Paul Bogaards is an EVP, Director, Public Relations, Knopf Doubleday, a publishing company. He’s looking to hire a publicist, and so he wrote what looks like an extremely creative job posting and published on Tumblr (not, as he says, on the official Knopf job’s page). It’s brilliant. It begins like this:
The Executive Vice President, Director of Publicity and Media Relations for the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (@paulbogaards) is seeking a Publicist to dazzle the industry and world with their work and brio and warm good humor providing day-to-day support and counseling for authors (a lot of counseling) in a blistering-paced, internal and external facing (internal = editors = suspicious, external = agents = sometimes mean though they will describe their behavior as outcome directed), detail-oriented (seat 2A not 12A), data-driven (blah blah blah) environment working with dying legacy media professionals, social media pioneers, brand ambassadors (FML), booksellers (️), and other half-crazed publishing desperados.
The whole posting is like this, adding that “The job is a grind. No one is capable of doing it for very long,” and “As a publicist, editors will complain to you about the New York Times (what the f*ck are they doing over there?) and then become agitated and disgruntled and dismayed and threatening when one of their books is overlooked by that outlet.”
Here’s the thing about this job posting: it’s not creative.
To keep reading, click here: Why We Need Less Creative Job Postings
THANK YOU.
I’m so sick of job posts that try to be cute. Just tell me what the [squidding] duties are!
And while you’re at it, please post the salary range kthxbai.
Now that’s crazy talk!
🙂
I lost patience after “and brio and warm good.” It was too much work to read and I am not interested in bad writing.
When I left uni there were no end of ‘media executive’ jobs, all dressed up to sound cool and quirky. The reality when you go there was that they were all basically telesales! Cold calling and selling rubbish people didn’t want!