Greg Kuchmek, who is represented by Aquent's DC office, has been working on the web since 1994. That's when he was hired to help produce a webzine, Stim, started by Prodigy. [Editor's Note: For an interesting flashback to 1996, read Ty Burr's review of Stim, which he gives a B+, and Slate, which he gives a C+]. When that gig ended in 1997 he discovered that, "3 years web experience was amazing. I was 'senior' automatically."
Flash forward to the present and Greg now has 14 years web experience. If you want to hire someone like Greg (assuming you can find someone like him), what do you have to offer him? He has a broad range of in-demand skills: in addition to ground-up experience with the full suite of web technologies, Greg is also an able photographer, animator, illustrator, and writer. When he goes on a job interview, the pressure is on the interviewer.
What is Greg looking for and how can you convince him to work for you? Listen to his words:
1. Trust
I'm looking for an employer that respects that I have my skills and trusts me to use them. They hire me because I can do something and they can't. It's great when they let me do it.
It's not always like that. I've done jobs where the client was really looking over my shoulder and micro-managing. I understand that everyone's got their personal style, but when that's happening, I don't feel free to be creative and really do what I'm capable of.
2. Flexibility
I don't wear a tie to interviews anymore. I don't need to dress up at this point. I've also got a full studio at home, so I'm even kind of shocked that I have to leave the house! I guess I've been spoiled by working in places like Boston or New York where it's more flexible.
More than flexibility about where work happens, though, I appreciate it when there is flexibility around how things get done. There have been countless little jobs where they needed a photograph and I've told them, "Look, I can spend the day combing through stock or I can go take one." It's great when people are more open to the "I can do this right now" approach, than they are attached to the "this is the way we have to do it" approach.
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Laurie Baldwin, who is represented by Aquent's Richmond Office, has spent the last five years running a successful search engine marketing company with clients like Wrigley's, Lumber Liquidators, and the Christian Children's Fund. A self-proclaimed Web marketing "addict" -- she named her dog "DotCom," her license plate reads, "GOOGL ME," and even tried to name her family's gecko "Google," until her children rebelled - she has been doing work in and around the Internet since 1995.
Everyone knows that SEO and SEM are important components of contemporary marketing, but there is so much advice out there about how to do it right, that it can get pretty overwhelming. In the interest of cutting through the noise, we asked Laurie to tell us the five things that people most frequently forget about SEO and SEM. Here's what she said.
1. Content Is Still King
When trying to optimize their sites, companies too often spend a lot of time focusing on technical things like metatags. They forget that if you have an authoritative site that talks about relevant stuff, you will be ranked.
The technical elements that matter to the search engines are always changing - the importance of content remains constant. Your site should talk about who you are, what you do, and who you take care of. Forget the "leading edge, highly competitive, committed to innovation"-type copy. People are looking for specific things so you should say specific things.
2. Think Like Your Customers
We had a client who sold fake eyebrows for cancer patients going through chemo. These folks weren't looking for "cancer solutions" or something like that, they were looking for FAKE EYEBROWS. You've got to show up where people are looking and that means you have to know where they are looking and what they are looking for. Ask them.
And while you're at it, ask them, if they did happen to find you, did they find what they wanted? If they didn't, make sure that the search terms you are optimizing for and the actual content of your site match.
3. Traditional Media Still Matter
Let your different marketing pieces talk to each other. Use your keywords and the key marketing ideas from your website in your radio, tv, and newspaper advertising. People will often Google the words, characters, etc. that appear in your ads. In fact, they will generally Google before they go to your site or your store, so make sure you are taking this into account when you are buying search terms.
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Talent Spotlight
You launch a new product and it doesn't perform as you hoped. What do you do? Well, you could turn to someone like Irma Salinas for answers.
