Having a blanket rule of only employing people with experience is understandable; with ever increasing pressures on budgets, time is money and it’s hard to justify spending time nurturing someone else’s skills, when the briefs are piling up.
But how short sighted is that? if no one ever hired raw talent where would that leave our industry? Supping from an ever dwindling pool of talent, filled with ‘safe pairs of hands’ that will do you a job, but rarely surprise you.
At Flourish we believe you have to make the time to bring new people on-board. That means Creative Directors sifting through CVs, checking out portfolios, meeting people face to face to see what vibe you get off of them. We’ve learnt that if you invest the time as a business there are lots of benefits to getting people in with the right skills, but little or no experience.
New people bring new ideas. Education has caught up, and graduates are no longer presenting themselves with notions and skills that are years out of date. People entering the industry are sharp, incredibly driven and mind-bogglingly smart. And they’re wonderfully idealistic. They’re willing to take a risk, as they are unconstrained by such trifles as what’s gone before, or what the client bought last time.
Having someone with no experience means (and this should appeal to the ego in every senior agency bod) you can take a talent and sculpt them into what you want, and what the business needs.
Nurturing talent also forces you to look at your own processes and procedures. It can be amazing what you can learn about your own practices, when you take a step back and try to communicate what the agency is ‘all about’ to a newbie.
Right now Flourish is looking for a Junior / Graduate Designer. If you’ve got a lot to share and bags of enthusiasm, then we’d love to hear from you. Please send your CV and portfolio to our Creative Director, Kim Martin.