It's a good time to be a welder. A skilled one, anyway. A New York Times article from last week pointed out that certain trades appear to be largely insulated from the job-shedding of the recent economy, including nurses, electrical linemen, and the aforementioned guys with the torches.

One obvious response to this revelation is to lament the diminished status of skilled trades in the West, especially the US: it's been decades since jobs involving skilled manual manipulation were considered prestigious work, and the scarcity of such skills is certainly a contributing factor to the conundrum portrayed in the article.

But at least as important, and far more instructive for creative professionals, is a common trait of those welders, nurses and linemen enjoying such good pickings: demonstrated proficiency in a hard-to-learn field. The welders in such high demand, for example, are the ones with 10 years of experience who can create flawless welds on oil refinery projects. The nurses are critical care nurses: a designation that takes exceptional levels of schooling, dedication and -- again -- experience to achieve. And so on: "...employers are begging for qualified applicants for certain occupations, even in hard times," explains the article. "Most of the jobs involve skills that take years to attain." The Free Exchange blog on Economist.com extends the argument by noting that "experience matters. Employers are uninterested in those without five to ten years on the job -- enough time to master the skills in question. That's obviously not something currently unemployed workers can obtain right away. In the short term, the supply of these workers is essentially fixed."

Moreover, these aren't skills that can be implied or hinted at by a resume or a solid Personal Brand. I've never hired a welder, but I suspect that if I did I'd want to see them weld before offering them the job, and that I'd want to look at those welds very very closely. Same for a special education teacher, another of the professions mentioned: teachers are typically observed in a classroom setting before being handed a contract, especially if they're to work in an especially difficult or high-stakes environment.

Creative professionals tend to walk a border between white collar and skilled labor, and as such don't have extremely clear routes for demonstrating competence. There's the portfolio, of course, which serves a similar function to a welding test in that it showcases ability in a straightforward way: if you can't draw, it'll show. No way around that. Contrast this with management skills, which are nearly impossible to test for directly ("you have 35 minutes to make this team of engineers and marketers into a smoothly functioning team..."). This is one reason why a white collar worker can build a career on affability and good connections despite a lack of skills: they're just that hard to measure.

Designers are generally judged on both. Recruiters and creative directors comment repeatedly on the double-whammy nature of the creative hiring process, where a good portfolio is the cost of entry, but the interview and the referrals seal the deal. It's a bit like being hired twice. The mistake many young creative professionals make is in assuming that their success hinges more on one side than the other. In the current economy, it could be argued that the intangibles, like management, decision-making, and "design thinking" are diminished in importance, since tighter budgets mean more risk-aversion, and an "intangibly great" applicant with a mediocre portfolio is a risky (though potentially fantastic) hire.

A likely short-term solution is to focus more than ever on demonstrable skills. Yes, personal brands are important, networking is important, and communication skills are important. What's more important, especially in a tight economy, is the ability to demonstrate skills in a direct, understandable way. What's the Graphic Design equivalent of a welding test? How does an Interaction Designer showcase her chops the way a critical care nurse showcases his? More and more employers are starting to ask these questions and act upon them.

For the designer, this makes right now a fantastic time to brush up on basics. Successful consultancies tend to spend their slow periods working fanatically on capacity-building projects, practicing the skills that make them competitive by developing their own spec projects. Jobless creative professionals would do well to follow suit, by taking classes, volunteering, or pursuing spec projects of their own: you know, practicing.

photo: Nikola Bilic, courtesy of Shutterstock

Gladly, most of us know that "the art of parking" go hand in hand with "the art of driving". Some of us, unfortunately, tend to focus on "driving" and forget about the "parking" part. Take that 23 years old woman, for example, was - sadly - severely injured today after falling 3 stories with her Mazda due to a failed parking attempt at the Malha shopping mall in Jerusalem.



Furthermore, according to the Israeli news portal Ynet, her husband who was standing outside the car was also injured after getting hit by the running car on its way down.