Irma is represented by Aquent's Connecticut office and is currently working on the "Marketing Insights" Team at a large non-alcoholic beverages company (as it turns out, she actually started her career at an international spirits company importing beer from Latin America). She got involved in doing product reviews when working for a research company where she was very involved in reviewing and reporting on the performance of non-carbonated beverages (water, teas, juices, etc.). "I started working in this area when it was really getting competitive. It was a very exciting time. The market for beverages was changing and I learned a lot."
Irma was frequently involved in reviewing the performance of new products. I asked her both why new products don't perform well, but also how companies go about setting sales goals for new products in the first place. "Of course, there is a very extensive process that large companies go through to develop and launch new products," Irma assures me, "and since they have tested it with consumers, etc., you soon discover that the reasons for poor performance are not usually to be found in the product itself."
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"If you're not thinking segmentation, then you're not thinking," Ted Levitt of the Harvard Business School supposedly quipped. While every marketer would readily agree with him, getting segmentation right can be as challenging as it is necessary - and getting it wrong can be downright disastrous: Working with segmentation schema that are irrelevant to your business is a waste of time and money; working with too few or too broadly defined segments means missed opportunities; and working with too many or too narrowly defined segments means stretching your marketing resources to their breaking point.
Since there are so many options and variables involved in segmenting your audience, it is best to rely on analysts, either external or internal, who understand your business and who understand how to match your needs with the myriad segmenting approaches. To sketch out a useable framework for getting the most valuable results from your segmentation provider, I consulted Ben Ben-Baruch, a Senior Business Intelligence Consultant represented by Aquent who got his first contract assignment with General Motors in 1997 and has been there ever since.
"Whatever segmentation provider you use and whatever methodologies and data they employ," Ben says, "the key is ensuring that you can use the segmentation to meet your business goals. Finding a provider that thinks in terms of your business, presents the data with an emphasis on its proper use, and makes it easy to keep the data fresh, is critical not only to the success of your segmentation process, but to the success of your marketing efforts in general."
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An Aquent Talent Spotlight
Article by Anne Stuart
Figuratively speaking, our planet is smaller than it used to be, thanks to jet travel, the Internet and other inventions that reduce the historical limitations of distance and time. But when it comes to global product launches and marketing campaigns, it's a big world after all--and going global involves serious challenges as well as significant opportunities.
Cindy Dyer understands that reality all too well. Dyer, who is currently in an Aquent placement as senior manager of consumer strategy and insight at Frito-Lay Inc. in Dallas, started out as a food scientist, but moved into marketing while at Pizza Hut Inc. She's also worked for global giants like General Mills Inc., Campbell's Soup Co. and Mead Johnson & Co., the infant-child nutrition division of Bristol-Myers Squibb. Throughout her career, she's been involved in international branding and marketing campaigns.
Following are a few of Dyer's tips for successfully taking your products and messages beyond your own borders:
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Minh Nguyen, a Southern California-based web designer currently working for Sony Electronics, has been represented by our San Diego office for a little over a year. Interestingly enough, his entrance into the Aquent world was fairly coincidental. "A friend of mine was looking for work and I told them about Aquent," he tells me. "I was walking them through the application process by setting up a profile of my own. I didn't think much about it but pretty soon someone from Aquent contacted me."
Minh got into graphic design at an early age. As he puts it, "I owe it to my family. My grandfather taught me how to draw when I was 3. My mom taught me how to color inside the lines when I was 5. My dad taught me HTML and introduced me to Photoshop when I was 14." He was doing web-design casually as a teenager, but by the time he got into college realized he had a passion for it.
Having a hard time getting a full-time design job after graduation, he started his own studio with some friends. Although the studio did fairly well - garnering clients from Jack in the Box to the Surf Rider Foundation - he decided that he was more interested in doing design work than running a business. He turned to Aquent to get back into design and eventually found a permanent position through us.
Since running one's own studio is a choice that many designers make and even more consider, I asked Minh what he learned from his experience doing so. Here's what he told me:
1. Don't just take any job you get, do things for free, or do things on the cheap.
Not only does this lower the bar for other people working in the field, the sites usually aren't that great, and the client will ultimately be dissatisfied.
