A freelancer's view of the communications industry
Author: Penny
As the title of my blog suggests, I am a freelance PR working mainly in the public and voluntary sectors, on projects from small scale copywriting to big social marketing projects. In my time I've worked for government departments, the BBC and a range of other organisations of various stages of dysfunctionality. Now I'm trying to get to grips with the world of the micro-business and facing up to the recession with a fair bit of trepidation.
Struck by the frequency with which I’ve been hearing the phrase “the poor will be hit hardest by …” on news bulletins about government announcements, I did a quick google search on it. This is, admittedly, not a rigorous way of testing the likely outcomes of policy (although it is a plea to journalists to find more original ways of describing it), but it does indicate a trend.
The dread phrase hasn’t been used to describe cuts to EMA but given what it was set up to do, perhaps journalists felt it was superfluous. If today’s IFS report that government policies will push 200,000 into poverty is right, it looks like this is spot on:
In 1970s weepie Kramer vs Kramer, unemployed ad-space salesman, Dustin Hoffman, has to find a job on Christmas Eve so that he can keep his son. His pitch at interview is that he will take a job at a rate far below his normal salary because he needs the work, thus helping his future employer to bag the employee bargain of a lifetime. This being Hollywood, Dustin gets the gig and the floppy-haired son gets to stay with Dad who can thus perfect his French toast-making skills.
I was reminded of this for the first time in years as I read the increasingly unmissable Redundant Public Servant’s blog. Colleagues of our hero, who’ve been pushed out of work ahead of him, report that at interview, they’ve got the sense that anyone chasing a much lower paid job is an object of some suspicion. That certainly rings true to me.
My sense, bolstered from conversations with the odd recruitment consultant, is that applying for jobs that involve a significant drop in salary level or job title makes the applicant look desperate (which, admittedly they might be; but it’s never a good look). Even if they get the job, it devalues their CV in the long term.
More importantly, no matter how much employers know that it’s a buyer’s market out there with Dustin Hoffman-esque bargains to be had, they will also fear that they are just a holding pen for the applicant – a finger in the financial dyke which will do until something better comes along.
One of the standard job hunters’ bibles, Richard Bolles’ What Color is Your Parachute, lists the fears interviewers have at the back of their minds during an interview, which might stop a candidate getting the job. Number four on the list is the fear that you’ll only stay around for a few weeks, or at most a few months and then quit without advance warning. It’s a hard one to counter if the job you’re applying for pays significantly less than the one you’ve had to leave.
Bolles’ suggested answer to the question Doesn’t this job represent a step down for you? by the way, is a chirpy and unarguable No, it represents a step up – from Welfare. This does suggest another issue, raised by Jenni Russell last week, about how to cushion the financial catastrophe which strikes the middle-class unemployed (for want of a better expression) when they lose their jobs and find a safety net of welfare benefits underneath them which doesn’t come close to meeting their needs. Another blog post, perhaps…
Out shopping yesterday, nipped into the bank to pay in a couple of cheques. A researcher from the bank called me this morning to check how my transaction had gone. How often did I use that branch of the bank? Would I recommend the branch to other people? How likely was I to buy financial products or services from that branch? Did I trust it to offer me financial advice in my best interests? The researcher giggled when I told her, slightly bemused, that I just happened to be passing that branch when I remembered that I had a cheque to pay in – it isn’t as though I keep a mental list of favourite bank branches I have used in the past. But she had a quota of calls to make so we ploughed on. How long had I waited to be served? Had the person behind the counter been polite to me? Called me by my name? Handled my query without being interrupted by other members of staff? What suggestions could I make to improve the experience of using that branch of the bank? I refrained from suggesting that they could do fewer customer surveys and use the money to pay a better rate of interest on their current accounts, and simply assured her that I thought the Canary Wharf branch of Lloyds is just fine and dandy as it is, and thanks for caring what I think.
Things have changed hugely in customer service in the past decade, and thank god for that. I started my working life in the theatre and vividly remember trying to get the box office and stage door staff to do some customer-service training on the grounds that we might do better if we didn’t frighten off one potential customer in every three by being rude to them. Sue, the scarily truculent stage door keeper, refused point-blank to do the training on the grounds that “I don’t work in Disneyland. This is not America”. I wonder how long she lasted (and what she would make of being asked to rate her experience of using a Creditpoint). I’m all in favour of improving customer service, and of gathering feedback from customers to make sure it’s happening. Can’t help thinking that Lloyds are taking things just slightly too far.
