– + Learn

How to Get a Marketing Job in Today’s Uncertain Economy

by

Share

Listen On:

On May 15, we hosted our second quarterly event of 2025 in partnership with the University of Portland’s School of Business. More than 110 attendees gathered for networking and a panel discussion, “How to Get a Marketing Job in Today’s Uncertain Economy: Why Analytics Gives You an Edge. Together, the panelists brought expertise from across academia, corporate marketing, and entrepreneurship, offering advice on how to navigate today’s job market as a creative and how to leverage analytics and AI in your work.

About Our Guests:

Welcome

Panelists

Resources in This Episode:

  • Use AI to optimize your resume against job descriptions, personalize your prompts to reflect your voice, and explore platforms like Jobscan and Hemingway for editing and matching the job description.
  • Experiment with tools like Tableau and JASP. There are also free certifications through HubSpot, Google, Hootsuite, and LinkedIn Learning.

Transcript

Find Your Dream Job, Bonus Episode 83: How to Get a Marketing Job in Today’s Uncertain Economy

Airdate: June 9, 2025

Welcome to a bonus episode of Find Your Dream Job, the podcast that helps you get hired, have the career you want, and make a difference in life.

I’m your host, Mac Prichard. I’m also the founder of Mac’s List. It’s a job board in the Pacific Northwest that helps you find a fulfilling career.

Mac’s List regularly sponsors public events in our hometown of Portland, Oregon. It allows job seekers, employers, and others to gather and make new friends and connections.

We recently teamed up with the School of Business at the University of Portland to host a panel conversation about how to get a marketing job in today’s uncertain economy and why analytics gives you an edge.

Here’s a recording of our conversation.

Michael L. DeVaughn:

Welcome, welcome, welcome. Thank you for coming this evening. My name is Mike DeVaughn, and I’m the Dean of the University of Portland School of Business here. I’m relatively new to the Pacific Northwest, this is my fourth year.

It’s been a great four years thus far, and it’s great to see so many folks in this room today. I’d like to share a little bit about who we are and what we do here, and then riff a little bit about this great panel that you’re about to hear.

When I first arrived, we started thinking about who we wanted to be and how we wanted to reshape ourselves.

We’re organized around four kinds of key priorities here, and I call them my four E’s. Our first one is to embrace our students to make sure they get what they need to be successful in the marketplace when they go out, making sure they have the tools to contribute right away.

We talk about enabling success for our stakeholders, and I’m gonna come back to that in a minute because I think when we put on events like this, this is how we help out in the community and make sure that we’re making our business partners, our alums, our students, and our faculty successful.

Engaging our communities, whether we talk about our other communities on campus, North Portland, Portland proper, greater Portland, the state of Oregon, everything we do is oriented toward how we can add value to those various communities of which we are part of.

And finally, expanding our branding and reputation. We wanna be Portland’s business school, right? We’re right here, we think, don’t fact-check me on this, but we think we’re Portland’s oldest MBA program.

I got my people sort of fat-checking that just to make sure. So we’ve been here a long time. We’ve been doing this graduate thing for a long time. And I’m really happy about that. But back to enabling success for our stakeholders, right?

One of the things that we try to do is make sure we provide a platform in events like tonight where we can do things to bring value to the community and our partners, in this case, Mac’s List. I’ll just do a quick sidebar and say it was by chance that I actually met Mac.

I think it was two years ago when we were at an event hosted by the former mayor and we just happened to be seated next to each other. And he mentioned that he’d had a relationship with the previous dean of the University of Portland. And this was pre-pandemic before everything started and so on and so forth. And then that led to a call, that led to a bunch of other things, and that led to where we are today. So we’re really excited about it.

And this is what we do. We’ve had these event learning labs. And we hosted an event here about two years ago, I think it was, when the Silicon Valley Bank meltdown, people remember that? Yeah, that was a bad day, yeah. So we had some of our faculty members talk about the implications, specifically for small business.

We hosted another event when the Rip City Remix kicked off their series right here at our Chiles Center, which is our athletic center on campus. We hosted an event called Beer Business and Basketball. And we had a chance to preview the brand new Remix beer that they serve at the Remix basketball games. And so this is just another event in that very long line.

I want to close by saying this is the right conversation that we’re having tonight at the right time. And when I arrived here back in 21, a couple things still stuck out as I started to meet folks, started to meet our students, started to get out in the community a little bit. And one of the things that struck me, we hosted something called our OTM, which stands for Operation Technology Management Department.

We hosted a symposium and we had two speakers who were in merchandising from Target. And that turned out to be the most popular session. And in that session, the two speakers talked about something called text analytics. And what they do, and what she did as a marketing manager was to be able to scrape all the qualitative data that you can pick up on socials and match and marry that data with the quantitative data that Target had. And she quickly said she became the most popular person in all of Target.

Every Monday morning the chief merchandising officer would hunt her down to say, hey, what’s going on with this new launch? What’s going on with this new brand? And so again, the importance of the merging of quantitative data, qualitative data, and traditional marketing focus is really where it’s at. And to underscore that, I was talking just a couple of days ago to the person who’s in charge of analytics for the Timbers.