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An Aquent Talent Spotlight
Bonnie S., who is represented by Aquent's Philadelphia office, got into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) the honest way: by working hard to optimize her own website. "I got a degree in architecture and then worked as an architect for several years before deciding I had to get into something else.
"I set up a design studio with a friend and we went into business providing design services to architecture firms. I created a website for our studio and then worked hard to get us to #3 in Google search results for 'graphic design' and 'Philadelphia.' I knew I was on to something when a friend called me out of the blue and asked, 'How did you get to #3?'"
One unexpected by-product of using SEO to promote her design business was that it actually led to SEO business. "One day I was talking to one of my clients and he said he was paying $3000 a month for pay-per-click advertising. I told him he could pay me a lot less to boost rankings through organic optimization [optimization that's driven by the content of the pages]. He hired me to do that for him. He saw results and began referring me to people, and things took off from there."
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Terence Thompson and Katie Kenney are in-house creative services managers who utilize Aquent resources. Terence, who has specialized in consumer packaging for over 25 years and is an Aquent contractor himself, is a studio manager of internal design resources at Colgate. In addition to creative supervision, he is responsible for the intake of all new projects, billing estimates, and hiring. Katie, who has close to 25 years of experience in print design and branding, is one of 10 studio managers at the in-house studio of Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS). Her specific team of designers is responsible for the overall look and brand of individual pharmaceutical drugs during their clinical trials phase.
Running an in-house creative services function can be uniquely challenging for several reasons, but the most pressing is this: You've got to provide creative solutions and customer service at levels comparable to those of external agencies while saving your clients and your parent organization money, and those cost savings can be substantial!
Terence and Katie describe a three-pronged strategy for addressing this challenge:
1. Provide structured account management
2. Attract talented people
3. Employ efficient processes
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A passion for visual communication "of any sort," an "inner sense of professionalism," and a sincere interest in "people asking me to do something new," characterize Betty W., who has been working through Aquent for the better part of 10 years. Having done her time in the design and agency world in Boston, and run her own design business for 14 years, Betty told me, "When the last company I was working for went belly-up, I realized that I was not meant to have a full-time job. I started telling people to call me 'Betty D. Temp,' because I knew I was meant to be this way."
"This way," has meant going into high stress environments, such as the office of the chairman at a major accounting firm, and to consistently succeed. "At that place, there were no weekends, you were on-call 24 hours a day, and it was a real pressure cooker. We had to produce proposals that were like annual reports in terms of their quality - they even had their own high-end, duplex color printing equipment. They made you take a test when you first got there. They'd give you the materials and you had from 8-5 to put together a proposal. I passed the test and was off and running."
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Do you ever talk to people who are genuinely psyched about their work, sincerely committed to doing a great job, and who seem to pursue their career with an infectious passion? Well, that's how I felt when I had the chance to speak with John Nullmeyer the other day. John is a marketing communications manager represented by Aquent's Washington, DC office. Having graduated from the University of Hartford seven years ago with a degree in communications, he's steadily carved out a career for himself as a marketing professional. "I really enjoy being a marketing generalist," he told me. "I like the collaboration and the creativity. I also like working on marketing problems and coming up with solutions."
Most of the "problems" that he's tackled have called for solutions involving effective communication strategies. He started out working at CIGNA where he served as an associate product manager responsible for developing and producing materials aimed at educating employees on various retirement offerings. After several years, he moved over to Prudential Financial. There he continued his work on "participant education," creating collateral, managing content for the participant website, and developing educational programs to help "demystify retirement plans." One such program, "Women and Investing for Retirement," even won an industry award and was featured on PLANSPONSOR.com.
By the time John left Prudential, he was working as a senior copywriting associate producing everything from financial newsletters to video scripts. This experience positioned him perfectly for his current role with a large financial services company "serving the American home mortgage industry," as their website says. Among his other responsibilities, he was asked to take over and "fix" a newsletter that serves as the company's main vehicle for communication with its clients.