It was the “‘Tis the season to be shopping” card nestling next to the “Merry Christmas Suckas!” one which bought on my annual bah humbug rant this year. Brother, here we go again.
PS. There is a version of this on YouTube which uses Tom Lehrer’s voice with the words written up on screen. Badly. Without a single apostrophe or indeed any other punctuation. I discover it pains me too much to use it. Does this say more about them or me?
Putting together the last post reminded me of the experience of unemployment (it may have been him without a job, but there was no doubt that we were in it together). It also set me thinking about what got us through. My mantra through the whole thing was “nothing lasts forever” – not plague, pestilence, nor even Tory governments. Things will get better. There will be a job, eventually. The trick is dealing with the period between losing a job and having one again. I’m not qualified to offer “how to find a job” advice, but here are some tips on keeping the shreds of your sanity together while you do:
1. Do not under any circumstances define yourself by the state of being unemployed (equally when you get a job do not define yourself by that either. Experience shows that these things are fleeting. Look at Ireland.) You are not a successful human being because you have a six-figure salary, nor are you an unsuccessful human being if you sign on. The important thing is what kind of human being you are, not what you do (or don’t) for a living.
2. Do not take it personally if you have been made redundant. You are not a bad person, a poor employee, or doomed to fail. You are just, unfortunately, at the wrong end of a harsh set of circumstance which prove nothing about your skills, intelligence or performance in your job and are no indicator of what might happen in future.
3. Continue to make plans for the future – not just things you are going to do when you get another job, but plans for now. There is nothing worse than living a life with the pause button pressed waiting for a job offer to start things moving again. We were young and foolish, with no family ties and fortunate that I had a secure job, so we blithely talked about buying a home together (remember when you could do that in London on one salary?) and joked about him waving me off to work before he set to with the Hoover. We did it, too.
4. Use your time off constructively – start that novel, learn to play the bassoon, take up tap-dancing and go to the gym. Or do some volunteer work, learn a language, get politically active. When the job comes (because as we know, nothing lasts forever) you will kick yourself for spending all that time gloomily searching for a job and bemoan the fact that you only have 25 days-off a year. Yes, your priority is to find a job, but there are 24 hours in every day. Even accounting for sleeping, eating and polishing your CV that still leaves time to…
5. Do something nice for yourself every day (oh, OK, every week if you’re really Puritan) You’re having a hard time. You deserve it.
There’s a sudden flowering of blogs from public sector workers facing redundancy, setting out with splendid gallows humour how the sector is facing up to cuts. I’m an avid reader of the Redundant Public Servant’s blog, and was struck by a post by Mrs RPS about the bitterness she feels about her husband’s impending redundancy.
I saw my then boyfriend, now husband, deal with a lengthy spell of unemployment a few years ago and understand completely what Mrs RPS is talking about. The thing that really hurt was the sense of powerlessness I felt watching the person I loved most in the world deal with something so devastating without being able to do anything practical to help.
Mrs RPS, though, also reminded me of when my Dad was made redundant, after 44 years with one company, a couple of years before he was due to retire. How unfair, I ranted. How disloyal, after all you’ve done for them. Typically, my Dad didn’t join in with the ranting, but calmly pointed out that loyalty didn’t come into it – on either side. The contract between him and the company was that he would do a month’s worth of work and they would pay him for it, and if they both agreed to carry on they’d both do the same the following month. In his mind there was no issue of loyalty involved – no-one would have accused him of being disloyal to them had he found a better job and moved on. It was a purely business relationship and, from the company’s perspective, making him redundant was the logical thing to do. Taking the emotion out of it allowed him to cope pretty serenely (although I imagine that having a decent pension on the way probably helped!)
The problem is, of course, if you profoundly disagree with the business decision that leads to your job being lost. An awful lot of public servants feel – as Mrs RPS does – that these are wrong-headed decisions, with jobs being “wiped out at the whim of a government and ministers whose motivation I deeply suspect. For a doctrine I believe is essentially flawed.” I completely agree with her. No wonder you can feel anger and hurt bubbling through her post.
