Where to look for full time employment

Jri

Member
Hi all,

Firstly, just to be clear;

When I refer to 'employment', I don't mean clients - I mean a traditional 'job' in the sense that you go to in a full time, long term capacity (i.e. not in any kind of freelance capacity).

I am curious to how you proactively seek graphic design employment, and where you seek it.

I have recently been devoting a lot of time to trawling google, but find that I just repeatedly dredge up the same vague descriptions of jobs advertised pseudo-anonymously by recruitment companies. You email them, phone them, chase them - nothing ever comes back, save for the odd automated survey email.

Do you guys go for the long-con and get cosy with local agencies/studios years in advance to foster an advantage when they finally come to advertise for a position?

Do you make you own positions, if so - how?

This process baffles me, I like my work and really want to climb the ol' career ladder - but it can really batter your confidence when all you see is the soup of dead end leads mentioned above.

Any advice would be much appreciated,

Jri.
 
It's been a while as I'm freelance but I found Indeed was pretty good.
There are also sites like DesignWeek who have job pages.

I used to have a list of sites I used to look through when I was looking but that went with my old Mac. :(

I found a good way of finding leads to jobs that weren't advertised was to bookmark local companies that appealed to me that had blogs/news/careers pages and also check their Linkedin.
Quite often they put vacancies on there before advertising.

I never got anywhere with recruiters.
I found them a waste of time and energy.
Mostly they were not 'creative' specialist recruiters and they hadn't a clue about design.
Also they have a nasty trick of advertising bogus jobs just to accumulate names and contacts for their books.
 
As above, Design Week job section has various specialist recruiters listed, also try The Drum website. LinkedIn is getting pretty good as companies are using it more and more as well as recruitment agencies. Get in touch with agencies you'd like to work with even if they're not advertising…you (and they) never know when a vacancy might come up. Good luck.
 
Just out of curiosity, where do people go to gain clients for freelance work?
You go direct to the clients. A good place to start would be any existing clients you have. Ask them for referrals.

If you use a marketplace to find clients you're up against 100s of other designers from around the world, and the quality of the clients can be an issue too. The majority of the time you'll lose out on work because of cost. If you seek out clients directly, you're cutting out the middle man and getting yourself directly in front of them.
 
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