Please don't get us wrong here, this is not about female drivers! Women are often more careful than men and known to account for fewer car accidents. It's just that this one is not a very good example to all that. Photographs by Gil Yochanan, Ynet.

1. What do you look for when hiring a designer?

Craft: Does their work demonstrate an eye for design and the ability to produce great work within the realities of manufacturing and budget constraints?

Design Thinking: Can they think broadly? Do they have an awareness of design's role within the context of business and culture?

Cultural Fit: Can they work in a rigorous multidisciplinary collaborative environment?

2. Is there a particular "tell" that signals a good or bad fit?

Craft and design thinking are competencies that can be easily assessed by viewing a designer's portfolio and listening to them present their work.

Cultural Fit is more difficult to gauge. The most telling signal of a potential good fit is an engaging dialogue. If a candidate does not demonstrate a genuine curiosity in the work that we do here, it's typically a red flag.

3. What is your best interview "horror story"?

I've had candidates break out in hives, drip sweat on to their portfolios, completely lose the ability to speak, blush deep eggplant, knock their water glass over, but I wouldn't call these horror stories. We tend to look beyond nerves, and in most cases I find a nervous candidate endearing and genuine.

I think the worst "horror stories" are candidates that aren't taking the time to be personal or do their research. We often get cover letters to the affect of "IDEO is my top choice…"

4. Do you have any specific advice for recent graduates, or people just starting straight out from school?

Recent graduates are essential to firms in the innovation business. They bring new ideas, questions and insights to our teams. However, unfortunately in this economy there are few full time positions available for recent graduates. Be open to alternative relationships with design consultancies such as apprenticeships, part time and temporary contracts. The first few years out of school should be viewed as a form of graduate school. Exposure and experience is crucial to your career, take any opportunity you can get.

5. What is the single, most valuable piece of advice you could give to those on the hunt?

Be authentic to yourself. An interview is not all that different from a date. If my husband had shown up in heels blaring Indigo Girls on his stereo for our first date, I would have found it down right creepy. Don't try to imitate the company you are pursuing, demonstrate how you can have a meaningful relationship with them.

6. Regarding creative employment, what do you know now that you wished you knew then?

Focus on understanding what you want to do, not who you want to work for.

- - - - -

Chelsea is the head of the Communications Design Group at Ziba in Portland, Oregon. Over the past decade, she's grown her multi-disciplinary design team from 4 to 14 members, spanning the graphic, web, and interaction design disciplines, and produced award-winning work for clients like Procter & Gamble, FedEx, Nike, Pixelworks and Umpqua Bank. She holds an MFA in Graphic Design from the University of Washington, sat on the discussion panel at the Portland installment of the Coroflot Creative Confab, and is an incredibly pleasant person to chat with.

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CNN Money writes in an article from earlier this week that the percentage of American workers employed in freelance, temporary or self-employed circumstances is expected to climb to 40% in ten years time. For creative professionals, the future is already here.

The Salary Survey we've conducted here at Coroflot for the past several years has long supported a suspicion shared by many designers: that they engage in freelance or other flexible working situations at a higher rate than the workforce as a whole. The 2008 survey shows most fields reporting around 60% of respondents in corporate positions, with the remainder divided between freelancers and consultancies, plus a few odd "other" replies, and while consultancies certainly employ full-time staffers, the core-plus-freelancers model is probably the most common. Add the growing popularity of project-oriented hiring in corporate studios as well, and you've got a total flexible workforce that's probably pushing 40% already, if not surpassing it.

The reasons for this tendency have been discussed for quite a while -- the perceived optional nature of design work in many fields, the intense competition for work, and the never-ending search for more interesting projects, among others -- but its appearance in other fields is a relatively new thing. A typical graphic designer can pretty much expect to have a spell of freelance work at some point in her career, but for most bankers (for example) this is still a fairly novel notion.

This may be a good thing for designers. Since creative hiring decisions are often made by folks in less freelance-prone fields, convincing an interviewer that a resume full of short-term employment doesn't indicate flightiness can be problematic. An environment where other professions are seeing more temporary and contract employment, though, could make those ears more sympathetic. It should, in any case, help dispel the image of the loose cannon designer, freelance by choice rather than necessity.

