The silver lining of life’s most uncomfortable moments is without a doubt the comedy. All but the most harrowing of today’s embarrassments and blunders eventually become tomorrow’s knee slappers—we laugh because we survived, and we survived because we learned something… albeit the hard way.

Job interviews are an excellent arena for this type of fodder. When someone’s very future is on the line, and they’re looking down the path of a possible future (“Could this be me?” “Am I home?” “Are you my mommy?”) weird things can happen. Sometimes these things are very, very bad in the moment, but we can all laugh about them now… and take furious notes to ensure we don’t make the same mistakes in our own interview.

On the flip side, it’s terrible practice to give a crappy performance as the interviewer, too—acting bored, insulting someone’s experience, getting their name wrong, making someone in an incredibly vulnerable position feel absolutely terrible… (or, in the case of the stories I heard, much, much worse). Unless you don’t care about attracting good employees and coworkers? Either way, you’ll get what you give.

In that spirit, I recently solicited stories about people’s worst interview experiences — from both sides of the table.

The Bad

  • “The interviewer fell asleep during my interview. Right in the middle of my answer, his head just went down.”
  • “I’ve had a few where candidates seem like they have a chip on their shoulder. I’ve called it out.”
  • “I was like 30 minutes late! I couldn’t get service on my cell phone, so I started to panic. And I ended up being way too dressed up—I’m talking super corporate attire—because I’d always been told that it’s better to be overdressed than underdressed. I felt like it was the worst experience… but I got the job.”
  • “I had a candidate show up with nothing—no purse, no pen, no paper, no resume… nothing. Another whose resume spelled “communication” three different ways—for a PR job—then kicked off the interview by talking shit about his current job. I interrupted him after two minutes to tell him he wasn’t getting the position but then I offered to give him some tips on what not to do.”
  • “The following things happened: They took a polaroid of me, they played a video of Arnold Schwarzenegger giving a speech at a fat camp, and they made me fill out an “employee test,” which was about five pages of math story problems that had been printed on a ditto machine (purple ink!).”
  • “Six months after giving birth, I was called in to interview at a high-profile ad agency. I was lumpy and tired and had lost my ability to think. I had cut my own bangs the night before—like Dumb & Dumber I wore so many Spanx I almost died taking them off. When I get there, I pull the front door and it somehow runs over my foot, which breaks the strap on my shoe. So I walk up the stairs kind of sliding so the shoe stays on. The woman comes out and she’s all cute and small and has her shit together. We go to this café, and she starts talking about wine and looking at the wine menu. I order wine. She doesn’t. She asked me to describe myself. I started saying stuff like ‘You go girl!’ I repeated myself and went into a dark place. Finally it ended.”

The Ugly

  • “[The worst are] hostile non-verbals, like furrowed brows, head in hands, near-throwing of pens, and—my favorite—the dropping of glasses on the table then looking out the window.”
  • “I had an interviewer on the phone ask if I was A) tall and B) blonde. Shockingly, I made it to the in-person interview, where he proceeded to walk me through the office—shadowed by an aghast HR rep—announcing all the derogatory nicknames he’d given his employees.”
  • “I was once interviewed by a CEO who went off on a tangent about how, if he had to choose between meth and cocaine, he’d go for coke every time because it’s natural.”
  • “One guy recently actually had cocaine on his face when he came in at 10 am to interview.”
  • “I was in a group interview on Skype when, in the background of the person we were interviewing, a human crawled out of a refrigerator box in the corner. The box had been there the whole time, not moving, and he said nothing about it.”

Have an interview story of your own? Share it with us in the comments!

Marjorie is a former Creative Circle candidate based in Portland who recently accepted a full-time offer for her dream job. She is a writer/editor and stylist/producer with an emphasis in the design world. If you are interested in working with someone like Marjorie, please contact your nearest Creative Circle office.

What’s your best line? I usually have good luck with the one where I compare my career trajectory to that of a grandpa’s: you start out sweeping the floors of a company, and you work your way up the ladder until they give you a watch after 15-odd years. (It started as an internship and I left with a pewter flask, but you get the idea.)

