How to get a Job in an Advertising Agency – 5 KEY Strategies

If you're looking to get a job in advertising Then you have landed on the right video because I will give you five Game-changing hacks and strategies that I have used to land multiple advertising agency jobs from manager roles to director roles Let's get into it Welcome back to marketing household where we simplify Marketing so that you can grow your digital influence and your business now if you're new to this channel Then you should consider subscribing as I post weekly videos with hacks Tutorials and even break down the steps that you need to take to apply the strategies that we cover What a surprise Getting a job at an advertising agency can be tricky because they typically only hire people with experience But I can tell you that my first agency job was with zero experience and zero connections in the company So if I can do it you can do it also after my first agency gig it got a lot easier to get the next role as I was already familiar with the environment and the Expectations with that said I'm going to share some big news with you guys before we jump into these five hacks and strategies I just landed a new role in New York City the mecca of advertising at a major advertising agency as an associate director of paid social Now after going through this process for the last couple of weeks and receiving multiple offers actually receiving offers from all three agencies that are interviewed with I Decided that I would share some of my hacks and strategies with you because I know that without a shadow of a doubt they will Increase your odds of succeeding in your ad agency job hunt.

So here it is What we will do is we're gonna map out the process of getting a job at an advertising agency and treat it just like the buyers journey now if you're not familiar with the buyers journey is a process that people Usually go through in stages when making a decision to buy something now in the in the marketing world We use it as a framework to understand what information is relevant at each stage of this process so I use the buyers journey as a framework and I applied it to the hiring process so that I can optimize the Information that I get and I share it at each state stage and I will give you guys some examples of that shortly So stay tuned I have a full video on the buyers journey that gets deeper into it and I will link it below in the description with that said Let's jump into it.

Now. I know there's a lot of information back here But if you're really serious about getting your first or your next advertising agency job Then you will stick around to the end of this video so you can have a complete understanding of how this works now These are my personal hacks and strategies that you can apply along your journey to increase your request for interviews Negotiate a higher salary and get more offers so the first thing you want to do is optimize your resume why so I See so many resumes out there that people just have information that's just not relevant on it You want to optimize your resume and there's a very simple way to do it First thing you can do is go on LinkedIn look for the job that you're looking for and look at at least Three to five maybe seven job descriptions for the same role and now I want you to look at what are the top three things? that people are looking for in that role in terms of responsibilities the top three things that you see across all these job descriptions are probably going to be the things most important to this for this opportunity so what you want to do is go back to your resume and tweak it so that you can speak to these things that are important to the people that are trying to hire you so you want To optimize your resume.

So this information is there and it's prioritized What are some things to not put on your resume your bio? Please do not put your bio on your resume That is the point of the interview process. Your resume is just a starting point That should have some of your experience some of your skills and some good talking points Don't be vague when you're optimizing your resume say specifically what you did if you can use numbers or stats That usually looks great because it's it's very objective and it gets people into a performance mindset So that's the first thing I would do I would optimize your resume now The next thing you want to do is optimize your LinkedIn Why dude your LinkedIn is basically your digital resume my last agency role when I came into interview I remember sitting down with one of the hire managers who was an associate director of social and He didn't have my resume in front of him.

He had his laptop open and he was staring at my LinkedIn profile So your LinkedIn profile is like your digital resume and there's a lot of ways you can optimize this now I just made a separate video on this that I'll link you guys also be in the description that I just posted last week But some quick things I'll tell you is optimize the skill section why when recruiters are Searching for potential candidates a lot of times they're using a skills search criteria Meaning they're looking for somebody that has certain skills on Their actual LinkedIn page if you go right now to LinkedIn and do a search for a certain job once you get to the Job Description page it's gonna actually show you a list of the skills that That role is looking for and I'll show you how well you match up against them So it's as easy as looking at a few of these job descriptions And then seeing what you're missing and if you do have those skills just add them in another thing you do is optimize your headline your headline on LinkedIn default to the name of your current role at the name of your current place now recruiters can search Many different ways one way they can head search on LinkedIn.

It's through your headline. Another way is through your current role so if you have the same description for both You're narrowing yourself while if you create one description for your headline and a separate one for your current role Now you have better odds of being found in the search. So the same way you optimize your resume You want to pass some of those things onto LinkedIn? but there's also some very specific things you can do there and you can see the rest of that information on that video that will Link you guys to below next thing is social proofing use your social channels To create social proofing meaning giving credibility to the things you say you do so for example If you are trying to get a job at an agency and travel is important use your estimate Show them that you know about travel don't just say it visualize your friend And you can do this to social media 20 years ago.

We weren't able to do this We just had one piece of paper It was their resume and that's all we were working with nowadays A lot of times what happens is during the interview process you have recruiters and hiring Staff that are looking at your social media channels. So you use this as an opportunity to? validate the things that you're saying on your resume and to bring some congruence to that now the next thing I want to share with you guys is The interview process mapping it now. Typically what happens is when you apply for a job at an advertising agency You're originally going to get a screening with somebody from each now. They're just gonna basically go over your resume They're not gonna get in depth with your technical abilities. They just want to know a little bit about your experience and you know here what are some of the things that you're looking for in a new home and then potentially Discuss salary now one thing I would always caution and I think everybody cautions This is to get into a deep discussion about salary in this first interview Why first of all? The HR person is not the person you're gonna be working with So they don't necessarily have your best interest you want to sell yourself to everybody before you really get into salary however a lot of HR screenings involve a light conversation about salary because they just want to make sure that if your Expectations are crazy above budget that they don't even waste anybody else's time So something I like to do when in the first pre-screening interview HR starts talking to me about salary I say hey You know I would definitely like to learn more about the opportunity and what are some of the responsibilities in the role before I get into deeds of discussion about salary and at this stage if they continue to push me what I'll Say is look I'll be transparent.

I can tell you where I'm at and then I tell them where my salary is at and I kind of leave it open and say you know I would rather have that conversation once I know more about the position and almost every single time They're totally okay with that the key here is don't get locked into a particular range But at the same time it's okay to be transparent and let them know where you're at because then that gives them an idea of where you Potentially might like to be another thing I can tell you about The HR process is that they're gonna ask you generic questions. Like tell me about yourself It is very important for you to have a response like this Prepared mapped out. I like to outline bullet points I like to say a little bit about what I'm doing in my current role some of the things I did in a previous role some of the things that excite me that I'm doing right now and I like to say, you know maybe a few personal things like, you know, I enjoy data and economics and Maybe some of my my hobbies that relate to the job like making YouTube videos you're not gonna get a lot of technical questions at this point and Something to really understand is when they ask you tell me about yourself.

They're not necessarily interested in No, too many intricacies what they're looking for here is to see how confident you are how concise and how well you can communicate now Enthusiastic you are so a lot of times. You're just trying to pick up on these soft skills So again, those are some things that that they're looking for in this part of the process The hiring team is different. You do want to get more specific here You do want to get a little bit more technical and share more specific examples of what you've done and how you've helped Your previous or your current role? grow now it is important to Remember what we talked about? Resume optimization when you did some research and you look to see what are these jobs looking for? You know, what are the top three four responsibilities that they're looking for at this point? it would really help if you already had those things mapped out for Example in the role that I just got as an associate director of paid social they were looking for someone with experience in a paid Social media strategy someone with experience in leading a team and someone that had client communication skills so what I did is I came up with examples of How I helped strategy or develop strategy or implemented strategies I had some examples of how I led my team and I supported them Examples of how I was able to develop a foster relationship with clients And what I did is I package them into these little bite-sized stories why there's a saying that nobody has 30 seconds to listen to your Commercial but they have 30 minutes to listen to your story people love storytelling It is phenomenal and it is something that's very important to us as marketers So when you are going through this process you're marketing to people, you know, you're selling yourself You're trying to get a job and if you can put everything in digestible stories It's just more likely to get absorbed and retained by the people you're talking to in this Second stage interview, what you want to do is have some of those things prepared pre-scripted so that when they ask you these questions you don't have to you don't blank and you seem Confident in your response because you already know what what you're gonna say to a degree.

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So moving on after this interview What's probably gonna happen is as long as everything went well. The recruiter is gonna reach out to you to get your feedback Within a day or two if they don't reach out make sure to follow up send them a note and say, you know, hey Cathy had great shot with whoever you talk to and I Really appreciate the color that they gave me on the agency culture and some of the clients and I think they really liked my experience in facebook ads and and strategic analysis, I think we had a good conversation overall and Would definitely love to hear some feedback at that point They're gonna give you some feedback and hopefully you know what you thought was your strong suits They thought were your strong suits as well and the interview should continue to the next Interview now something I always like to do when I'm talking to someone that potentially has a say in hiring me is I ask them Three very specific questions.

