Sapient Nitro - In-class group discussion

On Friday in Career Option class, a few employees from Toronto's Sapient Nitro came to visit and we had a nice group discussion and informal presentation. Sonia, Eiko, and David are all employees at Sapient. Sonia is the Director of Human Resources, Eiko is the Associate Creative Director for U/X focus, and David is the Senior Art Director at Sapient Nitro.

During this discussion and presentation, they started out giving us a brief and descriptive about Sapient and Sapient Nitro (the creative side of Sapient). Sapient is a company that has 6000 employees globally. They are a company that focuses from creative design, technology, project management to user experience. Sapient is a company that has end-to-end capabilities. This means that they can build things on their own without having to outsource any of their designs to other technology companies. They design, create and delivers all. Sapient is company that has a great diversity of positions. This is a company that gives you opportunity to learn and grow. It is also a company that allows you to travel a lot and you can even have a career manager who will assist your career path at Sapient.

In the Toronto office, SapientNitro is located downtown, Richmond and Spadina. They have around 200 employees and is currently adding more. The office mainly focuses on digital work. Their goal is to be like a full production agency, just like the New York Sapient.

One very important that they also mentioned to us what is User Experience and how they achieve it,
User experience is basically designing solutions for the user. It is important to when doing design research that we go and talk to people about online experience, build up personnas of your target, and do whatever it takes to learn about them as much as possible.

During this discussion, they've also explained to us a few things they will particularly look for when it comes to hiring an employee:

• If you can basically get up and talk to others easily, you're already a chosen candidate.
• A great team player
• Come prepared for your interview - laptop or portfolio set up before the interview
• Knowing a bit about the organization of Sapient
• Being to explain the process work in your portfolio
• Showing your process work to explain your work
• Being open as you can about the position's work, being flexible with the duties of the position.

Another very interesting thing that I found during this discussion was the video they showed us about their most recent and current design work. It was very well done and it certainly intrigued me to find out more about them and even consider to apply there once I grad!

Creative Niche - Resume Workshop

In today's lecture, Adele and Stephen from Creative Niche were nice enough to come into our class and give us a lesson on how to improve our resumes.

Creative Niche is a well-respected talent and creative business services agency. They connect many designers with client job opportunities and great careers. Adele is currently the Director for client services at Creative Niche and Stephen is the President. Both of them has had over 10 years of experience in the design industry and has had various jobs related to design and advertising.

In this class we spent a the time to discuss a few things that would be important and useful for us to know when we come out of school and enter the industry.

Here are a few things that would be important for us to remember.

What are some current market trends

• Digital / interactive / web
• Mobile
• Rich Internet applications
• Social networking

Adele also mentioned that when we look for jobs, we always tend to search for the obvious positions. She says that it would be good to search and take a look at the new opportunities that we might already have the skill sets for as well.

Obvious – production artist, graphic designer, art director
Less obvious – studio manager, production manager, content manager, project manager
Not so obvious – u/x designer, seo/sem specialist, online community manager.

When it comes to job searching, we should take into consideration to accomplish these few key points in order to successfully get interviews and job opportunities 


1. Research

• Identify and research a list of potential employers
• Research market trends
• Consider your needs and goals
• Carefully read job descriptions of your desired position

2. Skills assessment

• Do an inventory of your skills, abilities
• Accomplishments and achievements
• Create sample case studies of your contributions to clients and employers
• Create PARs (Problems, Actions, Results)

3. Use the PAR theory (Problem, Action, Results)

• What challenge do you face?
• What action did you take to overcome the challenge?
• What was the result of your effort?

Aside from these three steps, we need to identify our soft skills and incorporate them into resumes. Soft skills are basically personality traits, social graces, communication, language, personal habits, friendliness etc. They tend to be universal, everyone has them.

A good way to keep track of what you do at your previous jobs would be to simply write out your day-to-day activities from each job in detail.


Moving on to developing our resumes, Adele pin-pointed some important aspects that we need to follow when we write our resumes: 

Make sure your resumes have objectives

• Quick statement
• Relate you objective to your audience
• It should be work-centered, not self-centered
• Do not exclude employers

When you're talking about your experience,

• Be concise and specific about accomplishments
• Provide proof of you potential value
• Create an image that matches the company you are applying to.

State your accomplishment
How you've contributed to a project or an achievement that reflects your work style


When you're writing your education,

• Show case academic achievements, extracurricular activities, and related courses
• With 2 years related work experience, education should not be on first page or top of resume

State the school
Articulate the things you’ve done at school and related course work


Your resume should answer these 5 questions
1. Who are you?
Name, contact information, title

2. What are you applying for?
Your objective

3. What can you do?
Highlight your skills and abilities

4. What have you accomplished?
Detail your accomplishments and achievements

5. With whom have you worked?
Mention brand or industry, clients, companies, agencies and projects 


Format and Design of your Resume

• Determine layout, format, structure and content
• Should be visibly pleasing and easy to read
• Create a PDF that is you, but relates to the company that you’re applying to
• Make sure it fits within the 8.5x11 format
• Avoid large blocks of colour
• Have two versions ready: Word and PDF

Always edit and proofread

• Review, proofread and spell-check your final document
• Have various versions of your resume if you have more than 2 roles that you are applying for.
• Make sure the design and layout is appropriate for the role in the company
• Track where you have applied – repeated applications look bad

After all the rules and guidelines that CreativeNiche has given us, they were very nice enough to show us a resume sample and give us some small notepads to write notes on. They also gave us some final advice about keeping our resume up to date daily, staying informed about the industry and anticipate changes. We should always update our technical skills and knowledge, continue to participate in portfolio reviews, grow personal networks and build a great personal brand of ourselves.


Before they left, they gave us some contacts to where we can locate them on the internet. They can be found on Twitter, Facebook and even Youtube (used to provide job offers)


website: www.creativeniche.ca