Job interviews are like Tinder dates except extremely worse, because it’s usually 9:30 a.m., there’s no booze anywhere, and it feels like the whole of your tiny life is being held—ready to be crushed—in the palm of a stranger’s hand. Go to enough of them, and you start recycling your material. Practicing it. Perfecting it, like a comedian making open mic rounds before hitting the big clubs. If there’s anything “awesome” about interviewing for a job you don’t get, it’s that practice. Your nerves are going to do their thing in these situations whether you like it or not. The better you have your lines rehearsed, the easier they’ll roll off the tongue without having to fight through your anxiety to find the right words.

When you’re job-seeking — including saying hey to a roster of prospective new freelance clients — you’re having a lot of these conversations, just as you’re having a lot of awkward drinks with strangers if you’re working the singles scene. Although these types of interactions are typically — literally — the difference between night and day, they share one crucial component: chemistry.

We’ve all been on a vaguely awkward date. Afterward, your friends ask about it and you say something like, “Oh, it was fine…” or “They were nice, but…” The missing component that takes either of this circumstances from “meh” to “promising” is hard to pinpoint; it just works, or it doesn’t. No matter how well you match up on paper (You have the B2B experience they’re looking for! You both like dogs!), if they don’t like your tone, or they don’t get your jokes (the worst), or you fail to convince them of your interest in who designed the atrium of their agency’s new offices, things can start to feel tainted, fast.

Of course the flip side is that all of this is mutual. It’s natural to feel like it’s on you to be the impressive one in an interview setting, but it’s helpful to realize that’s not entirely the case. After all, how badly do you want to work with someone who doesn’t think you’re funny, or isn’t all that friendly? You probably wouldn’t put that much pressure on yourself when heading out on a blind date. You’d brush your hair and make sure that there isn’t anything stuck between your teeth, and you’d do your best to be charming and smart, but you’d expect a similar show of effort on your date’s part.

Yes, it’s important to put your best foot forward in dealing with a prospective employer. But if it doesn’t work out — and you get that sinking feeling mid-interview, though sometimes it’s from the start — you might also consider the fact that you’ve also dodged a bullet. You won’t benefit from being in an unhealthy, tense relationship with a boss or a client any more than you would be in a relationship where one or both of you aren’t totally feeling it. You’d end up feeling under-appreciated or burdensome, and even worse, it would chip away at your confidence, which is by far your most valuable tool in any setting.

I used to think all interviews were pretty awkward by nature until I had one that wasn’t — at all. I left on a high, like I’d made a new friend… and not to muddy the water too much but yeah, like I’d been on a really promising first date. Fast forward and I’m two weeks into a freelance gig of indeterminate length at his offices, with the possibility of full-time work a subject of open dialogue.

Whoever said that you have to kiss a few frogs before finding a prince wasn’t talking about a job interview, but I’d argue it’s just as applicable. You have to have a couple of ill-fitting encounters before you can strike up a business relationship that might have long-term mutual benefit. And, when it comes to the ones that end badly, just think: It’s not you, it’s them.

Marjorie is a former Creative Circle candidate based in Portland who recently accepted a full-time offer for her dream job. She is a writer/editor and stylist/producer with an emphasis in the design world. If you are interested in working with someone like Marjorie, please contact your nearest Creative Circle office.

Sitting down to write or review your resume is daunting. Believe me, we know. Especially when you’re hoping to make a change in your career and go after a role that’s different than all others you’ve had, it can be an intimidating thing to wrap your head around. Here is one page of blank space…and you’re supposed to fit your career history there, along with the skills you’ve acquired? That’s hard enough. What if what you used to do, isn’t directly related to what you want to do?

We meet candidates looking to change the direction of their careers and it is possible to do. By reassessing the direction you’d like to go in, acknowledging your transferrable skills, and arranging how to best present them to prospective employers and clients, you have the ability to make a change.

Here’s how to approach the goal without losing your head.

1. Breathe

Do you think every high-level director (or even CEO) had in mind the direct path they thought they’d go to get in their position? No, of course not. They got there through a maze of side steps and their GPS redirecting them at different corners. It’s okay to decide to make a change, the key is to be strategic about it (which is where Creative Circle can help). Remember that you probably know more about what you’re doing than you think.