It does seem that the process isn’t being made any easier to deal with by the way it’s being handled. My eye was caught by a blog detailing how one local government department was given a redundancy notice, without warning, by mass email. An agency I worked with, which was cut when the quangos were culled, reports that no help or advice has been forthcoming about how to go about winding up a business, no re-training opportunities have been highlighted, no careers counselling offered. That’s where I think you can start to complain about disloyalty. Cutting a job, a team, even a whole department is, as my Dad would point out, a dispassionate business decision. Cutting people adrift with no support is wrong.
There was a flurry of interest earlier this year in the CIPR survey which revealed that although PR is a largely female-dominated industry, fewer women than men occupy really senior positions. I’m getting interested in another nugget of information buried in the survey – the age profile of PRs with in-house roles compared to freelancers.
Apparently “by far the greatest percentage (50%) of in-house … members are aged between 25 and 34. Practitioners aged 45-60 significantly dominate the freelance sector, with 51% of freelancers within this age range.”
That feels perfectly understandable. PR is a discipline that suits freelancing brilliantly. Armed with a laptop, a broadband connection and a mobile you can work when and where you want – a boon for women juggling work and childcare. I’m starting to think that there may be a more sinister element to this, though I could just be paranoid.
There have always been rumours that recruitment consultancies don’t take candidates in their 40s seriously. My experience and that of friends and contemporaries certainly seems to bear that out at the moment. I apply for the occasional interim job to mix it up with the freelancing. Rather than being proud of the 20+ years on my CV and the huge range of experience that I can offer an employer, I’m starting to wonder what I can cut so that I don’t end up on the she’s-older-than-God pile before I have chance to talk to them. Are there so many freelancers over 40 because we can’t get anything more permanent?
Ironically, being 40+ should be an advantage these days. As the population ages communicators need to reach a mature and media-savvy audience which won’t accept being patronised or pigeonholed. I’m doing some work at the moment for a client who’s putting together a health campaign aimed at people over 55. They have smart campaigning ideas, a track record in generating fantastic creative work and great technical expertise in delivery, but they’re planning a campaign that risks turning off a sizeable chunk of its target audience because they don’t understand it.
I fondly remember being 27, single and childless. I had no possible idea what it might be like to be middle-aged, coping with children, job and mortgage, occasionally waving at my similarly harassed husband as we pass on the stairs, one to make dinner, the other to pick up a child from cubs. I certainly had no idea how it might feel to face getting older. Those are increasingly common experiences. Understanding them should be a huge advantage. One of my industry heroines, Jilly Forster , has been stressing this point for years. I’m watching the progress of Forster’s AGEncy with interest – and it already seems to be paying dividends for them. Others please note!
PR Week announced this week that government spending on comms has halved since May, and that Matt Tee, the Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary for Comms, leaves his post in March and won’t be replaced.
The outlook for government comms is pretty clear. In the short-term at least there isn’t going to be much. Some campaigns will continue because they’re too important (or too difficult) to cancel. Most ideas won’t get off the ground. As the scale of the changes to public services becomes apparent, a need may be identified to do a bit more public communication to explain what’s happening, but we won’t be able to devote the kind of resources to the job that might have been made available a few years ago.
There are, of course, some “process” questions to be answered as cuts are made. For example: the Cabinet Office master-minded last year’s cross-government communication in preparation for a possible swine-flu pandemic. With smaller budgets and fewer hands on deck – and no representation at the most senior levels of government – who will do that next time? But that’s starting to feel like the wrong question to be asking.
I hope that Matt Tee is using the months he has left in post to shape a review of government comms and the role of COI that doesn’t try to deliver the same kind of communications on a smaller scale (and isn’t just about saving the taxpayer money). It needs to ask the classic question for any strategy – what are we trying to achieve? What rightly belongs to government to communicate and what does not ? If decentralisation is the new reality, what does that mean for communication from the centre? What responsibility for communicating with citizens and workforces should rest with local authorities (and how will they pay for it)? How does government use the cleverer, cheaper, more flexible, more customer-centric approaches to communication possible online? And how do you change departmental structures and a Whitehall culture which seems to have made attempts to do this in the past such a nightmare?
Fretting that we’re losing the COI’s bulk purchasing power and expertise in managing procurement, as some people are, supposes that once budgets return to pre-crash levels there will be an appetite to get back to the kinds of campaigns that were a feature of the past five years. I just don’t think that’s going to happen. If it did it would mean that a fantastic opportunity to re-configure comms completely had been missed.
