We’re hiring! Want to combine your creative instincts and recruiting know-how? Join us as a creative lead.
Help startups build strong employer brands with culture-focused storytelling that improves the candidate experience
Note: We are actively hiring for this role as of December 2018. Resonate? Apply here in fewer than 5 minutes. Or ask Miki (our cofounder and first creative lead, pictured below) anything that’s on your mind: miki@jobportraits.com
Basics: We’re based in San Francisco but our team is remote-first and we work flexible hours. Because you’ll need to be able to visit Bay Area clients regularly, we are looking for someone local for this role. Compensation for this position is $85K–$115K. We pay 100% of insurance premiums.
About Job Portraits
We’re a San Francisco-based creative studio that creates culture-focused content to help startups hire more effectively. At root we fix a knowledge-gap problem: companies with strong, healthy work culture hire better people faster — but only if job candidates know about that culture. Using the tools of journalism, we help companies market their job opportunities with blog posts, photos, videos, and social campaigns. We often pair this content creation with strategic consulting, including brand development, employee engagement programs, and D&I consulting.
If you’re curious to see our work, we run a publication that helps job seekers make better decisions about where to work. (And, ahem, here’s a peek at our own work culture.)
Last year we grew revenue 3.5X and bootstrapped to profitability, entirely through inbound BD and word-of-mouth. We work most often with heads of talent, recruiters, hiring managers, and talent teams at VCs. On the surface we look like an agency, but under the hood we have broader ambitions — to widen access to meaningful work (our mission), to shape the norms of work itself, and to build our own business as a model for healthy, empowering work culture.
How We Work
- Half of our team is remote and team members mostly set their own hours. We trust our team members to find work rhythms that work best for them. As long as you’re getting your work done, we don’t care where or when it happens.
- We track our work time (internal and external) and make real changes if anyone goes over 40 hours/week. Most team members land somewhere around 32 hours/week.
- We understand that Job Portraits work is just one of many things that makes our team members’ lives meaningful. That means we encourage everyone to take regular vacations, as well as breaks during the work day to do things like visit a therapist or coach, walk their dog, exercise, or spend time with their family.
- We want work at Job Portraits to provide opportunities for personal — as well as professional — growth. We ask our team members to engage with their emotions and empathy, not just their intellects. We believe that vulnerability and radical candor — practiced within Job Portraits and with our clients — help build the connections and trust that allows us to excel at our work and grow into the best versions of ourselves.
Psst! We wrote this for you: “Researching Job Portraits? Here’s everything you need to know in one place.”
About the Creative Lead Role
As a creative lead you’ll provide the broad vision for our work with key clients and drive projects to completion with both conviction and grace. Part creative director, part account manager, you’ll set strategy for our clients’ employer brands, serve as their main point of contact, and direct our creative team.
You understand the recruiting space and its challenges and have experience (or strong instincts for) telling great stories in writing, photos, and video. You’ll use this background to continuously seek out new ways to effectively convey those stories to potential candidates.
You’ll also be Job Portraits’ eyes and ears, constantly funneling observations and insights gained on client engagements back to our team. This work will drive continuous improvements to our services and make you an essential contributor to the success of the business.
A Day In the Life of a Creative Lead
A common day for you might include several of the following activities:
- Walking a prospective client through a proposal deck
- Working with our legal/ops person to clarify the timeline for a new statement of work
- Helping a client determine which employees to include in an upcoming video
- Giving feedback to a writer and editor about a blog post
- Selecting photos to include in a social campaign
- Meeting with JP team members to improve our workflow for gathering feedback from clients
How You’ll Learn and Grow
- Become a stronger writer with direct coaching from our senior editors
- Gain experience producing written stories, photos, and videos start to finish
- Build close relationships with awesome people at growing startups
- Learn to think about — and improve — the candidate experience from many angles
- See the ins and outs of running a small business close-up — all full-time team members have access to, and the directive to help improve, our service offerings, sales processes, financial planning practices, tools, and more
- Run your own line of business: a likely next-step for creative leads is to take ownership over a specific service — with the support of Job Portraits’ back-of-house team and our stable of skilled creatives
Competencies and Instincts We’re Looking For
- Understands the recruiting space plus some marketing/storytelling experience OR has knowledge of employer branding and recruitment marketing specifically
- Has strong emotional intelligence and a deep-seated curiosity about humans and their motivations
- Can push back on big personalities while simultaneously building trust
- Asks great questions and is comfortable interviewing and meeting with all kinds of people
- Can quickly make people feel comfortable — and always heard and acknowledged
- Has great organization and time management skills. Can respond quickly to emails without sacrificing grammar, clarity, or empathy. Is comfortable jumping on the phone when needed.
- Has impeccable communication skills and is a bit of a nerd about grammar. (You might be a grammar nerd if: It drives you nuts when people use a hyphen where they should use an N-dash or M-dash.)
Core Tasks and Relationships
- Own long-term client engagements start to finish: scoping, selling, and producing
- Draft and deliver presentations, proposals, contracts, and success decks
- Serve as primary point of contact for clients, typically by email and occasionally phone.
- Work with our project manager to, 1) get contracts signed and legal/money stuff taken care of, and 2) manage scheduling and logistics as projects progress
- Set creative vision and direction for client projects and provide guidance and direction to our creative team, which includes writers, editors, photographers, and videographers
- Conduct interviews that will form the basis of projects
- Lead on-site production of creative assets (photos, videos, interviews, etc.) at startup offices in the San Francisco Bay Area (and occasionally out-of-state/country)
- Propose next steps for client relationships after each project is complete, and/or advise client on where else to put resources
- Stay in touch with major stakeholders at client companies
- Continuously learn and experiment to help improve JP services and processes, including: attending events, taking meetings with industry leaders, and staying up-to-date with interesting articles and research
Resonate? Apply here in fewer than 5 minutes.
Or ask Miki (our cofounder and first creative lead, pictured below) anything that’s on your mind: miki@jobportraits.com
A final note: We believe our success is dependent on our ability to build a team that represents a wide diversity of backgrounds, experiences, and viewpoints. A deep-seated curiosity about people is a value that unites our team. In fact, our bottom line depends on our desire and ability to have meaningful conversations and build trusting relationships with people who are different from us. We welcome everyone who is passionate about our mission and feels they can contribute to our work, and we especially encourage candidates from underrepresented groups to apply.