2. Use Your Resources

Thanks to the world wide web, there are so many resources available to people in the job market. It goes far beyond sites that are clearly only for job seekers. If you’re interested in a new role in an area that is something different than what you’re doing now, do your research! Hop on to Google and see where searches take you. Search job descriptions, reviews of roles at specific companies, and even people’s personal descriptions on their LinkedIn profiles. Search until you’ve practically overdosed on informational content. Get to know what it is you’ll be expected to do, what you’ll need to learn, what types of people you’ll be expected to interface with (and what their skills are), and what the current challenges and goings-on of this industry are. Just as it’s important before an interview to get excited about the company you’re meeting with and know as much about them as possible, think of your new industry that way as well (whether or not you have an interview there or not).

3. Read and Apply Your Words

Look at job descriptions of the roles you want to be in and remember that not only does each company write their job descriptions in a specific way, but specific industries have nuanced terms they use when discussing a specialty or role. As Jocelyn, a senior recruiter at Creative Circle NY says, “There can be seven different ways to say the same thing.” Pay attention to the language used, and apply it to your resume and cover letters. Buzzwords can be a great way to catch the eye of the person tasked to pool the most well-matched applications.

4. Remember: Skills are Transferrable

When you’re looking over your resume and your skills, don’t take your skill sets for granted. All skills are transferrable (another great point made by Jocelyn) and you can almost always find a way to apply skills you used in one role to the role you’re applying for or the new direction you’re headed in your career. Use the buzzwords mentioned above to describe your responsibilities at previous positions and in your cover letter, explain how your acquired skills can be applied to your new role.

All in all, when you’re focused on making a change in your career, keep in mind that it is going to be a learning process. Do your best not to get frustrated. Instead, use the resources at your disposal, and remain inspired. Think about how far you’ve come, what you know, and how you can use that to your advantage in this next chapter!

Allison is a former Creative Circle Account Executive, with a background in creative writing, content writing/strategy, publishing, and business development. Her world revolves around words and the relationships and interactions they inspire. Allison is now the Content Specialist at Raizlabs, a design and development firm in Boston and San Francisco.

Proportional and Tabular

Did you know that there are two ways to set numerals? You know uppercase and lowercase letters exist, but did you know there are also ‘uppercase’ and ‘lowercase’ figures? In addition to lining and old-style, there’s also two different spacing formats, proportional and tabular.

So much to know about figures, so here’s how it breaks down.

Differences in Height

Old Style numerals (otherwise known as text or lowercase figures) have varied heights in a fashion that resembles a typical line of running text. They follow the ascenders and descenders of lowercase letters. If you set body copy, use old style figures for dates, phone numbers and other uses. Whenever sentence case is used, set your figures in old style. It might look weird because you’re not used to it, but it follows the way people read.

Old Style

Notice how the old style figures here rise to the x-height and have descenders much like lowercase letters.

Using lining numerals (otherwise known as titling or uppercase figures) in body copy disrupts the flow of reading, in the same way that ALL CAPS SHOUT to your reader. Lining numerals work best next to all-cap height letters, or more commonly, in financials for accounting applications. Having all the figures line up at the cap-height makes them easy to read in a line.

Differences in Width

Proportional figures have variable spacing, which results in even color on the page created by horizontal rhythm and reading. The spacing around each figure allow for the width of each figure. Not only do I recommend old style numerals for body copy, I will also recommend them to be proportional. In order to implement, look for “proportional old style” numerals.

Tabular

Notice how the tabular figures here line up vertically. The decimal points line up all the way down.

By contrast, tabular figures have uniform spacing and have the same width. These numerals act more like monospaced glyphs, so where no matter what the actual width of the character is, the space in the glyph will be the same. Tabular figures are perfect for financials, price lists and setting math, because they will be aligned vertically when set into columns. For accounting applications, be sure to choose “tabular lining” numerals.

Why it Matters

When choosing a typeface, not only are glyphs important to the usage, but so are the numbers. Figure height and width spacing matters. If you’re setting long-form reading content, choose a typeface that has proportional old style figures. If setting financial-heavy documents, choose a typeface that has tabular lining figures. Choosing the right typeface for your project will help you design a great reading experience.

