CAREERS DEPEND LARGELY UPON CREATIVITY

Whether you are looking for a job, or trying to get ahead in business, imagination is a key to achievement.

            Job hunting should call for strenuous idea hunting. And yet famous employer reports: “In my experience, not one applicant in 500 uses any imagination in applying for a position. Anyone who suggested idea of possible use to his prospective employer would stand out and be almost sure to get preference-even though his suggestions were un-usable.”

            For 15 years, Sidney Edlund, former head of Lifesavers, Incorporated, has made it his hobby to teach people how to go after new jobs. His basic principles are these:

1. Offer a service instead of asking for a position.

2. Appeal to the self-interest of your prospective employer.

3. Be specific as to the job you want, and as to your qualifications.

4. Be different, and still be sincere.

All these principles call for thinking ahead, or thinking creatively, or both. Even in the matter of our personal appearance, we might look into the mirror of imagination before looking for a job. And to be “different”-to lift ourselves above the other applicants-we need to generate ideas before we knock on employers doors.

            We also need imagination to help us set out job-seeking sights. Our first questions might well be: “In what vacations would I be most likely to succeed?” Let’s jot down all lines that seem at all likely. Having done that, let’s use some check list. Let’s run through the classified section of the telephone directory and scan the 200 or so different lines listed there. Then let’s talk to some experienced friend and seek his guidance. But let’s not make his do our creative thinking for us-let’s show him our list of likely lines and ask only for his judgment.

Walter Hoving, of department store fame, estimates that of the 400,000 college graduates looking for jobs each year, only a few think creatively about what to try to do and where to find the right job. “I am constantly staggered,” said he, “by this passive waiting for someone else to do the thinking that they should do for themselves”.

Nowadays our aptitudes can be revealed to us through scientific testing. But such knowledge should be but a prelude to our creative thinking about our future career.

CREATIVITY IN PRESENTATION

The United States Navy has proved that people absorb up to 35 percent more when an appeal is made to the eye as well as the ear, and that they retain what they thus learn 55 percent longer. Our job-seeking presentation should therefore be a graphic as possible. A Harvard Business School graduate, after 14 years of successful experience, was applying for a still bigger job. Instead of a conventional summary, he submitted a pictorial chart which visualized his impressive experience. This not only intensified the employer’s attention, but made him covet the applicant’s creative power.

A graphic portfolio scores even better when tailor-made to fit the prospect. For example, just after World War II our firm was taking back 160 of our own people from the armed services; we were therefore seeking no new employees. At that very time a young man came to see me, and I hired him on the spot. Why? Because he had completed so many missions over Germany and had been decorated so much? No. It was because he had taken three months to study our business and its needs, had thought up just how he could be of most use to us, and had prepared a portfolio especially for that one interview with us-a job of work which proved to me that he was highly creative and in no way allergic to effort.

The planning of a follow-up campaign entails more creative thinking. The idea follow-up is a crop of new ideas. When we go back to the employer with more suggestions for the good of his business, we will probably find him eager for our creative capacity, and may find him desirous of our services.

A friend of mine, in search of his first job, applied at Macy’s. He was flatly told that there were too many applicants ahead of him. Unbeaten, he walked through the store, then he telephone the personal director.

“I want a job,” he said, “and I’ve jus spent several hours in the store looking for places where I could help. I have listed 10 spots where I think I could be useful right this minute. May I come up and tell you where they are?” He thus secured the interview, and was soon a Macy trainee.

George R. Keith was a Lawyer who retired at 40. As a creative hobby he conducted a system of finding opening for unemployed people at no expense to them. Over a span of 30 years he contrived ways to help over 80,000 job-seekers. By developing ingenious methods of smoking out opportunities, he was able to find more jobs than people to fill them-even during depressions. He thus proved in a big way that creative imagination can secure the kind of employment sought – in slumps as wall as in booms.

THE KEY TO SALESMANSHIP

Creative power can promote an employee’s progress in any phase of business, especially in salesmanship. A salesman has to use his imagination, deliberately and consciously, to think up just what little thing he can do to be helpful to each customer. Every case calls for different tactics. That fact helps explain why aptitude testers maintain that the two traits most needed for success in selling are an objective personality and creative imagination.

After a long drive I reached my hotel in Rochester one night at about nine. I had previously made a date with myself to devote an hour before retirement to thinking up how to persuade my prospect the next day. During the evening I piled up and jotted down ideas. My next morning’s interview succeeded, largely because of the creative thinking I had done the night before. That victory happened to be a turning point in my career.

A vice-president in charge of purchases told me about a salesman who had long called him without landing a single order. “He never got discouraged. Each time I turned him down, he’d just smile and say he’d try it again. Eventually I found myself giving him over $100,000 worth of business a year. What won me over? It was his habit of giving me an idea each time he called”

If a man on the road keeps his imagination awake, he can capture ideas that can help his home office. For example, G. Cullen Thomas, General Mills Vice-President and Director of Product Control, reported this case:

“One of our salesmen sent us some partially-baked dinner rolls that he had picked up at a small bakeshop in Florida. They were blond, almost white in colour, anything but appetizing. But when we reheated them to complete their bake, we had delicious, hot rolls with a delightful home made flavour. We immediately secured the rights to this simple process and turned it over to our research and technical personnel for further experimental study. About eight weeks later, we were able to present to the baking industry the revolutionary ‘Brown ‘n’ Serve’ bakery products that have since won their way into millions of American homes.”

Thus an imaginatively alert salesman can be a long arm of his company’s creative research.