Dear Hiring Manager:

This message is for the brave few of you who may have made it through my 5 pages of portfolio to my lonely blog page. Congratulations for cutting through the artificial intelligence that tends to screen out any applications that may not include all qualifications in a job posting, and digging deeper into my resume to find the real golden value of my experience.

As you may already be aware, career pivoting is not so easy in the middle of a pandemic. For those like myself who were unfortunate enough to have invested years in industries that have been devastated financially by the affects of COVID-19, it has been a tough road of re-education, re-experience, and re-wiring of the brain cells to be frank. As I was a hiring manager myself for close to a decade, I can respect the high level of detail in your job descriptions, but one needs to take the opportunity to review resumes with his/her own eyes with a mind to find the best fit for hire, and that may not necessarily entail the meeting of every single qualification in a description (besides the fact that most candidates would not be able to possess every qualification, even among the current high population of job searchers). Considering my specialized industry of experiential marketing for live events, I often was not even privileged the luxury of selecting candidates native to my field, and had to expand my sights toward other translatable skill sets. I found my highest successes in talent selection rested upon my intuition about the candidate’s skills, portfolio quality and attitude once my human recruiting screener started sending applications my way.

That said, I don’t feel that I really need to explain my frustration when having to apply for job posting upon job posting only to have most applications either rejected by a form email or receiving no response at all. If the posting is not active, why let it spin continuously until a safer time for hiring comes along? If the posting is active, why wait for the AI screener to produce the perfect candidate on paper when that person may well turn out to be falsifying their qualifications or lacking some key qualities (such as diversification and upward mobility within their experience). When push comes to shove, those with management experience should really be given a second look regardless of their industry, as management by definition usually indicates a certain degree of universality. The rest is a matter of orientation and self-education. I’ve seen so many management level openings circulating in the creative fields since December, and most of them have been in constant spin for the past three months.

I’ll get off my soapbox now. I know it must not be easy to be in a hiring mode during a global pandemic. The situation is causing a lot of frustration on both sides, but that ever-evasive career pivot could become more of a reality for job searchers out there if a bit more human interaction was employed in the process. It’s not all just about practical experience. It’s about intelligence, potential and versatility!

People Over Pandemic

This holiday season brings to mind the precious people in life such as my wife, family and friends. Along with these come memories of what I took for granted before COVID-19, including the wonderful people I once worked with while still employed in the robust industry of live events. That industry will no doubt survive this crisis and exceed its former greatness in time, although most likely in a different form.

Also on in my thoughts is my former dream team doing what they always did best… solving problems and having fun doing it. They will no doubt survive this crisis and exceed their former greatness in time. The sad thing is that most likely they will never again be part of the same team and organization, which is the reality of how impactful catastrophic events are on business. As we approach what is hopefully our darkest hour before the dawn in this pandemic, let us hope and pray we never again have to overcome a similar unavoidable disservice to our people on this level, as it is people who ensure the ultimate success of any industry.

As individuals, let us do whatever is within our power to ensure the eventual success of the vaccine rollout and the ultimate demise of this virus. Remember to abide by the protocols of our healthcare community as they are on the front lines for us to prevent future threats to our livelihoods and well-being. In the end, the laws of science will win the day.

Happy holidays and high hopes for an eventual return to health and prosperity in 2021!

Skeuomorph This!

I recently caught an article on LinkedIn about events going virtual which as a 3D visualization specialist got my professional dander up. It suggested that for the sake of form follows function virtual events should abandon skeuomorphisms (graphical user interface objects that mimic their real-world counterparts in how they appear and/or how the user can interact with them). It supported this argument by stating that the average user should feel comfortable navigating a graphical interface for an event without being engaged by familiar event imagery such as convention center halls, exhibit structures and meeting room setups, and that these elements are expensive to create and overburden bandwidth resources. While this may be true, who is to say that a particular client might not choose to include these in their online program to make their participants feel more at home virtually and their sponsors feel like they are supporting an activity more connected to a traditional live event? Not to mention the possibility that such an online activity might be running concurrently to a downscaled live event counterpart! For years, many associations were perfectly content with events adopting the theme of the city in which they were located until some clever pundit came along and suggested this was not enough and that they should let their agencies dig deeper into their marketing bag of tricks to craft the perfect marketing concept. Hence the art form was elevated.

My point is that why should we limit ourselves? The talent is out there to support and the basic platforms already exist for beautiful graphical interfaces that can suit every level of aesthetic and conceptual demand. Many associations have paid a high price some extremely clever and engaging themes that go well beyond the four walls of a convention center into other worlds, and the technology mavens of VR and AR are just beginning to explore the possibilities of these at their clients’ delight, Dreamforce being a perfect example. True, we do not always need to replicate traditional event architecture online to engage participants, but when there is a need to bring activities back down to earth as a point of reference for performing tasks, what is wrong with emphasizing that link? Face-to-face engagement will not be going away just because the necessity to quarantine has set a precedent this year. The future of the live events industry will be rich with innovation for generations to come, and there is no doubt the look and feel of that will be very different from today, which is a good thing. Think about the evolution of the movie industry. When sound was first introduced in the late 1920’s, many films were still sporting title cards to describe the action, even though spoken dialogue had already been synchronized. For some reason the moguls thought that audiences still needed a narrative point of reference even though the actors were more than capable of conveying the story audibly, albeit with some level of distortion. A comparison to today’s Blu Ray discs and streaming content with all their interactive bells and whistles tells us how far our minds and technology can go over the span of time. For now, let's allow our live event 3D creatives to continue to earn a decent living!