I explain more about numerals, letters and glyphs and all you need to know about choosing the perfect typeface in our online typography basics class, Type 1. Does your favorite typeface have old-style or lining numerals as a default? Let me know by tweeting us at @TypeEd. I’d love to see what type of numerals you’re using.

Michael Stinson is a co-founder and instructor at TypeEd, where he helps designers implement better typography, efficiently. Get more typography in your inbox when you sign up for more updates about TypeEd.

Every presentation skills teacher and coach has their own perspective when it comes to building and using PowerPoint slides. I have come to the conclusion that it’s a waste of time telling people not to use slides. You’re going to use them, so instead of fighting it, I have come up with, with some influence from Garr Reynolds, my Ten Commandments for using PowerPoint slide decks:

1. Thou shall only use slides if absolutely necessary

2. Thou shall never use an old deck to build a new deck

3. Thou shall stop tweaking your deck 24 hours before thou presents

4. Thou shall beware the Bullet Point

5. Thou shall only use one idea per slide

6. Thou shall never, under any circumstances, read a slide out loud

7. Thou shall not use a slide deck as a hand out

8. Thou shall say “no” to animation

9. Thou shall only use high-resolution images

10. Thou shall not build a presentation around a deck but rather build a deck around a presentation

 

While most of these PowerPoint commandments make sense on their own, let me elaborate on a few.

2. Thou shall never use an old deck to build a new deck

How many times have you opened an old deck to start work on a new presentation? It’s a common occurrence and you are not alone. There really is nothing wrong with this, chances are you are going to tell a similar story and use some of the same slides. If it’s a capabilities pitch then chances are 90% of the pitch is already built. The problem is that you are starting a presentation by using technology, and before you know it, you’ll be knee deep in slide tweaking and not focusing on building a storyline. Remember the Brain Rule to Unplug and Go Analog? This is where it comes into play. Your presentation is a story and your slides are to support your story. Figure out what you want to say first and then see if there is an old deck you can use.

3. Thou shall stop tweaking your deck 24 hours before thou presents

As I have said many times, a presentation is not a meeting; it’s a performance. In fact, your presentation is often a one-act play and it needs to be treated as such. Meaning, no edits or changes 24 hours before show time. Can you imagine the director of a play walking into the a lead actor’s dressing room 2 hours before show time with new dialogue? It would never happen and the same can be said for your presentation. Any changes the day before the presentation will mess up your timing, your cadence and more than likely throw you off your game. This is especially true when it comes to Ensemble Presenting.

4, 5 and 6. Thou shall beware the Bullet Point & Thou shall never, under any circumstances, read a slide out loud & Thou shall only use one idea per slide

Commandments 4, 5 and 6 go together. The main point is that the content on each slide should be minimal and focus on one idea. If you find yourself creating a bullet list with 3 points, then you should create 3 slides. It’s that simple. Two things happen when you put up a slide with multiple bullet points:

  1. Your audience reads ahead
  2. The presenter reads the slide

Basically, everyone in the room reads and no one is presenting. If you are going to read your slides, then just email the deck to everyone and cancel the meeting. With everyone reading, there is no time to perform and engage the audience. It goes against everything I have been saying.

I use these PowerPoint commandments every time I build a deck and present. They provide a solid foundation and remind me to take my time in preparing and to respect my audience.

Michael Weiss is Vice President of Marketing at Creative Circle. He is a digital strategist and presentation coach.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn here.

The day that I crushed social media engagement for a post I did on the fly for my company’s Facebook page was one of the giddiest days of my professional life. I was working for The Salvation Army Midland Division and I posted something about Cardinals’ opening day (which is a de facto holiday in St. Louis) with a picture of Stan Musial (a Cardinals’ legend) ringing the bell around Christmas time. It BLEW UP and set the stage for more followers and better connection with potential donors and volunteers. I had a little extra strut in my step that day.

Similarly, when I went to SXSW with my fellow Creative Circlers, I jumped up and down with Creative Circle’s social media maven when we became the top followed group talking about SXSW — we reached so many people and fostered future relationships that could be built upon.