And he told me, “Mike, I get probably 200-300 resumes every week for someone who wants to work in sports marketing. Analytics and marketing is where it’s at.” He’s gone from a department of one, when I first met him three years ago, to hiring his fourth person for analytics. And this is business analytics. So not the analytics about performance on the field and how we can score more goals, but how we can sell more hot dogs in section eight, how we can get more season ticket packages and things like that.

And so the analytics and the marketing space together is really exploding. And finally, I just want to read a testimonial from one of our students who again, I found this out in my very first year in 2021. It was so insightful. I thought I’d read it for you. Her name is Amanda and she worked at the time as a category manager for Bob’s Red Mill in Milwaukie.

And she said, “My background is in marketing and I love Professor Parkman’s marketing courses. He’s one of our marketing professors. Marketing strategy, marketing research, those were two of my favorite classes. And I thought I was gonna utilize that content and that information the most. But it’s pretty amazing how much I’ve learned to utilize statistics and analysis. That’s become a big part of my job now. And I didn’t realize how much I would utilize it day to day.

I would definitely say to focus on Professor Adrangi, who teaches statistics for us, because it’s very, very important. Data is very, very big now, and it’s very important to utilize good data to make smart business decisions. And so again, I think she said it, Amanda said it best here, and that’s why I think we’re having the right conversation at the right time. Thank you for coming this afternoon. I’d like to pass it off to Mac.

Mac Prichard:

All right, well thank you Dean and thank you all for joining us tonight. I want to thank not only Dean DeVaughn, but two of his teammates here at the University of Portland, Lilia Grundy and Melissa McCarthy for their great work putting together tonight’s event. How about a round of applause for the Dean and his team, huh?

And also, I just want to give a shout out. People come up to me and they say, thanks for putting this together. I didn’t put this together. We have a great team and I just want to identify them. Katie Janovec, Lisa Kislingbury Anderson, Ronnie Wilde, and Taylor and Susan Thornton-Hough. They did a great job bringing us all together and making this evening happen. So how about a round of applause for the Mac’s List team?

All right, we’re going to get going now. And I just want to say, if you’re in the back, don’t be shy. There’s still plenty of seats up front.

Maybe you’re not like me, the guy who sat up in the front row and asked the first question, but you don’t have to ask the first question to sit in the front row. Let’s get going.

As you know, my name is Mac Prichard. I’m the CEO and founder of Mac’s List. We’re a regional job board. And our mission is to help people find jobs that matter and to help make hiring more human. And we do that through our website, which has hundreds of jobs that you can look at for free as well as a weekly jobs newsletter.

But it’s also important to learn job search skills. That’s why we put together events like this. And that’s why if you visit our website, you’ll find podcast interviews, articles, online courses, lots and lots of free career advice about how to get better at looking for your next job or growing your career.

So let me start by introducing our panel. Kevin, you’re the executive vice president and the chief marketing officer of the Portland Trailblazers. How’s your week going?

Kevin Kinghorn:

My week has been busy.

Mac Prichard:

Okay, I can imagine. Thank you for joining us, especially during such a busy week. You oversee the team’s brand marketing, consumer insights, fan development and content. And we have to your right, Holly Feather. She’s the chief executive officer and founder of HHF Strategy.

Now, Holly, your company creates strategies for large and small brands that align with their values and you support sustainable growth. And then to your right is Dr. Ashley Hass, who’s an assistant marketing professor here at the School of Business at the University of Portland. Now, Dr. Hass, you also own Hass Consulting, which helps your business unlock its full digital potential.

So that’s our panel and please join me in welcoming our panel and we’ll get going. How about a round of applause? Okay. We’re going to jump into questions, but before we do that, just a quick show of hands. I’m going to ask you three questions.

Raise your hand if you’re looking for work. Don’t be shy. Okay. What do you think about 60, 70% of the room? Put your hand down and then raise it again if you’re thinking about changing careers. Okay. Good. About 10, 20%. And finally, who wants to learn more about data analytics and marketing, our theme for tonight? All right. So we’ve got some eager learners.

Let’s get going and let’s talk about the Portland job market, what its state is. Now, Ashley, you talk with both students and employers. What challenges are you seeing right now in the Portland job market, especially for marketers and other creatives?

Ashley Hass:

Yeah, I think that the think the reason why a lot of you are here is because it’s challenging right now. We have a lot of our students who are graduating, phenomenal people, phenomenal marketers, struggling to get jobs just because the market is in a really interesting state if we look at what’s happening just in that macroeconomic environment. There’s a lot of jobs that are either laying off or freezing. And we also have the introduction or more like mass adoption of generative AI, right, that’s changing the game big time.

Definitely everybody who raised their hand in here are not alone, right? It’s a very tough market that we’re in, which of course ebbs and flows.

Mac Prichard:

Just a quick follow up, what do you think candidates should do differently in this tighter job market?

Ashley Hass:

Yeah, we talk a lot with our students or if I’m mentoring young women about finding out ways to differentiate themselves. I’m sure that you all and I have too had experiences where you’re sending hundreds of resumes or not getting any responses right, you’re playing the AI game.

But really what we talk about here a lot at University of Portland and our business school is to network, create informational interviews, opportunities to get coffee, but not just like, hey, I really need a job, which is totally valid, but also in what ways do you see on LinkedIn that somebody posts something that resonated with you right, like something that makes it more about culture and about really connecting with people.

