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Avoiding the Ick Factor.

Warning: this post contains a bit o’ math.

Staffing agencies, like used car dealerships, are known for the Ick Factor – that uncomfortable feeling that makes you think “Is this person trying to get away with something?” Work Evolved avoids that reputation by creating an open-book philosophy regarding fees.

Whether our client is a one-person design firm or a Fortune 500 company, we’ve found that starting the relationship with this kind of clarity sets things up for immediate comfort and long-term happiness.

Recently, we were asked to agree to a stepped discount on permanent placement fees, reducing the fee by 35% every thirty days… from 20% to 13% to 6% to zero. This discount would trigger every 30 days, regardless of hours worked, amount billed, etc.

I did the math:

• Let’s say a candidate was being considered for a $100,000 / year perm job.
• Reversing $100k to an hourly rate comes to $50/hr, but in most cases our pay rate would be more like $60/hr.
• Our bill rate would be about $94/hr, of which we would make $24, or 4:1. It’s a 56% markup, which means about a 25% gross margin of profit.
• At thirty days, the client reduced the fee by 35%, or $7,000.00.
• At our markup, the candidate would have to work 298 hours a month just for us to make up the discount. That’s 69 regular hours a week. Or, if you include overtime, 40 regular hours and 19.5 hours of overtime per week on average, just to break even.

The only solution would be to markup the candidates wages by an amount that’s well, outrageous.

If the candidate works 40 hours a week, that gives us 175 hours to “catch up” to the reduction in the perm fee. We’d have to convince the candidate to accept $40/hr on the $94 bill rate, so we could make the $54/hr required to break even from the “discount.” If course, that’s a markup of 234%. That’s not what I would call a “look you in the eye” way to do business. It also assumes the candidate would even work for such a rate.

So we had a choice: accept this system, temporarily raising our fees by 33%, then bring them back down every 30 days (again, regardless of hours worked) concurrently raising our markups from ~56% to ~234%… or we could decline to work this way.

As much as we hate to say no to a client, we declined.

Happily, this is rare outcome. Much more common, I’m happy to say, is the flip side of that scenario:

An agency we work with on a regular basis had a set budget for the freelancer they wanted to hire on a temp-to-perm basis. That budget didn’t cover the length of time they wanted to freelance the candidate. So, we launched Excel, and had an open, comfortable conversation about our margins, what the candidate needed to earn, and what that mean in real costs and fees.

The candidate started that week, was hired on staff three weeks later, and we continue to work with the fabulous firm on a regular basis.

I can’t say with actuarial certainty whether our way of working lands us more clients or less… just like I have no idea whether our complete lack of cold calling means that we don’t get a few more orders… but I do know that honesty engenders trust.

And trust is a better sales tool than cold calling.

Word choice and connotation: you had me at “flocculent”

A copywriter* I interviewed the other day won my heart describing how much she’d enjoyed working on a pitch for Word Coach, a game for Nintendo DS. Unlike many of her other projects, this print campaign never made it past the second round of client meetings, but she loved it nevertheless. Why? “It’s about finding words that say more,” she said, “which is probably my favorite pasttime.”

I too love finding the word that says the most. Specificity is challenging but powerful. A sheep is soft, but not soft in the same way that a pillow is soft. Are we talking fluffy-soft or squishy-soft? Or to use an example from the cover letter of a copywriter I talked to today, when you use a metaphor involving the word “lubricant,” are we talking WD-40 or KY?

Shakespeare based entire tragedies on misunderstandings like that. Word choice is a big deal, which is why Rich and I obsess on it. A lot.

In the past, one didn’t have to be quite so careful. One could use tone of voice, body language, and a sensational haircut, to modify the perceived meaning of one’s words (or distract people from them entirely). Today, well, just look at a friend of mine, who unwittingly had his girlfriend in tears because, while he was calming typing away at her on AIM, she was reading his words in a very different tone indeed.

Whether writing copy for an ad, drafting a cover letter, or chatting with your beau, choosing “silky” versus “furry” can basically make or break your day. Choose your words carefully. Intentionally.

Flocculently?

Why you need a recruiter (you’d never guess)

Recruiters can be helpful, and not just in the obvious ways.