So when I started the best job of my life at Creative Circle recruiting my fellow passionate social media marketers, I noticed something kind of icky…

Most of us don’t have any kind of social media portfolio to show off our work.

“But I’m not a designer,” you might say. Or even worse, “Here is the link to my Twitter feed.” Have you ever tried to digest that firehose? Twitter, Facebook, and even Instagram are an epic stream of consciousness, and a hiring manager does not (and will not) want to filter through a long history of posting to find the gems of what makes you good at what you do.

Follow these five tips to improve your social media portfolio and make sure you’re not glossed over for your next application. Also be sure to check out our Portfolio Guide for more tips like these, or hear what my New York counterpart has to say about portfolios.

1. Screenshots are your friend

Learn to love the Print Screen/Snipping/Screen Capture Tool. Any time you write a quippy masterpiece, take a screenshot of it to save for later. A hiring manager is basing your skills on your ability to write solid copy in a limited amount of space as well as the engagement metrics that are shown (likes, retweets, etc.). Once you get a handful of your favorites, you have enough content to justify landing that next great position.

2. Organize by campaign

Social media is part of a larger, integrated strategy, so talk about the campaign objectives, and how social made an impact. Choose one or two screengrabs that showcase solid engagement and denote the metrics that followed: 15% increase in follows, 20% conversion rate to the denoted landing page, or anything else showing that your work caused something positive to happen that met your team’s goals.

3. Analytics, Analytics, Analytics

When I was putting together my portfolio, I took screenshots of analysis metrics that showed what I contributed and why when I was running the social media ship good things happened. Remember, while it’s good to know what your team did, when you’re being considered for a job, they want to know what YOU did as part of that team. Whether it’s Facebook Analytics, Sprout, Google Analytics, or other programs, dive into the numbers and look at engagement and conversion spikes so you can show that you can not only get things done, but you can read the data to forecast what can work next. A natural at social media has great gut reactions, but if you can’t back it up with data, then it’s much harder to justify. Reserve a page or two in your portfolio for analytics and showcase your “sexy stats.” Whether you worked for a small business or a multinational corporation, if you increased engagement and conversions by X%, then that gets attention.

4. Did you do anything else digital?

This is up to your discretion, but I know plenty of passionate social media connoisseurs that have other responsibilities of managing website content, deploying email marketing, or even doing some hands-on design for posts. Include that! You don’t want it to dominate your portfolio if you are seeking a primarily social position but put it towards the back to show that you have other skills that can bump up your candidacy. In the same vein for my portfolio, I took screenshots of emails that I had deployed, spreadsheets I made for project management tracking, and some scrappy designs I made just to show that I can definitely dabble in those other areas.

5. How do I lay it all out?

Some people prefer a simple PDF, like I did (totally effective!), or to use a portfolio site such as Squarespace, Wix, Coroflot, Cargo Collective, Carbonmade, Issuu, or others if you want to be publicly searched. The benefit of hosting it publicly is that you can tweet a company or hiring manager while showcasing your skillz in communication, ya know? The frameworks are the same — upload the image of your work and write a description beside it with those sexy stats and campaign descriptions. Just like anything else, the people who put in more work on this initial presentation will garner more attention from hiring managers. If you put a solid amount of thought and effort into your portfolio, the perception is that you will go above and beyond for your next position, so really put in some time to craft this. If you do make a PDF, keep it under 5MB so that it can be easily emailed and shared to prospective companies.

Also, remember if you create a portfolio site, always include the website on your resume — and make sure it is hyperlinked! I have had to do much copying and pasting in my tenure as a recruiter and it can be a surprising time-suck for those reviewing resumes.

Have you seen something that attracted the attention of hiring managers or anything that we missed? Send it to us! And of course, if you lay out a slick social media portfolio, we gotta see it. Apply on our Talent page, and if a company with a need has your name written all over it, we’ll get connected!

Until then, check out our Resource Guides for more ways to make yourself the best candidate you can be.

