Looking for specific talent and skill sets? Look at the thousands of working women who have taken a few years off to raise kids and are now looking to get back in the workforce.
The metro area is packed with moms (and many stay-at-home dads) who are designers, art directors, programmers, writers, media buyers, event planners…name it, they’re out there. They were invaluable employees for someone a baby ago, and are a relatively untapped resource today.
They might want to get back on their own terms—like part-time, flextime and telecommuting. But they’ll deliver, just as they did years ago. We’ve found this group to be mature, dedicated and eager to go back to work. The tradeoff? Once in a while they’ll need to pick kids up from soccer practice and go to recitals.
We match creatives with non-profits and government agencies – a unique niche and often a better relationship.
Good news for D.C.-area job searchers: Yahoo lists more than 7,000 associations and non-profits in the greater metro area. Add to that dozens of good-sized government agencies.
All have active websites; publish newsletters and magazines; run events and meetings; and produce loads of communications, Facebook pages, listservs, and job boards. Most need designers, writers, social media strategists, programmers and marcom pros.
Even more good news: They don’t chase bottom-line profits as much as supporting, educating and providing resources for their mission or cause.
OmniCreative Staffing specializes in matching creatives with jobs in non-profits. Their missions range from the environment and international relations to human rights. If you have a passion for causes, Washington is the best place to settle down and build your career.
Maybe you can change the world—or at least a piece of it. Perhaps it’s time you began working for something you can believe in.
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From the 1st day of the Business Publishing Conference in NYC—where the mood feels both anxious and excited about the future— a few stand outs:
1. Magazines: The big guns like Esquire will be setting the creative bar for design and interactivity for online magazines. Esquire’s editor-in-chief, David Granger, wowed the opening session with a presentation of their new mag app, featuring video of their cover stars. Large budget publishers will be constantly pushing the boundaries in this expensive medium. Like the flat top ketchup bottle he brought as an example, magazines must retain their appeal, but also change for the medium. Designers: get an IPAD and subscribe to the leading magazines for ideas and inspiration.
2. Advertisements will become more entertaining and interactive. Wonder Factory’s creative director, Joe McCambley previewed new ads in development that will be mini worlds of interactivity. For example, within an online ad, a user might change a camera lens and see instant results, or a woman could apply makeup to a model with her complexion—again immediate interaction within the advertisement itself. And, guess what? Readers want Ads like this in magazines, unlike the commodity banner ads they skip on websites.
3. Print Design Revival. Joe McCambley also said he thought that new mag apps especially spotlight the work of print designers, who he felt brought more aesthetics to this medium than web designers. The IPAD is a natural medium for creative print people.
4. De-aggregation: publications that target a niche subject and audience can concentrate their creative energy on being the best in their field, drawing readers back again. But the President of Merriam-Webster, John Morse, said many businesses find themselves “competing with Google.” For example, a user now searches for a word and its definition appears in the search results, vs. going to his company’s site or dictionary.com. BTW, the top word search of the week is “insidious.”
5. Publishing Apps: There will be dramatic changes for E-Reader creation tools over the next year. New platforms are springing up like Mag+ from Sweeden, and others, like Texterity, are adding new features. It seems that the publishing model for apps varies widely and there’s still a steep entry fee no matter which app creation method you adopt.
Feels like 1990. Everything happening now reminds me of the early days of desktop publishing, when Aldus turned things upside down with PageMaker and Apple introduced the first Mac. Now they’ve done it again with the IPAD. For readers and information hounds, it gets better and better, for us creative studio leaders and publishers, it’s another exciting but costly and challenging time. Day 2 of the conference is about to begin!