Now, of course I talk to them about what kind of clients they have What are the goals and all that stuff but asking three very personal questions? Towards the end of the conversation in the last five minutes. And the first one is I ask them, you know, what do they like about the agency that they're at, you know, obviously In the agency world people move around every year to two years.

So I always want to know is what keeps somebody there and Let them give me, you know candid responsive why they like where they're at now a second thing that has people is what does it takes to succeed in the role at the agency and This always give me gives me insights to what's really important. I can tell you a recent experience I had in my role as a paid social media manager at open education where I hired somebody that Just wasn't the right fit for the role what I learned from that experience Is that when looking for candidates to work on my team? I need somebody that's coachable And that's really good at actively listening now.

These are not things I'm going to put on the job description if somebody would ask me during the interview What's important for somebody – what are some skills are important for someone to succeed? I would have said someone that's coachable and that can actively listen my point here. Is that You're not going to get all the information from the job description. You're gonna get a lot of information from talking to these people So my question second question that I always ask what does it take to succeed in this role? And usually I get a lot of insight from that question And my third question is the most important I say to the interviewer at the end of the interview when I have about three minutes Left on the clock say based on our conversation in my experience. Do you have any? Hesitations on my qualifications not at that point if they do they tell me and I have an opportunity to overcome that information Additionally, what I can do is that if this person told me something was an issue I can Prepare it into a story so that the next conversation I have with somebody I can overcome that objective Before I even comes up and this that's actually did happen during one of the interviews I had with one of the agencies Where one of their hesitations was that I was on the client side right now and they said hey man, you know We usually like to see people with aggressive a lot of agency experience To succeed in these roles because they're very there's a lot of complexity with the teams So at that point I was able to explain to this person that you know, I I work with teams Internationally remotely and I'm placed in those scenarios a lot that person didn't have context to the situation so that really helped to move the conversation forward and then when I spoke to the next person He told me the same thing He said hey, I had a hesitation before we had our conversation.

But after talking to you that hesitation is no longer there So there's three great questions to ask. So now you crushed your first interview you got some feedback and you gave some feedback to the HR person and now you're gonna have your last interview which is going to be either with somebody very senior or the count lead of the team now basically if you do what you did here in The second interview this is gonna go amazing Now if you learned something here that you can apply over here phenomenal For example when I had one of my interviews with one of the agencies they said hey You have a lot of experience in LinkedIn. We really like that we haven't found a lot of people that have that I Realized that was a strength and some of they were really interested in So that's something I led with over here when I had my conversations over here However, that also per that person told me that they had hesitations because they usually like to see people that have more client and management experience So what I made sure that I did is when I have my conversations that the next stage is I focus on A few stories that gave color on my experience working not only with clients But with teams cross-functionally so that I could illustrate that.

I'm good at building relationships and maintaining them. Good job here What ends up happening is they follow up with you? And now there is? Hopefully an offer now when you get that offer what they're gonna do first is that they're gonna call you and they're gonna have a verbal communication on the phone and they're gonna say hey, how do you think it went this isn't this and they're gonna come back to you and say And give you basically a verbal offer at that point you don't have to accept the offer You can definitely sit on it you can think on it Hopefully at this point you've done some research and something really important here is to have a range It's not good to say.

Hey, I want $100,000 it's better to say I'm looking for a Hundred and five to one hundred and thirteen why if you give somebody a range there's a high part of it There's a little part of it even if the high part is pretty high The low part gives them options and it knows that you're they know that you're flexible but when you stick to a certain number You can undercut yourself potentially or you can overshoot yourself to the point that they might think you're not even you know Potentially interested because it's just so different So it's very important to do sure you do your research and always have a good range in mind Another thing I'll tell you is that beyond negotiating salary? There's other things you can ago. She ate a signing bonus relocation costs potentially a bonus structure paid time off Remote working options. I would always start with salary and once you knock that out look for other things that potentially you can negotiate on Anyways, that is my video that is my process This is the buyers journey applied to getting a job and it helped me get three offers from three major agencies in New York City the mecca of advertising and Hopefully my future videos will be shot on a different background in New York City.

Anyways, thanks for watching Thanks for tuning in and once again This is market and hustle where we simplify marketing so that you guys grow your digital influence and your business and until the next video peace.

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