Candidate Resources

Dana is a Recruiter in Creative Circle’s San Diego office, after starting with the company in St. Louis and Denver. She is a social and digital geek, passionate networker, and always getting at the root of what makes people tick to land them in the right positions for their skills. She can be found breaking out into song unannounced, recreating Tennessee Williams or Shakespeare monologues, exploring Colorado with her dog Frannie, or impersonating Bubbles from the PowerPuff Girls.

Food Desert, Idea Jackpot: The Design Week Open Houses of NW Portland

I may have spoken too soon when I declared that there was no need to plan for dinner during Design Week Portland’s series of open houses. In contrast to Tuesday night’s tour of N and NE Portland offices, where giant tamales, Mediterranean BBQ, and pizza abounded, the scene in NW was a relative food desert.

Nevertheless, it was a welcome excuse to check out Citizen, a truly remarkable company that concerns itself primarily with the intersections of design and technology, performing research and analysis of market and culture trends to find new ways for tech advances to integrate into our lives—and they create some seriously elegant flowcharts in the process. They also have one of the coolest office spaces in the city, tucked away on the fringe of where NW starts to become primarily industrial. Upon arrival they had Purple Rain projecting on the wall (respect), a few paces away from a ceiling pendant that had been fashioned out of Apple earbuds.

Design Week Portland Alternate Usage for Earbuds at Citizen Inc

At this point, we’re so deep in Design Week that you can’t help but start to recognize people who are working the same circuit you are. Such was the case with Luke, an architectural consultant I had also seen at Wednesday night’s party at NORTH. Mutual recognition demanded we introduce ourselves, swapping notes about the other events we had already attended, and those we planned to. It was pleasant enough that I stayed longer than I meant to, but eventually I pulled away, on to the next adventure.

Big Frog Custom T-shirts has been hidden in plain sight on W Burnside for four years, though I’d never heard of them. They’ll digitally print a design of your, or their, making with no minimum, on tees that come in an array of colors and sizes and… that’s pretty much it! But they did have snacks.

Design Week Portland Big Frog T-Shirts

The simplicity of Big Frog afforded me more time at Hand-Eye Supply, a shop that specializes in the best versions of tools for all kinds of projects. There’s a global selection of writing instruments, notebooks, tools, axes, and workwear—a curated retail haven for the fetishization of creative supplies. They are the retail arm of Core 77, an influential design site whose job board, Coroflot, is having its new office built within the adjacent Hand-Eye warehouse. It’s actually on wheels, and began as a planned tiny house by Laurence Sarrazin of Los Osos design studio, built with wood milled on the property it was originally slated for. I’ve met Sarrazin once before—she’s brilliant, and I enjoyed sharing a beer and conversation with her, though my stomach was starting to rumble by the time I finished ogling the Italian-made staplers on my way out.

Design Week Portland Hand-Eye Supply

My last open house of the evening was Anthropologie. I’d been curious about how they’d activate the store for the occasion, and thought they might use the opportunity to highlight their collaborations with independent designers. Nope! They were simply open, business humming as usual. It worked out since I needed to price out a duvet cover, but I didn’t dwell long before walking the few blocks to the westside tomboy headquarters of Wildfang.

Presented by Sockeye creative studio, the event at Wildfang was accompanied by—finally, hooray!—freshly cooked up dim sum treats by Boke Bowl, which just about saved my life. It featured Piers Fawkes, founder and editor of PSFK, a site that specializes in future-thinking news, inspiration, and forecasts. The night’s topic was “The Future of Retail”—basically a breakdown of the latest technology tools being used by companies to communicate with customers, maximize the availability of product information, and streamline their overall systems in ways that are both admirably efficient and depressingly capable of eliminating human employment. It was on the dry side for a jovial, dim sum and canned wine kind of crowd, but it got my juices flowing, and I drove home thinking through the inspiration it gave me for my billion-dollar startup idea.

And no, obviously, I’m not telling you what that is.

Marjorie is a former Creative Circle candidate based in Portland who recently accepted a full-time offer for her dream job. She is a writer/editor and stylist/producer with an emphasis in the design world. If you are interested in working with someone like Marjorie, please contact your nearest Creative Circle office.

Still on the fence about attending events or open houses?

Read our blog on why it’s important.