Insulting Candidates Is Not In The Purview Of A Recruiter

Recently, a senior executive candidate told me about a recruiter who thought he/she was being helpful and, instead, was insulting.  The candidate had had the misfortune of choosing the wrong company several times in a row and had three or four one year jobs; all her companies were well known with good reputations; the candidate had no idea before joining these companies that she was not a “fit”.  The recruiter told her that she had ruined her career, which had otherwise been stellar.  What good can come out of insulting a candidate?  Did the recruiter think she was giving good advice or was the recruiter merely using her position to be a bully?

If a recruiter wants to give positive career advice, that is fine.  But it has to be advice that can be followed and that is actionable.  Telling someone that they have ruined their career is both untrue and unnecessary.

Over the years, I have had candidates tell me about being insulted, bullied and put down by recruiters.  That certainly runs contrary to my philosophy.  If, as a recruiter I don’t like someone, I am polite to thank them for their time.  I tell them I will call when I have something appropriate for them.  They go into my data base with appropriate comments.  Occasionally, I am actually able to place them.  The wonderful thing about LinkedIn is that it allows me to see how people develop and grow. 

Sometimes people who start out poorly end up doing fabulously. 

Years ago, I was flabbergasted when a candidate who had worked for only small companies, told me that a recruiter said to him, “Why should I help you?  You have third world credentials.”  The candidate was about 27 years old at the time.  Today he is an EVP of a major ad agency.  We are all not so lucky as to get jobs at the best places right out of college. There is no point to insulting someone.

Before I grew my beard fully, I had a fairly heavy beard.  By the end of the day, I had “five o’clock shadow”.  A recruiter told me that he would only represent me if I shaved twice a day.  Give me a break!

I once hired a recruiter who at the time I offered her a job, worked for another recruiter who was infamous for insulting candidates.  In an effort to get this candidate to turn me down and stay at her firm, the recruiter showed her colors by saying, “You’re too stupid to work for him”  The candidate joined me and became a very successful recruiter. There is just no need to insult people.

When people are actively looking for a job they are vulnerable. Doing anything other than being a good listener, asking probing questions and being polite is to take advantage of the candidate’s weakness.  Any recruiter who does that to you should be taken off your list.

Interviewing: Your Attitude Is What Will Get You Your Next Job Not Your Words

The best presenter I ever saw taught me something about selling. It wasn’t his words so much as his attitude.  When he spoke he was excited, exciting and fun.  He totally believed in what he was presenting.  He set up his presentation so that he gradually sucked his audience in to what he was saying.  But it wasn’t so much his words as much as his attitude. And his attitude was persuasive. 

And so it is with interviewing.

When you are on an interview, you must be relaxed, confident and excited.  If you communicate your excitement for the job, for your business and, most of all, for yourself, you can get the job.  If you are calm and communicate in monotones, you will not get the job.  Simple as that.

I had a conversation with a candidate recently that was disturbing.  He told me his age, mid-fifties  (He should never have told me his age; I could tell).  Unfortunately, he has had five jobs in the last eight years.  Every one of the companies either lost business or changed directions.  One of them was an in-house agency for a Fortune top fifty; the company decided to no longer support its in-house agency.  None of it was his fault.  But he said something to me which was quite revealing, “I am fifty-four, I have no longer have illusions that my next job will be the big one.  I am past that.  I just want to work for the next ten or twelve years, hopefully at the same company which does not lose business or decide to change directions.”  That statement certainly reflected how he feels about his career and his age.  It also communicated utter defeat. No one wants to hire a defeated executive.  The point is to think before you speak.

Over the years, I have had many executives, some of whom were many years younger than fifty-four, communicate their unhappiness, often not in words but in their attitude.  Being let go is always tough. My heart goes out to people who through no fault of their own end up in the wrong place at the wrong time.  

But if you let yourself get down, this attitude will be reflected in your interviewing. As the song says, it is vitally important to “pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again.”  Successful people do that. In the case that I just mentioned, wouldn’t it have been better if the candidate had said to me, “I can’t believe that this has happened to me, but I had no way of knowing – none of those companies told me that they had problems while I was interviewing.  But now I know that I needed to ask about the state of their business before I accepted a job.  I am determined that this will not happen again and that the next job I get will be for keeps.”  Any positive statement he made would have reflected a better outlook.

Words don’t sell, attitudes do.  

