I can think of conversations about specific candidates’ looks, intelligence, class/background, even smell… which make my stomach turn to recall. One candidate was quite overweight, and while she made a great impression at interviews, and secured a good job through our agency, she was given a really cruel nickname in the office, and was the butt of a lot of nasty jokes. It’s jarring to think that something which is billed as a helpful service (“we can find you a job!”), is so unpleasant under the surface.

I’m glad that you got out!

I probably get…3-5 emails a day from recruiters, and about that many calls a week, when I am in passive mode, not looking for a job. When I am looking for a job I probably get 15-20 emails a day and 4-5 calls a day. I am not super special. I do have some impressive work assignments which heightens their attention, but this is a fairly standard response for people in my field (contracting, govt. contracting).

I would never ever use a recruiter trying to find jobs for me, the ideal situation (for everyone, always!) is that the recruiter is coming at you with a job already. My two biggest tools for letting recruiters know that I am looking for a job are dice.com, and LinkedIn. My LinkedIn profile is crazy, I mean that shit is extensive. I spend hours putting all that stuff up there and getting recommends and verification of my awesome-ness from all previous jobs. The nice thing is, recruiters will generally connect to you even if they don’t have a job that you want right now and then will post new jobs on their LinkedIn profile. I put the address of my LinkedIn page on my resume, right next to my email.

Seriously, if you are looking for a quick job in the right field, tech industry ALWAYS needs graphic designers, and the base salary is much MUCH higher than other industries because the workload is demanding (good for some people, bad for others). Those are my two cents.

1. If you don’t have experience you will NEVER get anything other than entry level salary as a designer in NYC. Too many young, talented people, and a good portfolio can always be faked. The only way a firm will trust you is work done for them. Good firms will pay you a subsistence income and give you a fair bump in 6-12 mos. Note that there are very few good firms.

2. Recruiting in design has always been a low return for generalized recruiters, and the old line firms (Janou Pakter, et al) at this point can only make money placing senior positions (they all used to place freelance as bread and butter, but internet), so they probably won’t even acknowledge receipt of your resume.

3. All recruiting firms in New York will only call you if your resume is an exact match. Nothing less. They see too many resumes, and remember someone is paying them $10-20K to not have to look at the wrong resume. Be very specific about what you want. They probably can’t help. Move on.

Understand that employers are getting flooded by resumes. We never listed anywhere besides the RISD alum list (my partner was an alum) and could get dozens of resumes overnight (and this is when things were relatively good). If we didn’t like the first batch, we would post to CommArts (still an okay resource). That would get us over a 100. In 6 years I posted to CL once. It got me over 300 resumes in an hour. Never again.

If your income requirements mandate a more aggressive earnings path, consider seriously bailing on design. Here’s the ugly truth: if you were really good and came from a name program, people would have helped with leads by now (professors are the best way to network). If you are really good but came from a minor school or state school, no one will ever look at your resume. Ever. If you can get some sort of online profile (portfolio site, good gimmick site, etc.) that might help. Don’t want to insult your skills without seeing your work, but being even being a great designer doesn’t necessarily make a difference. It’s easy to find a great designer for literally nothing in New York as an employer. Why people get hired is that they project they are responsible and responsive, understand the business needs of the studio and their clients, and never complain that the work isn’t sexy enough.

You can probably find more production-oriented jobs, by why would you? Salaries stagnate and it’s dreary and repetitive. Get an accounting degree or something with earnings potential and do that for a decade. Then start a letterpress studio or something fun. It might grow into a full time thing and it would be far more rewarding that 70% of the design jobs in NY.