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Suzanne is a product manager currently working for Kraft through our New York office. As is the case with many people who work with Aquent, Suzanne's choice to work as a contractor came at a midpoint of her career rather than at the beginning. As she puts it, Aquent gives her the opportunity to "keep up her skills and get experience with great companies without the pressure of a full-time position."
Not that Suzanne is any stranger to said pressure. On the contrary, she's managed brands that generated tens of millions in revenues and in her role at Beiersdorf Inc. launched 34+ new products & upgrades (including one that became and remains #1 in its category). In other words, she knows what it's like to have P&L responsibility and spend 50% of your time traveling. It was just that after getting to the point where she was heading the Global New Product Development efforts for a $79 million healthcare product line, it became clear that the next step for her was to assume the role of director. Instead, she decided to pursue a different course working on some of her own product ideas and pursuing her interest in theater. Working with Aquent gives her the necessary flexibility to do just that.
It took Suzanne a while to get to this point. Starting out in Marketing Research generating consumer insight data for Unilever, she soon realized she wanted a bigger role. "I like to see the whole story," she says. Continuing her research work at Cadbury Schweppes, her boss soon told her, "You can go anywhere you want here." She took that vote of confidence and segued into a Field Marketing position serving as a conduit between marketing and sales in support of store-level execution of programs and promotions. This experience taught her an important lesson: "If you want to get to know how to get a product on the shelf, you have to work closely with sales."
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Talent Spotlight: Doreen, Aquent Chicago
Doreen's career started in the advertising world. Graduating with a degree in journalism, she spent 4 years in account management at a couple specialty agencies before trying her hand at field marketing management for a restaurant chain. Discovering that this wasn't exactly the right fit, she decided to chart a new course and re-entered the advertising industry on the creative side as a copywriter.
After taking a few months to create a "spec" portfolio containing hypothetical campaigns for a broad range of consumer products she hit the streets. Finding work was a challenge and over the course of the next year she went through "60 or so interviews." Although interviewing was a hard slog, Doreen also found it to be a real confidence builder. "After a while you stop taking things personally. You take into consideration what someone has to say about your work, but in the long run you have to have confidence to listen to your creative instinct. So, if you happen to catch someone on a bad day, rather than getting down on yourself, you end up thinking, 'What was that about?'"
Pounding the pavement eventually paid off and she landed a job with Frankel. "That was a real turning point," she says, "because I'd actually gotten a job doing what I wanted to do." Not only that, it turned out she was good at it. The next several years found her doing award-winning promotional work for department stores from Marshall Field's to Target. Following her position at Target she worked at another prominent promotional agency on brands like Kellogg and Kraft. Gradually, her role morphed from copywriting to creative direction as she moved into TV and radio as part of Publicis Mid-America, working on successful campaigns for Del Webb and OfficeMax.
When Publicis closed their office in 2003, Doreen started free-lancing. Although she was able to find work through her many contacts, she also chose to register with Aquent. She made it clear up-front that, as she was planning on having a child, she would only be open to off-site work. The folks at Aquent were flexible and set about finding off-site opportunities for her. Among them was a gig through a national design firm concepting and writing copy for a leading, "cloth like" paper towel brand. This role was a particularly good fit for her since, as a working mother, "I was writing for myself. I was the demographic they were going after!"
"You can change if you put your mind to it," Doreen says when asked if she has any career advice for marketing and creative folks. She also encourages anyone making a career change to take the inevitable rejection in stride and remember that everyone's pretty much making it up as they go along. "It sounds corny, but don't listen to someone else's opinion of you, listen to your heart. If I had listened to other people's negativity I would never have left my house."
Doreen's experiences have taught her that passion and perseverance can ultimately take you where you want to go. "If you're happy doing what you're doing, keep it up," she adds, "And if you're not happy, find out what it is that'll get you there."
