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 Hustle, 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 gonna 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 I 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 buyer's journey. Now, if you're not familiar with the buyer's journey, it is a process that people usually go through in stages when making a decision to buy something. Now, 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 buyer's 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 stage. And I will give you guys some examples of that shortly, so stay tuned. I have a full video on the buyer's 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 wanna 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 wanna optimize your resume and there's a very simple way to do this. 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 gonna be the things most important to this, for this opportunity. So what you wanna 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 wanna 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 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 wanna 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 hiring 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 below to 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 it'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 defaults 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 search on LinkedIn is 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 wanna 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 I'll link you guys to below. 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 Instagram. Show them that you know about travel. Don't just say it, visualize your brand. And you can do this through social media. 20 years ago, we weren't able to do this. We just had one piece of paper, it was our 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 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 wanna 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 gonna get a screening with somebody from HR. Now they're just gonna basically go over your resume. They're not gonna get in-depth with your technical abilities. They just wanna know a little bit about your experience and hear 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 wanna 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 wanna 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, I would definitely like to learn more about the opportunity and what are some of the responsibilities in the role before I get into a deep 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 kinda leave it open and say, 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 maybe a few personal things like I enjoy data and economics and maybe some of 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 knowing too many intricacies. What they're looking for here is to see how confident you are, how concise and how well you can communicate, and how enthusiastic you are. So a lot of times, they're just trying to pick up on these soft skills. So again, those are some things that they're looking for in this part of the process. The hiring team is different. You do wanna get more specific here. You do wanna 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 when we talked about resume optimization, when you did some research and you looked to see what are these jobs looking for? 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 developed strategy or implemented strategies. I had some examples of how I led my team and I supported them. I had examples of how I was able to develop and foster relationship with clients. And what I did is I packaged 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'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 wanna 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 you're gonna say to a degree. So moving on, after this interview, what's probably gonna happen is as long as everything went well, the recruiter's 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, hey, Cathy, had a great chat with whoever you talked 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 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 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 I ask them three very personal questions towards the end of the conversation in the last five minutes. And the first one is I ask them, what do they like about the agency that they're at? Obviously, in the agency world, people move around every year to two years. So I always wanna know is what keeps somebody there and let them give me a candid response of why they like where they're at. Now, a second thing I ask people is what does it take to succeed in the role at the agency? And this always 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 that I'm gonna put on the job description. If somebody would ask me during the interview, what's important for somebody to, what are some skills that are important for somebody to succeed? I would've said someone that's coachable and that can actively listen. My point here is that you're not gonna get all the information from the job description. You're gonna get a lot of information from talking to these people. So my 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, I say, based on our conversation and my experience, do you have any hesitations on my qualifications? Now 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 it even comes up. And this 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, 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 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's no longer there. So those are 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 gonna be either with somebody very senior or the account 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 something they were really interested in, so that's something I led with over here when I had my conversations over here. However, that person told me that they had hesitations because they usually like to see people that have more client management experience. So what I made sure that I did is when I had my conversations at the next stage is I focused 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. If you do a 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, this, and this. And they're gonna come back to you 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 105 to 113. Why? If you give somebody a range, there's a high part of it, there's a low part of it. Even if the high part is pretty high, the low part gives them options and 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 potentially interested because it's just so different. So it's very important 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 negotiate. 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 buyer's 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.