Allison Arden, AdAge editor, skips resumes when hiring entry-level staff and looks instead for self-made creative work like videos or blogs. She defines her own brand around motivating younger employees and staying ahead of trends, not credentials on paper.
Other people would have to tell me how they define my brand because I read a quote the other day. Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room. But I can talk about what I strive my brand to be, which is I like to motivate younger people and inspire them to achieve. I think that's something I've been able to continually do with our entry level employees. I, I'd like to think I have my finger on the pulse of what's happening next. And I'd like to think my brand is very fun. I think a lot of people associate with fun. The former intern can tell you that that's definitely the case. So to me, those are the key premises of what I want my brand to be about. So everything I put out there, whether it's speaking engagement or the things I do on social media, the things I create. And I can tell you, when I interview entry level people, I never look at their resume. I've been burned by too many Ivy League resumes in the past. I ask people, what have they created? What have they actually built? Show me something that you've built on your own. Because usually the people that have the intuition to actually build things on their own are the people who are very likely to succeed in an industry that's changing as quickly as ours. So what does that mean? They created a video for their younger cousin's birthday and they edited on their own and they brought in a special music track. Okay, cool. I, I create a blog, I wrote a white paper on this, whatever that thing may be. If you don't have anything like that, then you're really showing that you're just the type of person that wants to walk into work and being told what to do every day. And those are the last people that we want to hire as part of our organization.
