A reply to the killer question
Anyone in corporate communication can relate to this. Someone pins you against the wall at a party and asks what you do for a living. The strained expression on your face tells your interviewer they have stumbled on to sensitive ground. Perhaps you have just been made redundant or worse. What your slightly sozzled mind is actually trying to formulate is an answer that avoids the dreaded follow up, ‘So have I have seen anything you’ve done on telly?’ As you race through the limited glossary of terms that describes our profession, all you can do is eliminate.
The first term to eliminate is ‘corporate’. It smacks of smoke stack factories and armies of pen pushers. ‘Video’ has connotations of weddings or You Tube and is likely to lead to a tedious conversation about digital cameras. And if you dare mention the word ‘training’, the words John and Cleese bubble up from the memory of some long forgotten course on telephone etiquette and you are dead in the water.
‘I work in communications,’ you offer lamely. Your interviewer immediately asks whether you know of a fixed-price, all-in-one, totally for the rest of your life mobile phone and broadband package. You stop that train of thought with the qualification, ‘business communications’, or ‘business to business communications’ or, in total desperation ‘public relations’. Still none the wiser, your interviewer suddenly realises her glass needs refreshing and you are left standing there like the gay vicar at the garden party. ‘Next time,’ you say to yourself, ‘I really must get my script for this conversation sorted out. I need a reply that eliminates all confusion and makes me look cool.’
‘So what do you do for a living?’
‘Government and private sector communications, you know, high end stuff; behaviour change, product launches, environmental awareness programmes.’
Note clever avoidance of words industrial or business and the conflation of totally different types of communication.
‘What sort of communications are they?’
‘These days it’s all about mixed media. We use a combination of live action, dramatisations, CGI and of course it’s all integrated at the back end using Web 2.0, social media, online collaboration tools, you know the sort of thing.’
Your interviewer looks at you wide eyed, she hasn’t the faintest idea what you are talking about but it sounds very cool. You quickly intervene before the next question.
‘For instance I am just working on a regular communication for a pharma company. They need to get the rank and file up to speed on their new blockbuster molecule. The whole thing is shot in a dedicated studio (virtual of course) with VT links to our roving reporters across the world. They won’t get much change out of half a mil.’
‘Sounds really cool, how exciting.’
‘The communications industry is big business these days; turns over around £3billion, bigger than advertising. But we like to stay in the background, (taps nose conspiratorially) our clients are the stars.’
The communications industry is more impressive than corporate communication and never say, ‘but no one has ever heard of us’.
‘So what’s your job?’
‘Nothing really, I just come up with the ideas and stop the client from making too much of a hash of it. Our job is all about managing expectations.’
Quit while you’re up, never let the conversation stray into specifics, move on ever so quickly.
‘So what do you do, anything interesting?’
Jonathan Priest does something very interesting. He’s a creative writer working on high end, back end, end-to-end communication solutions.
June 14, 2010
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