The best job candidates exude enthusiasm for what they do and who they are.  I recently had a mid-level executive get an offer for a very senior job.  She exuded so much confidence and passion for herself during her interviewing that the company knew she could do the job and she beat out several better qualified candidates. The hiring manager told me that she had the best attitude of anyone they interviewed.  Positive attitude should be innate.  If you are confident and passionate, but it does not show, you need to learn how to tap into your inner resources to communicate those traits.

Many candidates become thoughtful and introspective when they interview.  But interviewing is not a time for you to be overly cautious.  Rather, it is a time for enthusiasm and positive energy. 

Creative Is Still King And It Is An Exciting Time For Advertising

Advertising is advertising. Digital, broadcast, out-of-home, it doesn’t matter. It makes no difference how the business has changed or moved or morphed, it is still one hundred percent about selling products or ideas.

It is a very exciting time in the business.

The reason is that communications are finally becoming totally integrated.  Great ideas can be executed in multiple media, including digital.

Throughout all that is going on in the business, clients are still looking for good work that moves product or thought.  Anyone who is in the business and does not understand or know this, should not be working in advertising.  Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer at P&G, gave an important and insightful speech at the ANA recently.  In it, he talked about the new direction at Procter and Gamble.  To paraphrase him, he admitted that they (P&G) were spending too much time measuring and not enough time on the quality of the work.  Of course.  P&G has finally seen what all good advertising people have always known.  Creative is still king.  It is always about the work, not test scores.

Every person involved with the business – account, creative, strategy, media, events, CRM, content, social or promotion, etc. must understand that the work is why their company was hired.  No client has ever hired an advertising agency of any kind thinking they would be satisfied with ineffective work. I once had a not so successful and short-tenured agency president tell me that marketing was far more important than the work.  Wrong.  The work may come from great marketing (or vice versa), but one doesn’t exist without the other.  Great marketing backed by poor execution is doomed.  Great execution backed by poor marketing may succeed in spite of itself.  But when both are great it can be nirvana. The best part of the business is that now great work can be executed in multiple media.

Many agencies, in an effort to seem more contemporary, are calling themselves communication agencies or content shops or something besides advertising.  Doing that only obfuscates the truth.  The proof is that the successful digital agencies like R/GA and 360i are expanding their offerings into the territory that was once the province of the traditional agencies.  And the general agencies are morphing into integrated whole agencies.  There is even a rumor that Ogilvy1 and several other O&M agencies will be integrated into Ogilvy, which only makes sense.  

Perhaps this will signal to all agencies that it is time to end the silos, which only interfere with good work and with servicing clients.

It is and always will be about the work.

Account People Are Responsible For Solving Problems With Their Clients

The one thing that I hear from every agency person who has gone to the corporate side is that they finally understand what clients do, how they spend their time and the priorities that take them away from agencies. And they all also say that their client side experience puts the issues that agency people have into complete perspective. (I actually hear the same thing from clients who go to agencies – before joining an agency they had no idea how complicated the relationship is).

As I have previously written, agencies don’t like to hire clients (and vice versa).  It is a terrible mistake because every agency could use the perspective which client-side experience can bring.

There are many consultants and consulting companies who have made a fine living by lecturing senior agency management on the issue of agency-client relations and how to get along better, but they never seem to actually resolve the problem.  The reason they cannot solve this issue is because disliking and distrust of clients are endemic to the business on both sides.

Clients resent agencies pushing for their work; clients don’t think agencies understand their business.  Clients think their agencies are too expensive, especially when it comes to production. But there are other areas as well.  Agencies can’t understand why they don’t get better direction; agencies aren’t allowed to know their clients’ business. Corporate procurement has squeezed agencies to the point where the relationship is constantly strained and account people are merely suppliers, not partners.

A lot of the enmity is internally generated on both sides of the business.  Dealing with each other can be frustrating.  Nevertheless, I put responsibility for handling this squarely in the hands of account people. Good account people should learn enough about their clients to not only know about the client’s business, but to understand the ins and outs of the client’s culture in order to put their business in perspective and explain to their agencies what has happened and why it occurred.

This means that account people need to be well enough trained nd familiar enough with their clients to know what will sell and not sell; by no means should any account person prevent good, on-strategy creative from being presented. And once bought by the client, their job is to keep it sold.  

Their job is to keep creative, media and planners enthusiastic and excited.

