Hiring Qualifications

 

Will Any Agency Hire This Man?

He is 38, and unemployed. 

He dropped out of college. 

He has been a cook, a salesman, a diplomatist and a farmer. 

He knows nothing about marketing and had never written any copy. 

He professes to be interested in advertising as a career (at the age of 38!) and is ready to go to work for $5,000 a year. 

I doubt if any American agency will hire him.

However, a London agency did hire him. 

Three years later he became the most famous copywriter in the world, and in due course built the tenth biggest agency in the world.

The moral: it sometimes pays an agency to be imaginative and unorthodox in hiring.

That memo was written by David Ogilvy to one of his partners ... and the man described in the memo was Ogilvy himself, the man many refer to as "the father of advertising."

David Ogilvy

Ogilvy came to the US in 1938 and worked for Gallup’s Audience Research Institute. Ten years later, although he had never written an ad, he opened Ogilvy, Benson & Mather.

He went on to produce work for some of the biggest clients of the day: American Express, Lever, Shell, Sears, Rolls-Royce and built the agency into one of the world’s most prominent.

It sometimes pays to be imaginative and unorthodox in hiring.