When you are about to graduate from college and  the months or year following your graduation where every college graduate from any career path struggles to find a good job, you may fantasize about the idea of a recruiter head hunting you for a job. The reality of that fantasy may not be a rose coloured as you think.

Since I now have some years of experience under my belt, a decently populated LinkedIn profile, an online portfolio + resume, I guess I am becoming more visible for recruiters to find me AND want to reach out to me. I have been getting more calls, some of which are is presented as temporary contracting work I have almost taken. I did admittedly try for a full time job placement at any earlier point (when I was still looking for an alternative full time job for someone else), but lost the opportunity to someone with some decades more experience than me.

At this point, I am happy running my own design studio/ semi-freelancing, so I am not longer looking for full or part time work that requires a long term commitment. Looking back, I am not convinced that any of the contracting opportunities as facilitated by staffing agencies were ever truly fair. Let me tell you why.

• I’ll start with my most recent offer as it is still fresh in my memory. A recruiting agency that specialized in filling creative roles contacted me with  what first sounded like a  well-paying contracting job. This particular agency had contacted me a few times before but for what really seemed like a pseudo full time job (working 40 hours a week, during business hours); I did not like the idea of anything presented as a contracting position requiring full-time dedication w/o full-time dedication returned my way from the company. In this case, this offer was different. it was presented as a temporary contract to not last more than 2 months, with limited hours demanded per month and the ability to work wherever I chose (minus a few meetings on-site). it terms of a contracting offer, it sounded like a true ‘contractor’ opportunity but apparently I had it all wrong. I now finally understand how recruiters can offer ‘contracting’ work while giving you the short end of the stick by having the contractor adhere to employment commitments and legally pull it off.
• Staffing agencies actually hire you as an employee to their company and they contract you, a person, to their client. I guess this arrangement might work for other industries but for art-based industries I don’t think it is a good opportunity to be sought.
• I thought I would be a true contract as defined by the Department of Labor, but I would instead have to submit to employment (don’t forget the defined of employment is to suffer or slave), which then subjects you to have to agree to the work-for-hire stipulations of copyright laws; this means all copyrights are held directly by the employer and not the artist. That in itself was bad enough but the employment agreement went further to say that any work done for the client was not allowed to be used in my personal portfolio for job hunting purposes. Generally, in most research I have done, Including that of AIGA books, it generally  says that you can show your work-for-hire designs in your personal portfolio for job seeking purposes as the act would not diminish the value of the original design and you are not selling copies of it for profit. This employment agreement did not want to even give me that.

The irony of this was that my portfolio samples that I gave to them (which had nothing to do with them) were to be showcased.

PS – I wrote this in 2016, but apparently I never hit Publish on in. I am publishing it now (2026), as I took the time to write it, so I might as well publish it. I found it why discovering I had a trove un unpublished blog articles in draft mode.