7th grade just sucks. It really sucks when you are so white you are actually blue and vegetable soup has more meat than the skin on your 70 pound frame. Oh to be popular and wanted - to be adored by all the masses. To have real boobs and not ones made of tissue and to have really big hair held by Aussie freeze spritz – To be tan like Cindy Crawford – all of these or maybe even one of these would have made me front and center in the yearbook under the coveted superlatives page.

Being in advertising, “where’s the beef?” is romanticized for its creative simplicity. Growing up in the eighties, this too would have conjured fond memories like Izod shirts and parachute pants, if it wasn’t for Ethan Crutchfield. He was 17 and in eighth grade. He was more than twice my weight and spent the past couple of years in Juvie. His preferred past time was to manhandle my fragile psyche by screaming “Where’s the beef wedwine? Where’s dat beef?” My last name was Redwine, but I am sure the years of being sucker punched by his uncle daddy rendered him a good 30 points down the IQ chart, but who is bitter?

Leslie Stephens was popular. She had boobs. She was also a slut. She wasn’t one of those people who had boobs so that automatically made her a slut; she really was just a slut. Maybe I too could lock my conscious away in the hope-I-don’t-get-caught chest? It seemed to work before when staining my little sister’s face red for a week with iodine to “kill her zits”. Leslie’s name was all over the bathroom wall of what she would and would do again.

It was time to break down the dichotomy of being popular. Popularity seemed to be based on name recognition. It was also on what you would or wouldn’t do and when the letters that combined to form your name ended up in the same place you pissed in, it was not quite as respectable as having it printed in the local debutant rag. It also seemed to be a matter of why your name was being thrown around and what buzz words were associated or visions conjured when it came out of someone’s mouth. Was any form acknowledgment acceptable? No, it was not.

Same in recruiting. Quit throwing your name around for every hire. Be selective who you sleep with. You really don’t want five separate recruiting agencies working on the same search and then on top of that have it posted on every job board. Do you really think passive creative candidates are on Monster? Do you want your turnover rate’s fanny to be plastered on every URL that screams you brow beat your employees? They don’t look at it as growth. It can come across as instability. When we call a creative they at least want to ideate in the fantasy they were the initial person called. They want to be your true love. They want to be your first choice. Why? Because you played a little hard to get.

[tags]advertising, recruiting, agency, hiring revolution[/tags]