Of course, you’re here at these events, meeting as many people as you can, adding people on LinkedIn. I tell our students, or my students, we have wonderful guest speakers, which is how I know Kevin. He came to my class. And I was like, if you are all not adding him on LinkedIn, or any of the other people that you’re meeting throughout your program, or your networking opportunities, like you are doing yourself a disservice, you should do those things, because you never know 20 years down the road if you’re gonna have some sort of connection where it happens like it’s just crazy the stories that I’ve heard from people.

Mac Prichard:

Well, let’s talk about networking. Kevin, what’s your number one networking tip?

Kevin Kinghorn:

Not too different. Honestly, I just met someone the other day who had worked with a colleague of mine 10 years ago and it just so happened we had a job pop up and I mentioned it in the office and she said I needed to meet this person and then I went and had a coffee with them and they were fantastic and so, I think it’s just staying in touch with people. That’s probably the most important thing.

Mac Prichard:

Okay. And Holly, you not only run an agency, you also mentor and coach creative professionals. Do you agree with Ashley’s assessment of the market and what do you think people can do to stand out?

Holly Feather:

No, I do. I think it’s a tough market. And I also, I wanted to encourage you guys, if you haven’t yet, AMA is here. NextNW is here. Don’t be afraid also to go to the scheduled events and the scheduled coffee hours and make friends with the people who run them as well as all the other people there because a part of the reason that I’m here is because someone from AMA got to see me in that kind of environment and knew that I would be a good person for this, right?

So, you never know who you’re gonna meet and you never know what ‘s gonna come to fruition later. I do think that’s important. The other piece I would really say, you know, Ashley talked about differentiating yourself. And in order to differentiate yourself, you gotta know yourself really well. And I want you as a marketer to not just think about your job as marketing other people and other things, but go really deep about what lights you up, what you are good at when you’re not thinking that hard about it.

You know, and find ways to take more of those opportunities and take pictures of yourself or have other people taking pictures of you doing those things. Because you just never know when somebody who’s looking for you specifically is so much more valuable than somebody who is sorting through a field of resumes.

You know, we use AI to make us match the job description. I’m sure a lot of you are doing that. If you’re not, by the way, that’s a piece of advice I would take. I think the other piece is also knowing yourself and putting yourself out there correctly and really searching for jobs that match what you do as opposed to simply just making your resume right for the job.

Mac Prichard:

We saw a lot of hands go up when I asked the question about career change. What’s your best advice for someone who’s considering making a career change? Kevin, you want to go first?

Kevin Kinghorn:

That’s a good question. I mean, I never was in marketing to begin with. I’m a journalist. That’s where I started and what I went to school for. But started working as a journalist in sports that opened up a door. I ended up managing a website simply because I knew how to do that back when that was super important and then grew into the role that I’m in now. So I think really it’s about getting your foot in the door.

And then just being open to opportunities and learning. Like everything that I’ve learned has been on the job. So, you know, it’s just finding a way in and then making yourself really useful. That’s the advice I give every single intern who comes in, make yourself indispensable. I’d say 50% of the people that work in sports organizations started out as interns.

Mac Prichard:

And do you think that advice translates not only to interns, but people who are at mid-career?

Kevin Kinghorn:

Yeah, I just, I use interns as the example of. You know people who get their foot in the doors and make themselves indispensable but I just think getting your foot in the door and making a really good impression and then learning on the job is a tremendous way to grow. It’s worked for me.

Mac Prichard:

Okay, Holly, Ashley what would you add?

Ashley Hass:

Yeah, I’m pretty young which is cool. But I have made a career change. This is my second career in academia. My background is in sports so I played collegiate volleyball and was playing in a volleyball club and coached college ball which I did for a few years and I just kind of listened. I know this is gonna sound really silly, but it’s cool. We’re here in Portland. I listened to the whispers. I knew that teaching and mentoring was in me and I couldn’t dream of the life that I have now.

So it’s again really silly, but I talk to my students a lot about this is just to kind of take the jump and believe in yourself because when you’re doing things that light yourself up, you’ll find ways to make it happen. This is a little more, woo.

But it’s true because it’s scary to make a big career change. My entire life was volleyball, living and breathing. I just pretended to do business and now I have a PhD in marketing, which is crazy to me and a background in statistics. So if I can do it, you can do it. You can do analytics.

But yeah, just really know yourself and then go for it because nobody knows what they’re doing. Just do it.

Holly Feather:

And I love that so much. We’re a whole panel of job switchers, which I think is so brilliant.

So I was a producer for film and TV for 10 years before I went to business school. So when I went to business school, I knew that I could produce content. I knew how to make great creative, you know, and how to find the right people and how to run a team and how to be the hub of the wheel. And I had a really great mentor in college who was like, “Look at your skills, bud. You’re a brand manager. What are you doing?” Because, you know, I was of course looking for another creative position. I thought, “Well, you know, maybe I’ll go work for the agency, you know?” And she’s like, No, skip that.”

You know, and I think sometimes if you know what lights you up, it allows you to make those jumps and those kinds of quantum leaps and jobs because you know, if Kevin didn’t know how to make a website, where would the Thorns be today?

Mac Prichard:

Well, we’ve talked about the Portland job market and shared some advice about how to navigate it. Let’s talk about data analytics. And Kevin, I want to turn to you. Sometimes I think when people hear data analytics, they think, gosh, advanced statistics or math and I speak as somebody who had to take remedial math in order to get to grad school. What are we talking about when we say data analytics in the field of marketing?