Obviously, a staffing agency can act as your one-stop resource for creative talent, and, conversely, positions that fit your skillset. A recruiter will advocate on your behalf, frame your experience in a way your resume can’t, and build relationships with clients that get your foot in the door. A recruiter will spend hours going through a stack of resumes you may not have the time to analyze yourself, meet with ten candidates so you only need to meet with two, and help you accurately find someone who does something outside of your area of expertise.

We all know that, right? Right.

What you may not think about, when considering working with a staffing agency, are the other ways we cushion your hiring or job search experience. For instance, protecting you, as a hiring manager, from the frequent “What is that?” your peers will demand every time you interrupt their workflow with the trance soundtrack playing from another designer’s portfolio website.

As a candidate, you may not realize how often we’ll get a call from a short-of-breath Art Director who’s so overworked and on the verge of yet another inspired campaign concept that he or she barely has time to gasp out a few cryptic sentences about “InDesign- four days- signage!” before rushing off to a pitch meeting. Even permanent positions sometimes languish because the hiring manager just doesn’t have time to write up a job description and post it on Indeed.com. But they might have time to make a quick call to a staffing agency or two…

And to use an example that came up just an hour ago, using a recruiter means that when a Flash designer’s portfolio includes a game involving an interactive windmill, your boss doesn’t find you blowing intently onto your laptop’s mic, eyes fixated on the screen…

To see if it spins, of course.

Fantasy recruiting: my dream team

Although this may not be the busiest time of year in Manhattan, it is a GREAT time to meet talented people so that we can help them in the future. Who do I hope to meet in the coming month? Top five:

1. Mid-level agency copywriters. You’re brilliant at tossing ideas around, productively, with an Art Director. You have a knack for catching attention without cheap tricks (hint: comparing a product to a pretty woman is SO 1978). Your spec work is snappy but not offensive (and spelled properly). And you’re intuitive about the language and needs of markets you may never have interacted with personally.
2. Flash banner designers. Your Photoshop production standards are high, you animate on the timeline with that extra little thoughtful dash, and you have a demonstrable ability to design independently when given the opportunity (beyond an existing layout). Ideally you’ve worked both in agency and in-house environments and know a wee bit of ActionScript (2 or 3).
3. PHP developers. You live in the NYC area, and communicate clearly. You’ve customized content management systems, writing your own PHP and MySQL. Your contributions to file structure and databases are organized and lack redundancy. You comment your work. You have a portfolio of highly functional product (whole sites, modules, plugins, customizations) for the websites of national brands.
4. Interface designers, all levels, agency-side. You’ve designed the overall look and feel for well-known accounts. Or you’ve created new pages based on existing branding. The point is, you’ve had a role in choosing navigation style, typography, colors, textures, and layout of content. You’ve created Photoshop comps but you also know your way around Flash and/or write your own HTML and CSS.
5. Art Directors (integrated or print). Whether you’ve focused on pharma, technology or fashion, your visual metaphors are original and stunning (or terrifying, as the case may be). You feel the joy of a vector swirl or two, but you also like to art direct some first-rate photography or timeless illustration. And if you have to, you can do your own production.

We also need a production artist with dual UK/US citizenship, an information architect with flawless design taste, and a copywriter with experience writing pharma, direct to physician, on oncology. But, wild fantasies aside, in the general sense, we always need the above.

Own it

An interviewee just called, fifteen minutes before the interview, to let me know he was running a smidge late- five or ten minutes.

Beautiful. Seriously.

We all make mistakes. Whether it’s miscalculating the time to reach your next interview, or forgetting to re-check the styleguide before laying up the next piece of collateral and using Book Antiqua instead of Garamond.

Moving on, and making sure your manager or client or customer does too, is often just a matter of owning it. Defensiveness or silence in those situations usually leaves the person suffering from the mistake assuming the worst. That you didn’t care. That you’re always sloppy. That you think the branding is rubbish and everything should be switched over to Book Antiqua.

As an example… how many waitresses have you forgiven for messing up your order, because she apologetically warned you, at the very beginning of your dining experience, that it was her first week? Whereas how many waitresses have you gotten frustrated with- or stiffed- because of the same mistake, unexplained?

