- You'll send out your minibooks and try to meet with as many people as you can.
- Many of those places will not get back to you because they are not hiring.
- After a while someone will send you an email or call your mobile and ask if you're able to come by for an interview. Sometimes this includes a plane ride and a hotel room provided by your host agency.
- On the specified day, you arrive at the agency and spend the next several hours being ushered from creative to creative. Sometimes they'll ask to see your book. But this is just a formality. Most of them have already seen it and liked it. That's why they called you in. They really just want to give you a personality check. You'll be taken to lunch. Probably dinner/drinks afterwards. Everyone's still trying to see if they like you or not.
- You shake hands and head home.
- You immediately send thank you cards to everyone you met with. I'd send a card. Not an email.
- You wait. In fact, you wait longer that you had expected. Why haven't they called back yet? Did they not like you? Should you call? Maybe you should call. No, that would seem desperate. But they did fly you out right? Seriously, why the radio silence? (The agency, by the way, is interviewing a handful of other candidates.)
- Anywhere from two days to a couple weeks later, someone from the agency calls you back and extends an offer to you. They'll give you a salary and probably a start date. Feel free to ask them for a couple days to think this over. They're probably not expecting an immediate answer. If you have any additional questions, now is a good time to ask them.
- You call them back in a day or two and accept the offer. Everyone's happy.
- You go on to a successful career, never forgetting to mention the Makin' Ads blog each time you're featured in the One Show Gold on Gold section.
What Getting A Job Looks Like
In very general terms, this is what you will go through when you get your first job out of school: