Job hunting can be difficult at the best of times, and if you’ve got your heart set on working in the creative industry, landing that dream role can seem almost impossible. Claire Baldwin looks at some creative ways to get work in the creative industry and beyond.

When looking for a role in the creative sector, it’s likely that the words “creative” and “creativity” feature fairly prominently on your CV. The difficulty here is actually showing this creativity to make employers desperate to hire you.

Here are some creative ways to express your creativity and land that job in the creative industry (Have I said “creative” enough yet?!).

Fringe benefits

In August, Edinburgh-based graphic designer Laura Whitehouse turned the Fringe Festival’s endless flyering to her advantage by creating her own flyers advertising her services. In her blog post about the project, Laura discussed using the Fringe as an opportunity to find more of the work that she loves: designing posters and flyers for performers.

The flyers were about as matter-of-fact as adverts can get, featuring a handful of her previous design work on one side and a simple, memorable and hilarious message on the other. Instead of tiptoeing around the subject of a business transaction, Laura waded right in: “You need a poster, I need money. Seriously, I’ve been trying to but the same armchair from Ikea for months.”

By swapping flyers with performers, she was able to get her name in front of the very people she was hoping to work with, and adding a clever nod to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival community.

employadam.com

You might not know the name Adam Pacitti, but you might have seen his face on a billboard, especially after it went viral in 2013.

Aged 24 at the time, Adam used his last £500 to pay for a billboard in Shoreditch asking for a job. The billboard directed people to the website employadam.com, where you could (and still can) watch Adam’s video CV detailing the humourous and self-deprecating experience that makes him a perfect candidate for roles in the media industry.

It was a long shot, especially during the recession, but it paid off, as Adam received over 100 job offers and found himself as a viral video producer for award-winning production company KEO. He then used his first wage packet to pay for a second billboard, thanking the Great British public for their help.

The Google Job Experiment

In 2010, Alec Brownstein set up a series of Google Ads so that when top NYC creative directors in advertising Googled themselves, they would see a message from Alec asking them for a job.

In the search results, they would see an advert for alexbrownstein.com that addressed them by name along with the message: “Googling yourself is a lot of fun. Hiring me is fun, too.”

Alec set up adverts for five top creative directors, landed interviews with four of them, and received job offers from two. This creative use of industry-relevant knowledge and experience led to a job at global marketing and communications company Y&R in New York.

 In total, The Google Job Experiment cost Alec the princely sum of … $6. Not a bad investment.

How to promote yourself creatively

What these examples show us is that great creative promotion works best if you are able to leverage something key to the industry: Advertising flyer design for performers by handing flyers to performers; creating a viral campaign to get a job creating viral campaigns; or investing in adverts to land a role in advertising.

This allows you to directly acknowledge the skills that make you suitable for a role and demonstrate them through tangible, real-life examples.

If you’re not sure how to promote yourself, get in touch with us and we’ll work on your creative campaign together.