Zeusblog

We get an awful lot of people applying to us for internships or creative placements. We don’t actually offer either, because we’re just too small a company - from experience it doesn’t work well for them or us. They’re not to know that, so you can’t blame them for asking.

However, there are a couple of things we’ve noticed, which may help students be more successful with their applications to companies that do run internships and placements.

1. If you want to get a creative placement, no-one is interested in your C.V. All they want to see is your portfolio. I’d been at O&M for three months before my boss found out I’d actually been to University - and then it was only because I mentioned a beer festival I ran while at Uni. 

2. And what are they teaching on Creative Advertising courses? If your lecturer hasn’t told you that you need a portfolio, you shouldn’t take the rest of what they say very seriously - honestly, it’s page one. 

3. It also helps to mention what area you want to work in. Careers in account management, creative, production, television, planning, and media departments are all very different to one another, and each department would be looking for different things from applicants.

4. Use spellcheck. We recently had an applicant who wanted to be a copywriter, but had SIX spelling mistakes in one paragraph. Call me old-fashioned, but if you want to be a writer you need to know the difference between there, their, and they’re.

5. Don’t CC addresses in email. People like to feel that you are sincere in your desire to work at your particular firm.

6. And even if you are sending the same thing to each company without CCing, make sure it’s relevant. We had someone the other day blathering on about how they’d seen us on the list of one of the top 500 companies in the world to work for. Given no-one from Fortune 500 had asked Julia or myself what it’s like to work here, I suspect they’d just cut and pasted Zeus where the names of big companies had appeared. (Although to be fair, I do think that Zeus is the best company in the world to work for.)