Merrick + Towle

So, I’ve been dying to tell you, but I have a new job! Merrick Towle Communications, a huge design firm about 25 minutes from my house. I interviewed with them earlier last month and they invited me in to work for a day.

I had been interested in them since early in the year; they had posted other positions (that honestly I didn’t quite fit, but applied for anyway) and had checked out their cool website. They seemed like a dream job.

Turns out my application was missed in the mix anyway, but I had gotten the email of the HR person, Debbie. In August, they posted a new job, this time for a Studio Artist. I read through the description; right up my alley. I was hooked. I emailed Debbie and told her I’d be interested in the position.

I came in for an interview and met with Debbie, who explained their policies and showed me around the building (which you can also see in the pictures below).

In addition to lots of spiffy green paint, they have a huge lunch room (black marble, 2 fridges, enormous flat panel TV and too many microwaves to count), hundreds of offices and cubicles (all the design ones dimly lit with glass desks), an exercise room (bike or treadmill) and a shower so you can be so fresh and clean after your jog.

I then met with Dinorah, the head of the department, and showed her my portfolio. She seemed very impressed, and attentively looked through every piece I brought, asking questions about how things were put together. When we were done, she asked me to set up a time to come in a freelance for a day!

What a cool concept! They paid me to come in a work for them, check out what they’re about, and essentially hired me as a 1-day freelancer. I think that’s brilliant.

The freelancing went great. I was thrust right into the thick of it; and it was essentially sink or swim. I swam. I swam HARD.
Dinorah handed me some jobs just as tests; the first was a photo editing job. I had to edit a photo of a house in a development with some pretty aggressive changes. I re-routed the driveway, erased the sidewalk, added a new sky… all kinds of things. She handed me a finished copy to use as reference (that’s how I knew it was just a test), and I took it and went a little further. I added in shadows, took stickers off the windows, and a bunch of other things that weren’t on the example… but made the photo seem more real.
The next job I did was to proof a brochure; in which I had to fix some strategically placed “mistakes” that were designed to fool me. Again, I was given the brochure as finished piece to go off of; but again, I found mistakes in the finished piece that I knew weren’t supposed to be there.
When I was done, Dinorah seemed pretty impressed at all the extra work I had done, remarking “No one [previous freelancers] has ever gotten that far!”.

A few days later, they called me and congratulated me on receiving the job. 🙂
Debbie told me they had narrowed it down to two candidates,but that I was aways their first pick!

I’m getting sleepy, I’ll tell you how it’s been going later.