Kevin Kinghorn:

So I took an intro to Algebra 11 as well, so I’m not your math guy. But what I think is really important is just being able to use facts and statistics to tell your story. So oftentimes we have young marketers come into the business and it’s one thing to tell a story. It’s another thing to back that story up and be able to really clearly articulate your vision. So I think it can be as simple as that.

What information am I seeing out there that helps inform my strategy? And then really importantly, as you’re executing that strategy and going through your plan, what’s the measure of success and how are you able to report that back? That skill is invaluable. Just very succinctly being able to put numbers together to help back things up.

And I think also, to back up the other panel’s points, your unique selling proposition, the same skill that helps you succeed inside of a company also helps you sell yourself. And being very clear on what your value add, your unique selling proposition is to a potential employer, you can use those same skills there.

Mac Prichard:

Actually, here at the school, data analytics is a big part of the curriculum. Can you say more about what you teach here and how it helps people in the job market?

Ashley Hass:

Yeah, absolutely. We have a wide range, of course,

Of course, in our course offerings. I specifically teach digital marketing and then social media and social media marketing and analytics. So we focus on social media in my classes, but we have, Mike mentioned earlier, our Dean, our Operations Technology Management program here at UP, which is really unique. There’s not many schools across the country that have an OTM group and they do the majority of our business analytic classes as well.

So they have you know, intro to Python, all the way from things like coding to understanding business analytics. And then in the marketing side, we really talk about the storytelling piece of like, okay, so now we’ve crunched the numbers, we’ve got the data, we have our market research class. Now, what does that matter? How can we tell a story? What are we gonna do as marketers? So it’s quite a wide range. And we have phenomenal professors that are able to do it, which includes me, I guess, but others that are super phenomenal, like incredible.

Mac Prichard:

Holly, I saw your head go up and down when Ashley was talking about storytelling. How important is it to blend storytelling with analytics?

Holly Feather:

100% important. Why is it important and how do you do it well? What do you see? I’m going to give you a quick amorphous answer and then a really quick trick, if you will, a bullet point.

So the amorphous answer is storytelling is really important because I think the first thing you’ll learn in any of the storytelling groups, be it Toastmasters or Communicating for Business, they will tell you that you think you’re in a room full of executives and therefore everybody’s really smart. They’re not. And also they don’t have a lot of time and brain space. So when you’re going to tell something, you need to start with a super short, super quick overview. If you don’t know it in 30 seconds, they’re not going to learn it no matter how long your deck is, right?

And then I think the second thing that is good to know is people are gonna ask you for hard data. They’re gonna ask you for hard data all the time. When you’re talking about future initiatives and when you’re working at big companies, you’ll be talking three to five years out. You need to realize that hard data for three to five years out does not exist yet. What does exist is hard data on what happened last year and the year before and you can draw trends from that, right? And you can also then use your quantitative to overlay why.

And then if you’re looking at right now, that’s where social media can be incredibly helpful for you because you can scrape a ton of data off of what the sentiment is today to give you the central point. But if you’re gonna be looking forward thinking, you need to be looking at trends. You need to be looking at consumer emotions. You need to be taking the things that they’re purchasing, the places that they’re going and how they’re really spending their time and use those things to build a trajectory of what’s gonna happen next.

And because it’s what’s gonna happen next, it’s not gonna be clear yet. There’s gonna be a lot of noise in that data and you have to learn how to harness that if you really want to build a new product or build a new program for someone. So that’s just a little trick of the trade I learned.

Mac Prichard:

I appreciate you sharing that. And I’m curious, Ashley, what do you see when people do all the work that Holly just laid out, but a marketing team doesn’t use that data well? What happens next?

Ashley Hass:

It happens all the time. What happens is poor decision making, right? And like even again, coming from my background in athletics, we used a ton of data in the college programs I was at and at the club programs, because we were nationally competitive and it was a huge, huge deal for us. But there’s, and you were talking about the quantitative and qualitative data, so it’s important to overlay those. But if you just go with your gut, oftentimes bad decisions are made.

It’s more based on the people who may be the CEO or whoever – marketing manager has these decisions like, yes, we should do it this way because I’m right, and then it epically fails. The market’s going to dictate how you’re performing. Consumers are very, very cognizant of brands nowadays. If you don’t get it right, cancel culture has definitely gone to an extreme oftentimes, but consumers will call you out, especially with this two-way relationship that we have. Of course, the company and people especially in it will suffer for those reasons.

Mac Prichard:

You do the synthesis, you research and look at the data, and then you propose a solution as a second step. And the third one is to measure your success. What’s been your experience in the workplace for watching marketers do that? How do leaders react and what kind of career success do people who know how to do that well have?

Kevin Kinghorn:

So I used to have this, president to another team that I worked for and he used to say to me all the time if you don’t know where you’re going anywhere, we’ll get you there and that applies to all kinds of things in life, but certainly from a marketing perspective, trying to understand what success looks like, especially in sports where team performance can bail you out. There’s all kinds of things that can go your way or not go your way, but unless you have a really clearly articulated plan for where you’re going to try and get to and then all the steps that you’re going to get there and then what that success looks like.