Talent Spotlight: Holly Goodrich
When I started working as an agent in Aquent's (then MacTemps') Boston market, Holly Goodrich had already been with them for four years. She did presentation work and print production and was known for her technical ability and reliable professionalism. Ten years later, we're both still here.
In a way, Holly has made a career of working for Aquent. Since she first registered with us in 1989, she has grown with the technical innovations in graphic design and production, doing time on everything from print layout to package design to web development. She has also worked in diverse roles with over one hundred of our clients in a variety of industries. We even once flew her down to North Carolina for ten 17-hour days working in a massive airplane hangar with "its own weather system."
By now, Holly has worked for "every kind of business:" financial institutions, hospitals, universities, studios, start-ups, high tech, pharma, manufacturing; you name it. She's worked for companies with one employee and for companies with 21,000. Along the way her experience has taught her, among other things, the relative benefits of working in organizations large and small, and in environments structured and chaotic.
"Larger organizations tend to have more money and so they are able to hire more people," she explains, "The drawback is that often you are brought on to do one very specific thing and nothing else. At smaller companies, the money is tighter. But that usually means that you get to do more, see more, and learn more."
Looking back on the path she's followed, Holly identifies two major turning points. The first came in her career as a graphic artist when clients began giving her more than "production stuff." "When you're first asked to make design decisions on your own," she says, "it really boosts your confidence." The other turning point came in her career as a contractor. "It was that moment when I stopped being 'the temp,' or a hired gun, and became the specialist called in to solve problems."
All the while she she's been navigating the world of creative work, Holly has, of course, also been creating things. In fact, you may have already unknowingly encountered one of her many creations. Perhaps you saw the splash screens she designed for the post office in the Mall of America. Perhaps you saw her package designs on the shelves of your local electronic game store. (Or, perhaps you saw the counterfeited version of her package design on that bootlegged game you bought at the flea market.)
But then again, maybe you just underwent brain surgery and noticed, hanging on the wall of the operating room, the laminated poster she designed, the one telling your doctor how to correctly use the latest in quick-healing brain surgery technology.
Which is another way of saying that, though the ongoing career of Holly Goodrich contains many lessons for the aspiring and the established creative professional (never stop learning; be flexible; remember that you're there to help others), the most important lesson is undoubtedly this:
Graphic design IS brain surgery.
(At least indirectly, sometimes.)
Talent Spotlight: Jack Burke
A few years ago, Jack Burke thought his career was on the wane. A self-professed "marketing and graphics generalist," Jack had followed a path that took him from early days in pre-press and typesetting to years as an advertising manager, a vice president and general manager of a graphic arts and digital imaging business, and eventually a director of client services at several marketing firms. Jack had acquired a wealth of experience in all phases of marketing communications, from graphics production and publishing to account management and business development, but times were changing. Mergers and acquisitions had significantly altered the client mix of the firms he represented and technological innovations had transformed the landscape of services they were seeking.
Then things changed for Jack as well. After working for a while as an independent consultant, he landed a contract job at a large pharmaceutical company. There he was charged with managing a variety of advertising-related projects through the promotional regulatory process. Although he did not have any prior experience in "pharma" or "regulatory," Jack did have several skills that contributed to his success in this role. First of all, he understood the basic principles of process and operations management. Second of all, he was a strong communicator and knew how to mediate between people who were frequently at odds, such as those responsible for promotions and those responsible for compliance.
Given the complexity and organizational politics involved, this was a job that "nobody wanted to do," but Jack jumped right in. ("I'm not afraid to get done what needs to get done," he tells me.) By educating himself on the intricacies of the regulatory process, rationalizing the flow of work and approvals required from group to group, and consistently communicating with everyone involved, he jokingly says, "I created my own monster." In reality, he stepped into an intermediary role that had not existed before and built a process that the company is following to this day.
