Resparking Creativity: A Marketing Professional's Career Guide Towards Becoming a Director by Fatemah Mirza & Sumayyah Rafiq ➱ Book Tour with Guest Post & Giveaway

 

 

Whether you're interested in marketing management, affiliate marketing, or network marketing, this book serves as your guide to career success.

Resparking Creativity:

A Marketing Professional's Career Guide Towards Becoming a Director

by Fatemah Mirza & Sumayyah Rafiq

Genre: Nonfiction, Career Self-Help

Are you a marketing professional feeling trapped in your current job? Do you want to climb the corporate ladder and become a successful marketing director? Or are you so overwhelmed by daily operations that your creative energies have run dry?

I wrote this book for marketing managers who feel these pains. So, if you're struggling to unleash your creative energy and experience career growth, this book is tailor-made for you.

As a marketing professional, you may be deeply creative and ambitious enough to aim for a director role, but these obstacles are holding you back. You're caught in a monotonous routine, unable to pursue projects that will reignite your creative spark and simultaneously showcase your potential as a marketing director.

In this book, I offer concrete and actionable strategies to help you break free from this rut and:

*Create a portfolio of projects that will prove your candidacy as a marketing director

*Develop a stronger understanding of your strengths and capabilities at the director level.

*Create a resume, LinkedIn, and cover letter that grabs the recruiter's attention.

*Strategically network with the right people and stop chasing recruiters.

*Excel at interviews through strategic and proactive preparation.

*Advocate for yourself during salary negotiations and negotiate highly competitive compensation packages.

These strategies have been refined over my 13+ years as a marketing professional, empowering marketing leaders in the industry to approach their promotion plans with renewed vigor.

If you're a creative marketing manager with a track record of success, this book will equip you with methodologies that will facilitate long-term success and propel you to the pinnacle of your marketing career.

This book is designed for marketing professionals who:

*Who are deeply creative

*Have great ideas and are eager to put them into motion

*Are committed to changing their job search strategies

*Who want to make the world a better place through their work

Whether you're interested in marketing management, affiliate marketing, or network marketing, this book serves as your guide to career success. Order "Resparking Creativity: A Marketing Professionals Career Guide Towards Becoming a Director" today and start your journey toward professional fulfillment.

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According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 80% of jobs are filled before they are posted online. This makes sense when you consider that posting a job online is expensive! It requires screening resources, and a lot of time, and results in candidates that are slightly less engaged on average. 

Before most companies resort to posting jobs online, they try to hire internally and via referral for two reasons:

1. It’s a lot cheaper. It takes a lot of manpower to look through the hundreds of applications they typically receive.

2. It’s more effective. Candidates hired via referral usually stick around longer. Additionally, when a company has a referral program in place, the referring person also benefits! It becomes a win-win situation for all parties involved.

According to one study, overall, referral employees had a 28.5% chance of being hired, while non-referral employees only had a 2.7% chance. And internally, 45% of internal hires were referrals! Furthermore, a whopping 72% of interviews were referrals! That means that if 100 people applied and only 20 were interviewed, that’s 14 people who were referred! 

So, there’s a great deal of benefit in getting a referral for everyone involved. This is where networking comes into play. 

Networking allows you to leverage your connections to land a job. And by connections, I mean everyone you know, not just people you know in a professional capacity. Your network includes the people you’ve worked with, your supervisors, professors, alumni network, friends, and family! That said, you also want to network with people who are doing the job you want to do or have already gone through that process aka marketing directors or executives. This is important because you will be able to go to these people when you need help and advice. 

Platforms like LinkedIn have made it much easier for people to really grow professionally. People are using online platforms to find jobs, make connections, look for opportunities, and expand their professional network. However, just like any social media, professional networking can often take too much of your time. More often than not, people end up spending time and effort looking in all the wrong places. 

As a professional, you should always know where the best opportunities are and what networking mistakes to avoid. 

Mistake #1: Chasing recruiters

Reaching out to a few recruiters with a copy of your resume is a good idea, but expecting them to respond immediately, and with a job that’s just perfect for you, is not realistic. Recruiters are emailed by hundreds of candidates a week and it can be difficult to stand out unless you are a perfect fit for a role they are actively recruiting for. The chances of that happening are slim, especially because recruiters often are very specialized. A recruiter that I spoke with once, for example, built an entire, thriving business just sourcing candidates that worked in the lighting industry.

I’ve seen a lot of job seekers get very emotionally attached to a recruiter but do not make that mistake! If you do not fit within their open searches, or if their client decides not to pursue your file, they do not even have to let you know. Therefore, don’t get strung along by a recruiter who you’re not a priority for.

Instead, network with people you could potentially be reporting to and people who are doing the kind of work you want to do. If you are applying for Marketing Director roles, you will most likely be reporting to the CMO. Look for CMOs that you can incorporate into your network

But why this approach? 

• Authority

People who are department-level decision-makers have more hiring authority than an HR person. If they like you enough, they’ll go to bat for you. They’ll go to HR and say, “We need to hire a new marketing director this fiscal year, and I actually have someone in mind to fill that role.”