I mean, you’re just kind of like riding the wave, right? And I sort of see in sports specifically, everybody’s on a little bit of a cycle. Team performance is great and you’re crushing it and you seem like the smartest person in the room. You tried to start a player and now you’re struggling. Our job is to carve off that valley so you don’t sink as low. And then when things are going really well, maximizing that peak and then having a really strong understanding of what you’re trying to achieve in each of those different cycles takes you a long way. And I think those are the people that end up at that executive table for sure.

Mac Prichard:

Terrific. Well, let’s talk about AI. You can’t talk about marketing and analytics without discussing it. It’s already come up in our conversation to date. And this is for all three of you. How is AI changing the way we work, not only in marketing, but in all creative professions? Who would like to go first?

Holly Feather

Sure, yeah. I mean, I think it has cut down on the time you spend on first creating things. I think it might have increased the time you have to spend on checking references and rebuilding and honing. I think AI gives you access to a lot of information very quickly, and that’s a big benefit. I think the curse is that a lot of us have creative as a part of our job heading, right?

Marketing has typically been very intertwined with creative. And I think that AI has taken some of that organic and new out of the system in a way that can make it even harder for really good ideas to break through. And it can also make it very hard for you to advocate for really great creative because you will get the pushback of AI is cheap.

Kevin Kinghorn:

I use AI every single day. You know, I was just working on a campaign prior to the announcement. And I run it through AI and I’m like, tell me, great, here’s what I want to achieve. Tell me what you think of this. Then, you know, I think it’s good. 75 % of what you do, you can get out of AI. There’s always going to be the 25 % that is going to rely on your intelligence and your smarts and your intuition and the information that you know how to call, at least that’s how it looks to me now, it’s changed our world tremendously.

So I’ll give you one more story and why this is super important. We had a young man who was a gamer and a professional gamer. Then he became the manager of our e-sports team. He’s now our AI expert.

And that happened in three months. He just was really interested, just took it on, has a full-time job now, and helps guide our strategy internally. Now is the land rush of AI. You can be an expert, and it doesn’t take much. It will teach you. I just think it’s so important to be conversant, at least, and just to understand how it can be applied. And you just learn it by doing it. You can’t really make a mistake there.

And I am by no means an expert, but I am so much more conversant and so much better at using than two months just from doing it. So I highly recommend that. To your point earlier, it’s going to come up in every interview in my opinion.

Ashley Hass:

Yeah, I just echo what they both said. I think that, and I loved, Kevin, how you talk about it does 75 % of the work and then you need the human to do the other 25%. I think I also use it almost daily if it’s prepping my classes or like doing just things related to that. But also I use it in my research. I use it for my consulting business. I use it with students that I’m helping start up their LLCs. I use it to talk about my problems. It’s crazy. If you haven’t tried any of the generative AIs, I highly encourage you to do that.

They were saying you can’t break it. But I would also just say that my area of expertise is digital and social media wellness. So I research responsible tech usage. Not responsible, but companies just trying to make us consume more and more. With technology, with social media, we’re entering into a time right now, which we already have been in, but even more so where we’re inundated with messages always.

And it’s interesting because some of the clients that I work with, I work with because they like digital and social media, so they’re not just putting out AI captions and content, right? Like consumers are looking for authentic content for things that they wanna connect with, the stories, and AI can’t do that.

My class, for example, we were working with a company out of London, which is very different from American humor. My kids got roasted because they did not get, like that was one of the content pillars. It was great. But it was interesting because our first round of content, we used AI to help generate the captions. And the client came back and said, you know, we’re a digital wellness company. We should have very authentic content.

Students wrote it, of course followed the script and they’re like, “This is still AI.” And we’re like,
“No, that’s not right.” So it’s interesting. We’re moving into this kind of brain rot fatigue along with short form content. People want longer content now, which is a little interesting and companies who are using AI internally and in great ways, but then still creating authentic content. I think we’re going to actually have the competitive advantage, which is really interesting. But yeah, use AI, please test it out. It’s helpful for your life.

Mac Prichard:

Holly, as I mentioned in your introduction, you mentor a lot of professionals and do some career coaching yourself. What advice do you have for a job seeker who might feel overwhelmed about learning AI? What’s a good way to get started?

Holly Feather:

I think it’s a really easy thing that you can do. Take your resume and take the job description that you’re looking for. Run them both through AI until there is a high enough match that you’re not gonna get kicked out by the AI system that most recruiting agencies, even if they tell you they don’t do this, they do use to kick out your resume. It gets you in the door and it’s a very easy way to use AI to help you.

Mac Prichard

Kevin, I gotta ask, you have a fellow who went from starting to learn AI to becoming the Trailblazers AI expert in three months. How did he do that?

Kevin Kinghorn:

He used AI. I’m not kidding. You just go AI and say put together a learning program for me. Okay. Just use it and you’ll get better at, but you can just ask, how do I get better at this? And then it’ll tell you how to get better at it. Like I do that all of the time, literally.

Mac Prichard:

Okay. So we’ve got 20 minutes for questions and we want to hear from you all in the room. And we’ve got microphones that are going to be circulating. Do we have one or two mics, Katie? We have one. So.

Raise your hand if you’d like to ask a question and Katie will bring the mic to you. We do ask that you stand up and share your name just so we know who we’re speaking with.