Jack found working in the pharmaceutical industry to be "interesting, enlightening, and educational." He also found it to be an intense, fast paced world where workloads can assume gargantuan proportions. Nevertheless, he maintains that it's a "big plus" to know that you are working for a company whose "stated goals are to help improve the health and quality of life of the patients they ultimately serve." Aside from being personally rewarding, however, Jack also found that it was opening new doors for his career.
"My opportunities were limited until I got into pharma," he says, where he soon found one thing leading to another. For example, a communications manager he had met at the engagement described above, having taken a position at a smaller pharmaceutical company, contacted Jack when she needed the assistance of a consultant. As a result, Jack's been at this new firm since last summer on a contract through Aquent doing what he does best: organizing and communicating efficient processes so that a diverse group of stakeholders - doctors, lawyers, clinicians, communications specialists, ad agencies, and printers - can successfully execute marketing and sales programs.
When I asked Jack what advice he has for people at earlier stages of their careers he begins by stressing one of the fundamentals: "You have to be able to write." As important as marketing communications are to your external clients, it is equally vital to be able to communicate clearly and succinctly when implementing and managing critical internal processes. Jack discovered on his first foray into "pharma" that his willingness to talk to and learn from a host of people, coupled with his ability to clearly articulate his plans and explain procedures to all affected parties, was the key to his success.
In Jack's view, the ability to write and communicate cannot be separated from the necessity of connecting with a broad range of people. "This business is all about contacts." The key to building a strong network of contacts, he explains, is serving as a resource to others and remaining open to opportunities as they present themselves. "I basically agree to do whatever someone asks me to do. If somebody says, 'I need this,' I just do it if I can. If I don't know the answer to a question or can't fulfill a request, I find the right people to get the job done."
By working hard, helping others when you can, and reaching out to others when you need to, you soon build a reputation as someone who is not only dependable, but invaluable. You become someone like Jack Burke. "At this point," he says, "though I'm a contractor, people come to me for answers."
Talent Spotlight!
Julane Marx calls herself "a natural editor," although she admits that it's kind of a curse - she can't read the newspaper, for example, without spotting typos. With an MBA and a career that took her through a range of tech-oriented companies involved in technical training, software, and Web-based business services, she finally found herself ensconced as a VP of Marketing spending 90% of her time doing things she didn't enjoy like sitting through endless meetings and agonizing over spreadsheets.
Striking out on her own, Julane's love for words and interest in the English language led to one of her first freelance editing gigs. As a subscriber to Michael Quinion's "World Wide Words" newsletter, one day she stumbled across a mistake in it, which she duly brought to his attention. Being a stickler for proper syntax and usage, Mr. Quinion appreciated Julane's eagle eye and American viewpoint and enlisted her as an "Advisory Editor," setting in motion a "series of fortunate events" that has turned into a second career as a freelance copyeditor.
Julane has found freelancing to be a "fun way to make a contribution" while retaining the freedom to explore new possibilities once the project has ended. She came to Aquent back in 2002 thanks to a clever ad for proofreaders our Los Angeles office ran and successfully passed the fairly challenging proofreading test that we administer interested candidates. She worked for Aquent here and there, eventually landing a long-term assignment with a Fortune 500 biotech firm specializing in human therapeutics.
Starting out as "one of the troops," she later moved into a role as manager of the proofreading team, then took responsibility for training the vendors our client brought in to take over this function as our contract was phased out. Overall, Julane found the environment particularly rewarding, partly because she enjoys working with really smart people, and partly because proofreading for products with medical applications is beyond mission-critical. As she put it, "If you get certain things wrong, someone could actually die."
Her successes on the proofreading front led to a new role as a marketing communications manager for the company's brand protection department, the main purpose of which is to combat drug counterfeiting. During this temporary assignment, she updated the department's public position statement on drug counterfeiting, created a fact sheet about the department, penned newsletter articles raising its profile in the organization, commissioned two logos and a multi-use tabletop display unit, and worked on a plan for rolling out an important new product security feature to be launched in the fall. She enjoyed flexing a number of different muscles she has used in the past in an interesting new setting, plus there were "a manageable number of meetings and not a spreadsheet in sight."