• Executive-Level Relationships

Building relationships with other executives is a great way to get the company to create a job that draws on your unique intellectual and leadership assets.

• Knowledge of Role

Who would know better that it’s time to hire more Marketing Directors? Additionally, people who are marketing directors already can guide you on what you can do to achieve the same goal. 

• Timing

While recruiters may only reply to you when there is a perfect, open match for someone just like you, the CMO will keep your outreach in mind months in the future, especially if they feel you are a talented candidate. 

• Advice

Even if the CMO cannot give you a job tomorrow, they can give you valuable advice to help you with your job search and career overall. It is a win-win situation for you.

●       The work you do as CareerTuners is so unique. How did you get into this area of helping job seekers?

I actually started by helping a few friends of mine in college and it snowballed from there. It started from me wanting to help my friends to wanting to help more and more people. Because, with the expertise that I’ve got, I could be a high-paid recruiter. I do do that to keep myself abreast with what the market wants but I don’t want that to be my full-time job.

 

When the recession happened in the formative years of my adult life, it showed me how badly unemployment impacts people. I understand that huge emotional burden you take on when you’ve taken on a job that isn’t fulfilling your creativity. When you feel like your soul is being sucked out of your body. That was my reality as a young adult. And I wanted to do something that would help people break out of that situation and transition to a place where they felt fulfilled and happy with their jobs.

 

To me, economic justice is incredibly important. And the easiest way to help people become upwardly mobile is by getting a better job. They work in a better place, they earn more. That’s the kind of work I’ve been focused on doing. That’s been my focus with CareerTuners because I want to empower job seekers to break out of the rut they feel stuck in.

 

●       What inspired you to write this book?

I’ve been working with job seekers for 13 years. A lot of them are from marketing. And one of the main things I noticed while working with these professionals is that they were struggling to maintain their creative energies. Whether they were new managers or established, they felt stuck in this rut. That a lot of their work involved a lot of the daily grind or a lot of operations and that was sucking up their time and energy or they were not feeling very creative. And that feeling, that inability to really flex their creative muscles, was hurting them. They were starting to feel burned out or unhappy with their job.

 

That’s the thing that really sparked the idea for me because I wanted to give marketing managers a guide that would help them evaluate their current standing and then what steps they could take to transition into a director position. And to do that in such a way that they were being super creative and excited about the work that they had to do.

 

●       How did you decide on this book title?

One thing that I knew from the start of this whole project was that I wanted to focus on helping managers get their creative energy back. I wanted that to be a key part of the title. The second thing that I wanted was for the title to energize people. Inspire them. (laughs) It took a lot of brainstorming with my colleague, Sumayyah, and mentor, and a lot of keyword research, before we decided on this particular iteration.

 

●       Is there any advice you would give to people who want to enter marketing as a field after reading your book?

That changing your career to marketing isn’t a nebulous or scary thing. A lot of the advice given in this book can be adjusted to suit your situation. The core thing that you need to do is to have a clear idea of what your target is. Do you want a certain salary? Do you want to work in a specific industry? What field of marketing are you interested in?

 

Once you’ve got that down, you can start the work. You can begin the self-evaluation, identifying what are your weak spots, what skills you need to learn and develop, what kind of projects and experiences you need, etc. Essentially, to ease your transition, know where you want to go and what gaps you need to fill. And whatever advice you can get from people who are doing the work you want to do? Pay close attention to it. Nothing beats that advice.

 

●       What can we expect from you in the future?

Me and Sumayyah are working on another book. It’s going to talk about why people don’t get promoted. What are the habits that force people to get stuck in a career rut and what are the actionable steps they can take to break free.

 

Another thing that I’m working on is what I’m calling the Careertuners.ai project. I want to take our services, combine them with AI, and use the results to help students in underprivileged countries and universities. My goal right now is to reach 10,000 students in the global south using CT.ai by the end of 2023.

Fatemah Mirza is a Certified Resume Master who has been helping job seekers with their resumes since 2010. She owns a company named CareerTuners, which is a small team of skilled professionals from various industries who specialize in providing professional resumes, cover letters, LinkedIn profiles, and many more career-related services to help ambitious people land their dream jobs and achieve career goals.

Fatemah is a highly sought-after speaker and coach who helps ambitious job seekers find higher-paying, more fulfilling jobs. She has created free resources that have seen more than 160,000 downloads, helped hundreds of clients increase their pay, and built a network of more than 3000 recruiters.

Sumayyah Rafiq Haider is an experienced author and career mentor with a passion for helping individuals excel professionally. With an MBA in Human Resource Management and SHRM-CP certification, Sumayyah has assisted numerous clients in their job search, providing guidance on resume writing, LinkedIn optimization, cover letters, interview skills, and career direction.

In her free time, Sumayyah immerses herself in the world of fantasy stories, drawing inspiration for her own captivating narratives. Her writing explores themes of personal growth, resilience, and the power of imagination. Sumayyah's unique blend of business acumen and literary talent positions her as an esteemed author and mentor.

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