Loose Cannon: DM Ink
Should job candidates bearing tattoos hide their colors? Yes, because such illustrations risk biasing potential hirers, according to research from search media firm Vault Inc.
Direct marketers know differently. To a DMer, a tattoo is the outer-envelope window that hints at the freemium of a potential employee’s soul.
Bunny Sloan won her current position — circulation director of Effervescent Living magazine — after the HR director accidentally saw her tattoo of her bloodhound Eloise. “My interviewer clearly wasn’t impressed by tattoos, so I told him it was to remind me of the importance of tracking down leads,” Sloan explains. “I said if we launched a loyalty program, I’d get a terrier for the other arm.”
Similarly, at a DMA convention pool party, four members from the same advertising agency seemed to have random words on their backs. It wasn’t until they stood shoulder to shoulder that viewers realized they had inked the first chapter of Lester Wunderman’s “Being Direct” onto themselves.
“I hired them away en masse,” crows Desdemona Salem, human resources director at the White Phoenix catalog. “They’ve got great team spirit!”
There are other ways DM recruitment professionals use tattoo clues to place their candidates. “A visible treble, or G, clef tattoo means the applicant is a musician and doesn’t expect to be paid very much,” according to Lilith Natashason, a recruiter in Norman, OK. “Employers should view music-related tattoos as ‘cents off’ coupons when considering salaries. Similarly, a philosophy major who sports an ‘I [heart] Kierkegaard’ image probably will work for free.”
“Watch out for tattoos that incorporate names,” Natashason adds. “One applicant had her six ex-husbands’ names on her forearm, each with a line through it. She harbored deep resentments toward every David, James, John, Michael, Robert and William she met. I ultimately sent her to the collections department at Cigar Lover’s Digest. She did great!”
“Work your prospective employees’ tattoos,” suggests Perdita Neil of Eau Claire, WI-based DMSearch. “If a job seeker has a rose, send her to 1-800-Flowers. If the tattoo is of an angry bull, send him to Omaha Steaks. And if it’s of three teardrops — one for each of the candidate’s murder victims — send him away. He clearly has no sense of how to build long-term customer relationships.”
But there’s a difference between making an existing tattoo DM relevant, and getting a DM-specific tattoo. “I recently interviewed a guy looking for a direct mail copywriting position,” Neil says. “He had ‘You may have already won!’ inked across his forehead. C’mon! In today’s climate, that’s as relevant as having the 1997 domestic mail rates etched onto your cheeks.”
So what was the best DM-employment-related tattoo ever seen? “You know those ‘love’ and ‘hate’ tattoos bikers have on their knuckles? I had a candidate who came in with ‘online’ on his left hand and ‘offline’ on his right,” Neil says. “There was someone easy to place!”
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