Here’s the short answer to how I got my first marketing job: the founder/CEO of ReferralCandy, a software company had read my blog, liked what I’d written, and asked me out to coffee for a chat – where he offered me the job.
(I actually didn’t say yes right away – I was hoping to be a flight attendant, but then that fell through – so I took the offer after that. I ended up spending 5.5 years at RC, and it was a wonderful time for me. I learned loads.)
I actually got another job offer of sorts a few months earlier, but I didn’t really follow up on that properly. And once I started with ReferralCandy, and started having a visible output of work, I started getting more job offers still.
So the one-line answer to anybody looking to break into a job in marketing: start a blog! And publish regularly over an extended period of time. It can be about anything. My blog wasn’t about marketing at all, I mostly wrote about the news, and local politics.
In the years that followed, I was also involved in hiring decisions when it came to other people on the team – and I found that I too liked to prioritize people who had their own projects. One of my colleagues ran foodie meetups. Another ran a breakdancing YouTube channel and website. The great thing about people who have their own “thing” is that they know how to take ownership of something.
To be updated.