Bridget Jackson:

Hi, I’m Bridget Jackson. I’m new to Portland, probably about five months in. For those of you, and I think it’s the professor here on the panel that also has a consulting business, I too am a consultant and I’m kind of finding it hard for the organizations that I support are kind of scaling back on using folks like myself in PR and marketing.

And so for those of us in the room that might have self-employment time in their game and are looking to go back to full-time nine to five, any advice that you have for returning to the job market after being their own boss? I don’t have good advice for this because I’m a professor and I’m like an independent contractor.

Ashley Hass:

My dean’s awesome also. He’s incredible. It’s hard. I say this with experience: My mom owned a deli for a very long time and she’s retired and she refuses to go back to work because she’s like, I’ve been my own boss forever and it’s gonna be really hard. I think that what my gut says right now is it’s really important for you to find a company that values you and sees you as a collaborative partner and not, I’ve heard this from one panel that we hosted related to DEI here at the business school and it was, not just like a culture fit, but you are a culture add.

So I thought that that was kind of profound and I’d never thought of it that way. But I would just encourage you to find spaces where it’s an interesting space, right? Like we’re going back to in-person hybrid, like whatever weird things, find something that works for you where you can communicate. So if that is more hybrid, that’s what I would recommend. But yeah, also professor life is sweet. So if you ever want to do that, I highly recommend it.

Julie:

Hey everyone, I’m Julie. Hello. Okay, two questions. One is what are the practical tools, both in AI, like you had mentioned ChatGPT, but I know there’s a lot of differences like, yeah, like mechanisms, tools, websites that you use, and then also the tools for data analytics. So like me, I’m coming from the medical device industry trying to break into marketing.

What are the tools you guys use or trending tools, stuff like that?

Ashley Hass:

I’ll answer again and I’ll do my best. I don’t teach data analytics. I have analytics embedded into my courses though. So Tableau is definitely one of them. I do more traditional, I guess, data collection and with the friends that I have in the industry, we have a female professor group, and I swear we have a list of over 100 different programs.

So there’s so many different programs. I think learning how to learn programs is more important. But I use R, which has some coding aspects. And then I use JASP as a free version. So I use that a lot when analyzing data.

I’ve got friends who know Python and my sister, my little sister’s in a PhD program, she scraped data from Reddit and did some content analysis. I mean, truly, I believe, and with marketing, that’s always been my background, it’s just scrappy. You can always learn how to learn the tools because enough people have YouTube tutorials and all of that. My sister is terrible at math like me and she somehow did content analysis on like 50,000 Reddit posts.

And I would also highly recommend there are a ton of digital marketing free certifications if you’re looking to tool up. HubSpot has great ones. They’re very general, but people love seeing HubSpot. SEMrush has a ton of them. Hootsuite has some good certifications, but I think that you have to pay for those to do it. And then Google Analytics, absolutely get certified in Google Analytics again. Another free, and then I use that a lot.

I’m a really big believer in not paying for stuff which is probably not great but like our students I know have access to LinkedIn Learning so I recommend it. I think anything that kind of gets you in the door and if there’s anything interesting that you could talk about. I know this is silly but I got the mother hen award which is kind of rude actually for my coaching. But I swear on every interview that I’ve had people have said, that’s weird. So like, I don’t know if you had some sort of random certification or something and you can tell a story of, well, actually this informs, right?

Or if there’s some cool thing, cause it shows you as a bigger dimensional being, right? Like we’re not just these marketing analytics people or whatever.

Holly Feather

Also, and I think Kevin would probably echo this, anybody who’s hiring you freaking love somebody who can learn.

And what it shows is that you like to learn, you have initiative, you have an entrepreneurial spirit, and people love that kind of person on their team. So, like, don’t get too caught up and sticky into what you can afford or what, like, people love. It’s about storytelling at the end of the day. And then two AI programs, I would add, JobScan. It’s expensive if you use it every month.

But if you just wanna run your resume through it, it has up to three free ones that you can do where you put in the job description and your resume. It’s quite good. I’ve known a lot of people get jobs off of that. And then if you’re writing, if you’re doing like an intense amount of writing, put it through Hemingway. Hemingway works like an editor, like a physical editor. So if you’re writing any content, it’s a nice way to just have somebody go through with a critical eye and say, this could be three paragraphs shorter.

Mac Prichard:

I see you nodding, Kevin. Anything you want to

Kevin Kinghorn:

No, they covered it. had nothing to add there. Okay. All right. Terrific. Next question.

Christina:

Hi, I’m Christina. I’ve been in Portland for three weeks, so I’m learning a lot here. I have kind of two questions. One about AI. I actually just saw a post from one of the hiring managers I’m trying to target that she’s noticing, like, they have application questions, and she’s seeing the same responses because somebody’s just putting it into chat GPT and doing nothing else with it.

So of course, I have a background in copywriting, so I write my own stuff. But when I do use AI, I make sure I say, okay, here’s my writing samples, use my voice. Are there any other tips or tricks you have to get it away from the generic chat GPT answer and into something more human?

Holly Feather

I’m going to give you a little free blurb of what I do with my coaching clients. And it came from the way I structure marketing strategy. One of the first things that I do with people is kind of the old school Ogilvy brand heart, right? So on this side, it’s them. On this side, it’s me, right? And I want you to think of who’s the exact opposite of you. What do they want? What motivates them? And what are their outcomes?