When I was a senior account person, I would not allow the account people to badmouth their clients to others in the agency. I told them that they could come in to my office and bitch and moan to me all they wanted, but when they discussed their client issues with others in the agency they only succeed in destroying enthusiasm for working on the account.  Some account people mistakenly believe that by speaking ill of their clients that they will strengthen and build their relationships with others in the agency – especially creative people.  Unfortunately, the opposite is true.

In today’s environment, agencies do not spend enough time at the client.  When ad agencies don’t spend enough social and getting-to-know-you time with their clients, they cannot learn the subtleties and nuances of their client’s jobs and their businesses.  Clients are partially to blame for this issue because their procurement people have cut agency compensation to the bone which discourages this kind of quality time. Nevertheless, learning the client’s business is the essential job of account people so that information can be translated back to the rest of the agency. 

Of course, there are some bad clients, but the only way that agencies can handle them is by trying to understand what makes them bad and attempting to deal with the issues in a positive way.  Mostly, I found that bad clients are clients agencies don’t spend enough time with.

Even good clients occasionally need to be hand-held.  It is part of the job.

Adventures In Advertising: The Worst Client, Ever

I hear stories all the time about bad clients:  clients who are abusive, clients who call unnecessary meetings at 4pm on a Friday, clients who won’t buy the work.  But this is a story about a client who went way beyond all bounds.

I was a young account executive and was put on a new account at my agency.  The account was one of the major American watch brands and it was among the first accounts that I handled.  I was about twenty-four years old. I was very excited about the assignment - until I got to know the client.

It turned out that my client, the advertising director, was rough and crude. The first hint that this was going to be a difficult client was about two weeks after we started.  The ad director cursed at me and insulted me because a messenger was delayed (no emails or faxes for documents then).  Virtually every day, for no good reason, I was cursed at, insulted and told I was stupid and that my agency sucked.  It was beyond unpleasant.

I went to my boss, the head of account management, and his advice was to not let it bother me and not to lose my cool. But it turned out that it was not just this particular ad director, the nastiness pervaded the watch company from the top down.

Sometime later, there was a big meeting and the president of the client company disagreed with something the president of my agency said.  Out of the client’s mouth came a torrent of insults and curses the likes of which I never again heard in business.  Truth is, it happened because the president of the agency offered an opinion.  This barrage of insults was basically unprovoked, but it was too long ago for me to remember what or why.

At that point, the agency made a very good decision:  do the best we could and look for another watch account with more genteel people.

In the meantime, there was an upcoming sales meeting at the Dellwood Country Club in Rockland County and I was asked to present the new advertising.  I was about 24 years old and had never done that before.  I was very nervous to present to their sales force.  The presentation was to take place about 4pm.

At one o’clock there was an informal meeting among the agency and client executives to discuss the agency portion of the presentation. The meeting was so informal that those in attendance were just standing around.  I don’t remember what was being discussed, but I offered an opinion. Whatever I said seemed to be agreed upon by others who were in the room. The client president was either angry or surprised that a kid should have an opinion and a good one at that.  What happened next I can still see in my mind, as clearly as if it were yesterday.  To this day, I don’t know what motivated this man, but he was clearly surprised or angry at me. He looked at me and said, “If you are so smart, what is the difference between a chronograph and a chronometer?”  I knew the answer and gave it to him.  (A chronograph is a stopwatch and a chronometer is a very well calibrated, accurate timepiece.)

This obnoxious client was shocked that I knew the answer.  So shocked and excited that he actually went to punch me. I saw him make a fist, cock his arm and let go.  I pulled back and in doing so, I lost my balance and his blow hit me on the shoulder.  I did fall.  I am not sure if he knocked me down or if I fell while ducking his punch.  It was very surreal because I don’t think that anyone knew what to do or say. The agency president and client just kept on talking as if nothing had happened.  I was just lying on the floor. No kidding.  I was lying on the floor and they proceeded as if nothing had happened.

So I got myself up, walked out of the room and went home, which was about 25 minutes away in Westchester.

When I got home the phone was ringing.  It was the agency president.  He told me either to get back and make the presentation or I would be fired.  I actually told him that I would only come back if the client apologized when I returned.

The client half-heartedly apologized. I made the presentation.  I also resigned.

So when I hear stories about rough clients, I also smile to myself knowing what a truly bad client is all about.