70 days to completely revamp everything... 100+ pieces of collateral, trade show booths, everything... you never realize how much stuff your logo is on until you have to replace it or redesign it.

I like the rebranding process... NORMALLY. This was too much, too fast with zero help. This was completely a single-handed restructure where the design was concerned. No one else was able to help during that entire time, and a body can really only take so many 20 hour days before things start to go horribly wrong. It's much harder to try to come back from than you imagine, not just a matter of spending a couple of days catching up on sleep. I've become quite the insomniac now and I'm not quite sure where it will end. Hopefully it'll be soon.

Something's gotta give somewhere... and right now, it's not at corporate.