And then I want you to put you on the other side. And when you build your own story, make sure that you repeat that and then go through your resume and make sure every bullet on your resume with your little star story matches that long, that three things that are about you.

So you’re always driving them back to the same point. It’s just like when you make a deck, that 30-second summary at the beginning, every slide’s gonna hit on one part of that summary. It’s very similar in your interview. So like think of yourself as a product that you’re branding and be really true to what makes you shine because a different copywriter than you isn’t a bad copywriter, but it might not be the one that they’re looking for, and they’ll know that it’s you if you can speak to that story.

Christina:

My second question is, how do you guys feel about sort of submitting the resume and then a little extra cold outreach, either through email or a LinkedIn message? Because that seems to be working, but I still feel very hesitant about it.

Kevin Kinghorn:

No way, for sure do that. Yeah, I get messages on LinkedIn all the time. And then if it’s a really good outreach and you know, the person seems genuine, I’m more than happy to connect. I’m more than happy to talk about a job anytime.

Mac Prichard:

So Kevin, I gotta ask what makes a LinkedIn message really good that is appealing to you?

Kevin Kinghorn:

It’s human interest instead of necessarily, you know, driving right at a job, someone who just wants to learn and meet. That is what makes, always catches my eye and that goes for sales emails as well.

Ashley Hass:

Yeah, just, it’s interesting because I was on the hiring committee for a new faculty member and then today with my consulting, I was helping hire a marketing manager for the people that I’ve been helping, which is a pickleball court. It’s amazing to me how many people don’t do that.

and they don’t follow up with thank yous.

I’ve always just done that. I don’t know why, but I have. And it was so odd to me that people didn’t. And I tell my students all the time, I’m like, please do this because others are not. And the same, the genuine, it’s not like, hey, I want a job. It’s like, I really resonate with this. Something that’s, yeah, truly about connection, which is probably your motivation too.

Julia:

I’m taking this project on at work. Basically, I’m making a product or a brand strategy. I think it’s what it’s called, where I’m revamping the whole floor strategy, essentially, of how the brand advisors could be re-branded, I guess. I’m utilizing AI. I’m actually trying to create my own reports to understand the traffic around the store and understand kind of the events happening within the store.

What I need help with is, what kind of job is that? Is that brand strategy that I’m doing? And also if you can give me advice like the other types of data that I should possibly be looking into. And yeah. Please share your name.

Holly Feather:

Julia, everything is brand strategy. So yeah, I would say.

One important thing that you’re gonna wanna look at with data is a lot of what you’re doing is gonna drive something that we in marketing like to call awareness. And awareness is really hard to quantify. You can see it, but Kevin’s eye just twitched. And it’s really hard to quantify, right? But I think what you wanna do is you just wanna tell the story of how a consumer approaches the store: what their experience is like, and then where the shortcomings are and why the optimization meets it.

And then find a select piece of data, find the strongest piece of data you can for each one of those pieces, and I think you’re gonna do great. Great.

Ross:

I’m a marketer with a design background, and I feel like I’m often advocating for the benefit of new and fresh creative. And you kind of spoke to that earlier. I was hoping maybe you would expand on that.

Holly Feather:

Yes. I would say there are two things that are fueling this sort of separation from original created content. And I think one of the things is the fact that you have to have so much per day, right? Having been working on a brand at the dawn of AI, a really big brand at SCJ, one of the things that we were constantly debating is how much content should be bespoke versus how much should be swappable.

How many, you know, where you just swap in a photo, right? And it’s a delicate and difficult balance when you’re working with something like TikTok where you have to post four times a day. And so I think the creative directors and the designers who are going to absolutely flourish in the AI universe are gonna be those who can recommend the highest value places for a longer form or a really bespoke, really well-touched, well-designed piece of content.

And then those who learn how to use a more fast creation environment in a much more authentic way. Because I think where those pieces struggle, if you’re seeing like a bottle in a kitchen, it doesn’t make you feel anything. Right, so yeah, you’re hitting that algorithm four times a day, but you’re not moving any units with that content.

And I think the person who can find that balance and then who can sell that balance with a little bit of analytics behind it, even if it’s just stuff you Google, because honestly, Google’s free, I think that person is going to really break through, because I do think that people are craving, we miss that real connection. That’s why you saw the kind of films that you see winning Oscars, right? Is because people want that emotional experience and they do want it for the products they really care about.

And if they’re gonna really care about you, you have to find that balance.

Mac Prichard:

We have time for two more questions. Who’s our next one, Katie?

Ilke Martin:

Hi, my name is Ilke Martin. I asked Chad GPT, what is the smartest question for this session? And I wanna ask you all as AI reshape marketing workflows, but human centered skills are becoming even more valuable for marketers entering the field.

Ashley Hass:

So you’re saying that even with AI, human centered skills are more, I mean, I think that that’s the trend that we’ve been seeing. I know we’re using AI as a buzzword right now, but we’re really talking about generative AI here, right? Like, I mean, there are definitely so many other types of AI, but the one that has caught our attention is generative.

AI has been around for decades and it was already kind of changing that. Like with the evolution of digital marketing, it’s important to have those soft skills. And the way I build my classes, we do talk about marketing and I hope that they learn some stuff. I have a couple of my old students here, so they’re nodding. They’re like, yes, I did. Thank you. That’s the correct answer. But we do a lot of soft skills. I especially love, we do a lot of practicing with open-ended questions because open-ended questions are so powerful.