I hadn’t really bothered about the 40th birthday of Page 3 this month, other than to notice the irony that it shares its anniversary week with the anti-Miss World demo at the Albert Hall. Then I was roused to tooth-grinding fury by, of all things, the Guardian media podcast which carried an item about how much of a non-issue Page 3 is these days. Explaining why, the (female) contributor commented “we’re so immune to pictures that are worse, that Page 3 becomes quite tame and quite funny… the fact that it’s so ubiquitous …you become immune to things you see on such a regular basis. Familiarity breeds, umm, in this case, lethargy”
Well, no. Contempt. That’s what familiarity traditionally breeds. Contempt. Which is what Page 3 does. And, pardon me for pointing it out, but it was to try and prevent the “worse” images that Clare Short and others tried to ban Page 3 in the first place.
Page 3 – not uniquely, but it’s a useful general signifier for porn-lite – is a means of portraying women as objects. It sends a message that we are the sum of our cup size; that we are perpetually available and up for a laugh (and if we don’t get the joke we must be repressed,ugly killjoys); that we might not be too bright, but it’s OK if we can fill out a g-string; that we’re fulfilled as the recipients of a male gaze. It’s indicative of an attitude to women that makes (some) men feel at liberty to harass us in the street, and (s0me) women argue that they are “empowered” by appearing naked in public. That’s not empowerment, ladies, that’s Stockholm Syndrome.
I don’t know any women who don’t have stories to tell about being shouted at, leered over, groped and worse by men in public places. Some stories are frightening, some are just ridiculous. My friend Laura was once approached by a complete stranger at a railway station who asked her for a date, his eyes never leaving her chest. She had to point out to him the 9-months pregnant bump that was nestling beneath it.
One of the great blessings of the cloak of invisibility that drops over you when you reach about 35, is that men don’t shout at you in the street any more. I no longer have to go out of my way to avoid walking past building sites and I miss it not one bit. So I was really saddened when I was walking Rebecca home from a friend’s house the other night and we were cat-called. I say “we”. Neither of us believed for a moment it was aimed at me. She’s 12. She was as angry, puzzled and embarrassed as I always was when it happened to me. I have no idea what to tell her to do about it, other than try to laugh it off. And start a campaign to ban Page 3.
I’m struggling to help my daughter, who has asked to borrow some clothes so she can dress up “like a 45-year old” for a play she’s doing. Unfortunately for her I have no idea what “45-year olds” look like . Personally I live my non-working life in jeans. Rebecca is still only 12 but is already as tall as me and has the same size feet. She borrows my clothes pretty regularly – not the formal stuff, but certainly the black V-necks and the ankle boots; I’ll have to wrestle my trenchcoat off her back if I ever want to wear it again. So I should just have drawled “honey – this is what 45 looks like” and told her to go dressed as she was, just adding a harassed expression and perhaps some crow’s feet.
But that’s obviously not what they want. I suspect they’re after the look that middle-aged women had when I was little. In my memory* women then had hair that was styled and set once a week and wore headscarves to protect it in high winds. They had sensible clothes in muted colours; perhaps a jaunty scarf at the neck. They wore flat shoes and 40 denier American Tan tights. Slacks were acceptable but not jeans. They did NOT have tattoos. When they got a bit older they wore fur-lined bootees in winter and hats like mushrooms with stalks coming out of the top, and generally looked like the three Great Aunts from Glossop in I Didn’t Know You Cared.
There are no women like that around any more, and I for one miss them. I envy their domestic competence and their unshakeable self-confidence. Which is not to say that I want to be like them. Possibly it’s the dread of damart that makes women of my generation fear getting old so much (and may explain their sales slogan – Think you know damart? Think again!) When you pass 40, you are super-sensitive to how very OLD it sounds. I shuddered when I read a newspaper article the other day about a “sprightly 50-year old” Sprightly? Isn’t that how you describe octagenarian ballroom dancers who like the occasional Scotch?
Ageing is unavoidable of course, but I’m still waiting for the level of grown-upness in my head to match the number on my birth certificate. And, on a more serious level, I am reminded every day in dozens of little ways – this is only one example – that in the eyes of many people I’m very nearly past it.
*It was surprisingly hard to find images to illustrate this. There are some very odd things lurking under a search for images of older women, but nothing much that gives you pictures of “ordinary” middle-aged women from the past. Perhaps they were invisible?
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