A little context goes a long way.

I’ll be the first person to tell you, I’m not a genius at estimating how long a trip is going to take me. As a recent example, when I moved back up here from Austin, Texas in late April, I thought the drive would take me two or three days. Try five. So I’m not going to cut off anyone’s head for a little delay. But when an interviewee walks into our office five or ten minutes late with no explanation, they’ve set themselves up to look less professional. There’s no way to answer even the gentlest inquiry about lateness without sounding defensive. And if we don’t ask, we’re just wondering, “Did they notice that they were late? Did they care? If we sent them to an interview for a job, would they keep our client waiting?”

My favorite example of owning it? The man confident enough to shave his head instead of combing over his remaining strands. From hospitality to hair loss, your career to your love life, the philosophy (like butter) makes all things better.

Summertime projects

“Summertiiiiiime, and New Yorrrrk is sleeeeepy…”

Tis the season for three day weekends, “vacations” back home to visit family, and for a lot of folks I know, afternoons in front of the A/C, tackling those creative projects you just couldn’t get to when you were busy earning money. In this spirit, I thought it would be fun to collect a few sources of inspiration, motivation and creation. Because we’re more the type to spend a Sunday designing an iPhone wallpaper than in the garage building a bird feeder. Heck, around here, most of us don’t have garages, much less birds.

1. First, the obvious: How sexy is your business card? Non-designers should check out Moo. You can upload photos or create cute text-based cards easily, no Photoshop necessary. For those of you who live and breathe InDesign, use Zazzle or another similar on-demand printsite to make non-standard sized cards (mini or biggie!) to ensure your next new contact will be pinning that sucker up on the wall after meeting you.
2. The nearly-obvious: Threadless! If you don’t already know about this site, where voters pick a winning t-shirt design, you should. Anyone can enter, either with an illustration or slogan, and potentially win enough money to keep you in M&M’s for the rest of the summer.
3. Design a tattoo for a friend.
4. Exercise your hand skills for said tattoo design by taking a drawing class at Soho’s Spring Studio.
5. Drop by AIGA’s Design Journeys exhibit before it ends August 5.
6. Design an iPhone, Facebook app or Twitter interface.
7. Attend a free Noble Desktop seminar on anything from employment strategies to typography.
8. Write your beloved a love letter or design an unbirthday card. C’mon, when was the last time you showed the love?
9. Create a new logo or write a new tagline for your favorite struggling local business or charity. For inspiration, visit desigNYC’s project before it closes at the end of July.
10. Take your camera to Coney Island. As someone who left NYC in the spring of 2008 as it was about to shut down permanently, I am delighted to discover its quirky thrills still flourish. Sometimes there’s nothing more inspiring than visiting the New York beyond Chelsea.

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But… but…

She said there was CANDY in there!

That was me!

Going through resumes today, I came across one that began, “For the past six years, I’ve worked as an administrative assistant at a construction company…”

And… no. Can’t help this person. Wish I could! But I can’t. Not even a bit.

In the midst of that thought process, I had a flash of all the manuscripts I used to mail out in my early twenties. Those carefully printed, double-spaced chapters of the young adult novel I’d written and re-written. Thick annual listings of publishers and agents always advised researching the agency or publishing house before submitting. Nothing was more annoying to an editor going through that slush pile, they advised, than reading the cover letter of a sci fi manuscript when they only published historical romances. And while I did only submit to publishers that read YA fiction, I didn’t always look too closely into the nature of that YA fiction.

I just wanted the darn thing published. Like the administrative assistant, I felt such desperation to be considered, that I felt I didn’t have time to find out whether the person doing the reading would actually have anything to offer me.

It becomes a bit “me versus They,” casting the person doing the hiring, or the publishing, as a mysterious Matrix-esque figure you can only see if you take the red pill.

Or blindly email out 42,000 resumes.

Having seen the process from both sides now, Joni Mitchell style, I can honestly say- there is no mystery. Some folks publish historical romances, some sci fi. Ignore that, and you won’t get published, because you’re not in front of the right people.

Ironically enough, that novel involved finding and keeping jobs. Foreshadowing my current occupation, and probably also providing a small clue as to why it didn’t get published as a children’s book…