eSign Creative Employment Application Made Easy

Esign creative employment application

I got rejected from about 60 studios when I was trying to apply for a design internship so I can totally get how hard it can be to apply for a job at a great office or a studio this this week luckily enough I'm on the other side trying to hire a designer so I want to share some insights with you that perhaps can help you when you're applying to your next design job so here's a story I've shared with you that I'm looking to hire a junior designer to join me at the startup that I'm working with and I started by sending kind of a job request to a group of threats of very talented friends and few people answered that and I've talked to them but they were actually too talented or to experience for the job they were actually senior designers so it's not really what we're looking for for this position the next thing I did was to post a job offering at kind of a Facebook group for Israeli designers looking for a job as it will with a few thousand Israeli designers and what happened was that about two hours after I posted a job there my inbox was flowing with probably more than 50 people who are reaching out sending their portfolio to Syrians and so forth and when that happens you gotta understand I'm doing this you know on top of my job so I can't really spend my whole day looking at portfolios I've got actual work to do so when I got 50 of them one by one and every few minutes I got another email pretty quickly I got into a habit of clicking really fast looking at the portfolio really fast and making a decision in seconds and I'm sure that I'm not the only one hiring for a company doing this process and I'm sure that great companies or great Studios agency that perhaps you want to work at have even harder situation where they're getting hundreds or thousands of emails so in that split second when I or or another person have to make a decision about whether to reach out or follow up with a potential designer there's a few things that kind of make me take a decision really really quickly and I want to I want to talk about them so first of all let's talk about the portfolio right I get into the portfolio and again I can make a decision in about 10 seconds it's like when you're seeing a woman on the street and you know innocently if you're attracted to her or not I can instantly say by looking even to the thumbnails and that behaves or whatever if this designer knows the basics of good design such as composition typography color and if he has good visual aesthetics and it's true that you know you're not supposed to judge a woman by only how she looks and you're not supposed to judge the designer but only if his work is beautiful you have to know how he thinks I never end everything but that's actually the second stage just like dating because I can help a designer grow and learn how to think but if he doesn't have that you know just sense of taste and you know understanding in how to lay out a typography correctly those are things that are too too hard to you know give a designer and you know even a junior designer out of the job so he has to have those core things and that I can really judge quickly so I take a look if I see those if those things look good enough then I explore deeper and perhaps move into the kind of short list of designers that I want to reach out or talk to later but if I don't see that in the first 10 seconds then I completely I just close it and I say thank you for reaching out or whatever so I'm not sure this is something that you can either change if you don't have it then perhaps you don't have it and you need to you know practice your design and improve this but the thing is that a lot of designers who have good work who could pass this first impression are getting lost because of actually pretty silly things and let me tell you what they are people who don't put the link to their portfolio really really quickly and simply and obvious to see their email they're writing me a long email inside that long email which I don't really have time to learn they're saying please open the PDF attached and in the PDF there is a link to my portfolio with a password they're really actually making my life so hard and complicated that when I by the time that I get to their portfolio I already have a better impression of they're kind of pissed me off because they they actually didn't understand user experience because user experience is about making my life the user who's trying to use your product checkout your portfolio hard so please please please write short emails make it clear where your portfolio link is and make my life easier and also put a phone number in that email because when I do reach out to you I want to click on my mobile phone and just give you a call and not start to open the PDF and look in your CV see if you wrote a phone number and then copy paste it and then that little much it's just super super complicated and I know that perhaps it sounds picky or you know trivial but remember what I told you I have 50 emails or a hundred emails that I got to do now and I got into it quickly because I want to go back to my design job so please please please make my life easier and be super practical about it one more thing that pretty quickly turns me down when I see a designer is either he's telling me I don't have a website or he's sending me a link to a Wix website with down below created by wigs he didn't even put it on his own domain or remove that banner or he's sending me some kind of an excuse explaining why this is only temporary and and you know and he didn't have time to do it properly not all the works are there come on listen I know I feel you me myself I hate my website and it's not actually a good portfolio and everything so I I understand but please understand it you're currently even as you sending it to me you're in a job interview so please don't apologize just stand up and be yourself and be proud of what you right now even if you're not proud and that's that's our life is designer right we have a deadline we need to present something even if we're not super proud of it and what you're doing by apologizing before I even open the link you told me this sucks and I'm sorry for it I already have an opinion about you which you suck because you told me so and that's and that's that's a shame because perhaps I would check out your working out with the site that it is fun so please don't don't you know fail yourself but by apologizing or by you know not having a website its 2017 it's just you know unacceptable that you don't have a website on your own domain there's just so many platforms right now to do it really quickly without coding without paying you know too much money so please do not apply for a great job that you want without at least a decent website and while we're on the subject of portfolios a couple of days ago I got an email from a guy from California called Ryan and he sent me his portfolio he is a student a senior student at design school and he kind of have for feedback on his branding on his portfolio so let's check it out and see if we can help him create a better website so this is Ryan's website that's his logo and here you can see his works and works are actually pretty decent I would say for a recent graduates to do yeah I think look like I think overall there are some branding works here somebody toriel works the works are actually pretty good design wise so let's see how we can improve this regarding Ryan's logo I would say that lo is fine I wouldn't change it as long as I can read who you are and see that you can do basic you know typographical skills that's fine I wouldn't touch it I think it looks great but here's what bothers me about website I mean it's good it's not bad but here's thinking what I would improve so first of all I can see Marco Ramirez here twice why would I see him twice that's that's a waste of place you could let me know something else about here instead of showing me they look the same work twice perhaps show me something about yourself because looking at this yeah I can click the about page and see who you are but perhaps you should put something a bit more personal on the front pages to let me know that I arrived to your website and this is you who you perhaps you have an agenda or the short info about yourself but anyway just showing the same word twice is it's just waste the the other thing which I think is could be improved and that's pretty much regards all the works here is that I feel like the website is kind of lacking a little bit in our direction which means the design itself is pretty good but you have to present it nicely for example when you're presenting a bread to just show the logo it's just a little bit out of context and it's true that you show here at the business cards but I would need a bit more you know applications or to show it to me a bit more in context for me to really imagine the brand as a whole and see how that works and you can see a lot of brands on B hands they just do it wonderfully by giving you a lot of examples and you can see that by saying art direction I mean that they are shot with their well shot on a background that you know complements them and it's just it looks good even if you're presenting a business card there's a way to make it look great a little bit pop a little bit different the background the shading so you can do something that you know makes it look a bit better and again this is about presentation because the work itself is pretty good now you want to present it in the light that makes it look it best and that's got to do with our direction presentation the way you shoot it the way you you put it you know inside your your webpage and I think that's true in in every case here you have a magazine and you've actually embedded the whole magazine here which i think is nice but i think it will be much more powerful if you would actually have the printed magazine open on a nice background if this is a fashion magazine then put it in some kind of a fashionable context and take a photo about of it that would kind of look I think more impressive and more you know better it's just better you know just like when you're selling the car the car you you probably want to clean the car and take a good photo of it and that's the same because the work here is like the car it's pretty good but you want to get presented in the best way possible overall I think that's all I think for a design student you're you're in a pretty good place right so keep it up and for all you guys out there send your portfolio's don't be afraid even if you get rejected try to learn from it again and again and most important have a website and just try you need to get rejected at least you tried anyway I hope this was helpful for you guys and I will catch you next week all right week [Music]