Having worked in a range of environments and worn a series of different hats, Julane's primary advice to others pursuing a career in marketing is to "try everything." "Variety is a value in itself," she says, "and it's the ideal way to discover what you do best and what makes your heart sing." Exploring the possibilities in order to find out what you love to do isn't just about following your passion, as we're so often told. More importantly, it's about becoming a valuable and engaged participant wherever you work; someone who understands not only his or her own function but also how it fits in with the big picture. In Julane's words, "You aren't going to be effective if you don't care about what you're doing."
Welcome to the first Talent Spotlight!
In this column, we'll introduce you to some of the incredibly talented and experienced people that work for Aquent. In addition to giving you insight into the careers of marketing and creative professionals, it's our hope that you will learn a thing or two to help you take your own career to the next level.
This month we're going to kick things off by looking at the reasons why marketing and creative professionals would choose to work with a staffing agency in the first place.
Why work with a staffing agency?
One good reason: A staffing agency can provide you with opportunities to try out a variety of companies and work environments before settling into a permanent role.
Take the case of Steve Johnson, who worked through Aquent in our Chicago office. Steve got his MBA and then spent a few years working for a large CPG company doing brand management. Curious as to what it would be like to work for another company, he took a job with a small agency.
It quickly became clear to him that the aspect of brand management he enjoyed most was crafting the overall strategy for the brand, something he could not do in the agency environment.
Determined to find a new, more fulfilling position, Steve turned to Aquent. As he puts it, "I wanted to be able to experience what it was like working with other CPG companies, and the idea of working on a contract basis through Aquent before taking a permanent job with one company was very appealing. I could essentially research what it would be like working for a company while getting paid."
As it turned out, Steve found the right fit with the first company, a well-known maker of chewing gum and confectionary products, that Aquent placed him.
Initially, Steve was there on a temporary basis to fill a gap created by a maternity leave, but the people at the company were so impressed by his performance that they found another temporary project for him to work on once the initial assignment ended.
Eventually, the company created a full-time position for Johnson, and he is now the marketing manager for strategic initiatives.
Contract Work's Flexibility and Contractor's Ability To Cross Functional Lines
While providing access to a lot of great companies can make staffing agencies a valuable career partner, it can also make them good companies to work for in their own right.
Consider the story of Ruth Pulker, a graphic designer and print production specialist who has worked through Aquent's Detroit office since 1997. She has worked for companies of all shapes and sizes, including national retailers and associations, during her tenure with us, but she says, "I still think of myself as working for Aquent."
Working for Aquent appeals to her for two reasons. She appreciates the fact that, by virtue of her status as a contractor, she can often cross functional lines.
"A lot of production work consists of getting the creative and preparing it for press," she says, "I'm at the point where I can get the mechanical, and if the layout isn't working, I can redo it. At a lot of agencies, especially the large ones, there is more of a strict line between production and creative, and I just wouldn't have a chance to do that."
And, Ruth appreciates the flexibility that comes with working for Aquent. As she puts its, "Wherever I'm working, I never end up thinking, 'I'm going to be stuck here forever.'"
This sense of freedom often serves to make her a valuable addition to the client's team. Where a permanent employee might find tight timeframes and complex document management systems a tedious burden to be endured, Ruth's independent perspective lets her see them as complex challenges to be mastered.
Aside from making her work-life more engaging and rewarding, this open-minded approach has even resulted in clients hiring Ruth to train new employees on their own systems.
What best suits your interests and abilities?
It's not always easy to figure out our next career move and choosing the right path can be complicated by the fact that there are so many options. Even figuring out what the options are can prove challenging.
As Steve and Ruth discovered, staffing agencies such as Aquent allow you to try out different options before committing yourself to the one that best suits your interests and abilities. In fact, it can even turn out that working with a staffing agency represents the best option of all.