There are multiple downsides to this trend for the job market as whole, however, one of which was elucidated by Chelsea Vandiver, head of Ziba's Communications Design Group in Portland last week. While on the panel at Thursday's Creative Employment Confab, she pointed out that applicants often define their own temp-ability through their skill set. "When I see craft," she explained, "I think freelance," while staff positions generally require excellent communication, management and cross-disciplinary skills as well. The CAD Monkey and Hot Pencil stereotypes bear this out: much as we might admire a tongue-tied prodigy who does nothing but crank out gorgeous renderings all day, we rarely envision him rising through the ranks, or even staying put for more than a year or two.

Could it be that the further Temping of America will exacerbate this split and drive it into other professional fields, leaving us with a bifurcated work force of full-time overlords and lifelong temps? The creative professions are generally understanding of a freelance youth, and with some demonstrated savvy and leadership experience, shifting from temp to staff is tricky but not impossible. Other fields, newer to these employment structures, may not be so forgiving.

Job-seeking is a stressful task, but especially so for designers: not only must we make the right connections and have the right combination of training and experience, we're also judged -- sometimes quite coldly -- on the merits of work that we've poured our sweat and soul into. It could be argued that the most useful thing design school teaches is how to take rejection and criticism gracefully.

But did you ever consider the job search from the perspective of the ones doing the hiring?

Creative hiring is unique from the employer's perspective as well. The past two months have had me interviewing and conversing with a broad range of recruiters, directors and senior designers (for the Confab series, mostly), and one subtle theme of those talks that caught me off guard is how hard the hiring process is for them as well, and how daunting. It's easy to lose sight of this fact when you're a recent grad or newly unemployed, scraping for something, anything, in what feels like a completely skewed and unfair system; but as with many design problems, sympathy for the client can be a powerful tool.

Consider what you are telling an employer when you inquire about a job. "I want you to pay me a considerable sum of money," you are, in essence, demanding, "for a long, long time. In return, I will come up with fantastic ideas that you can use to improve your business. These ideas will be appropriate to your projects, fit in with your established process, and be realistic enough to reach the market. They'll also be astonishingly creative -- stuff you've never seen before, nor even imagined. And I'll work seamlessly with the rest of your team, challenging and pushing them, but also listening to and working with them. I won't be a diva, and I won't be an asshole. I'll make you money." That's a lot to propose, but when you get down to it, that's the reality, and the consequences for for not fulfilling all of those needs are severe.

A poor creative hire is a fucking nightmare. Anyone who employs designers expects to pile a big stack of money and effort on top of their designs, and if they're ill-conceived or poorly realized, that money and effort goes down a hole: the campaign falls flat, the product doesn't sell, the building stays vacant, the publication ends up in the trash. It's bad for the designer, of course, who probably takes a lot of pride in delivering a great solution, but it's even worse for the company at large: an ineffective design team eventually means a failing company. And while the hiring process can be laborious and expensive, the firing process can cost even more. One reason more and more firms are hiring on contract rather than salary is that it reduces the costs of a bad fit.

Good firms and studios are cautious in their hiring. Beth Sasseen, a senior recruiter at Nike who sat on the Confab panel in Portland last week, recounted multiple instances of hires that took six months or more to finally complete. This sounds interminable from the applicant's point of view, but it's just as excruciating for the employer. Time is money, after all, and if they could find a guaranteed perfect designer in one day, they'd have them on salary the following morning (check out this interview with Josh Morenstein of FuseProject for one example). The reality is more complicated. "Taking a chance" on an unknown applicant means taking a chance with the company's livelihood, and successful firms don't do that. They make sure.

So when you're updating your portfolio, building your networking, setting up informational interviews, and sending out contact letters...have pity. Make it easy on the poor recruiters and team leaders. Find out what they need -- not what you want them to need -- and explain to them in clear detail how you'll deliver that. Make it easy for them. You can do that. You're a designer.