And if you have those soft skills, which can again be a buzzword, it can get you places. So yeah, the human is still going to be important. I do not think the Terminator is going to take us. Great use of ChatGPT. you win. You win the session. Yeah. You’re going to be an expert in three months. I can see that. Katie, last question.

Alfred:

Hey, my name is Alfred. So I just graduated with my master’s in marketing. When I’m applying for jobs, it feels like I have to be a jack of all trades. I mean, in class, I learn marketing research, communication, branding, regression analytics, all a bunch of really advanced stuff. But I have no way to express it in my resume because you don’t have a job until you can’t really express it on your resume until you have a job to work on. So I was thinking, could I do a project? Are these more appreciated than a certification on the resume?

Kevin Kinghorn:

I would say, when I’ve hired people, I’m hiring the person. And to the point earlier, as someone who can learn and adapt, that’s what’s really valuable to me. Obviously, where you’re at right now without having a ton of real world experience, it’s just a different type of job you’re applying to.

But I just find so much value in what I would call someone who’s a bit of a hustler and not in the negative connotation of that they’re a bit of a scammer, but someone who’s really engaged, a great communicator, really good listener. You can learn anything, but having those skills, especially being a self learner is the thing that stands out to me the most.

And I’ve always had success with that versus hiring someone who has like a great resume and a great list of things. I mean, it’s always a little bit of a roll of dice. You never know, but I would absolutely lean to that. And then the other thing I think is super valuable is just having a connection to that individual.

If I have a reference from someone who says, I, this person’s great, or I’ve worked with them before, and Ashley tells me one of her students is fantastic, that carries a ton of weight for me.

Mac Prichard:

Kevin, many people will say in a job interview, I’m a lifelong learner. What are people doing in those conversations or in their application materials that show they are lifelong learners.

Kevin Kinghorn:

The pivots, know, things that they’re interested in, it all comes through in just like a human conversation with someone. I don’t know that I could necessarily pin it down, but I know it when I’m having the conversation that I believe in this person and I believe in their skills and their ability to adapt and learn.

Mac Prichard:

Great. What would you all add?

Holly Feather:

Albert, I would say if you want to do a project, if there’s a project you want to do, do it and then talk about it. But I think it goes back to, you know, the key to showing somebody who you are is being who you are joyfully and like, building on that. Because the right job for you, you’re gonna meet Kevin if you do that project and you put it on your resume, or if you take that class that you’re curious about and you put it on your resume, and you’re able to talk to him about why in your cover letter, you know, like, you don’t get to meet Kevin if you don’t do it.

Right, so I think it kind of comes down to do what you do and then talk about why you did it that way. And I mean, let’s be honest guys, it’s really hard for any of us to talk about why we did anything. And so sometimes that takes a little introspection, but I do think that that choice is gonna be different for everyone in this room. Because not everyone in this room is gonna thrive doing a project by themselves, but they are gonna thrive taking a course and talking about a course that they love, right?

So the key is, following your instinct for what you love to do and what shows them what you love to do. Thank you.

Ashley Hass:

And I’d like to add just kind of in general that we’ve talked about getting a leg up and differentiating yourself. In my digital marketing class, their final exam is a personal branding website and they hate it and they love it sometimes. But the goal of that is to have, you’re showing that you have literacy and are able to build a website and it is not difficult as much anymore now.

Of course if you’re a coder and you’re doing WordPress or something or I use web flow of my website I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I just kind of Google it and figure it out I had a friend help me build it now I’m like this is messed up gotta figure it out right like you can do that, but I have them use Wix is a really great tool.

Canva has a new feature now for building websites right like that is a differentiator you can list projects like that and not only show, and it doesn’t need to be huge, it can have an about page, it can have some projects and all of that. I would recommend not putting your cell phone number on there.  Nobody needs to have that. I’ve had people try to scam me before because I had that on my resume posted on our doctoral website, so not that.

But just again, showing kind who you are, and people will go, wow, that’s really interesting. And I’ve also had guest speakers in my class who actually don’t really use resumes when they go out anymore. They have a QR code to their website, and people will then have that and see.

And Wix is free, it’ll try and get you to pay for a domain, you do not have to do that.

And what I tell my students is if somebody doesn’t wanna hire you because it’s ashleyhaas.wixsite.com, you probably don’t wanna work for that company, because that’s a barrier, right? That’s not very equitable. But yeah, I highly recommend having some sort of digital presence, especially if you all are trying to get a job in marketing, that is a little bit more important.

And I even had one guest speaker who said, you don’t need a resume anymore. And I was like, no, that’s not correct. But both are becoming very important, right?

Mac Prichard:

Great. Well, that brings this portion of the program to a close. We’re going to step off the stage. But before the panel leaves, please give them a big round of applause. What do you say?

Thank you for listening to this bonus episode of Find Your Dream Job. If you’d like to learn more about our in-person events at Mac’s List, go to macslist.org.

This show is produced by Mac’s List.

Susan Thornton-Hough schedules our guests and writes our newsletter. Lisa Kislingbury Anderson manages our social media.

Our sound engineer and editor is Matt Fiorillo. Dawn Mole creates our transcripts. And our music is by Freddy Trujillo. This is Mac Prichard. See you next week.