Keep on Cruzing
Follow along for Coastal California hikes, DIY Gardening Projects, Roadtrips and Camp Advice.
Follow along for Coastal California hikes, DIY Gardening Projects, Roadtrips and Camp Advice.
LauraFries.com was established in 2003, when this image was taken.
After years as a hiring manager I've reviewed thousands of resumes and hundreds of portfolio sites. (And nope, it doesn't make it any easier to write my own).
When I am on the other side of the process, I ask myself questions as I read. What is a motivating passion for this individual? How do their skills augment the team I'm hiring into? Will this person fit into the culture at our company?
So, dear reader, I have put together this little page - a summation of what I would look for, were I in your shoes.
Leslie Knope with the closet of April Ludgate.
Ton of corporate and DIY leadership experience.
Masters from Georgia Tech & eCommerce experience with The Home Depot.
Someday I’ll own a taco roboto.
Strangely, I’ve never NOT had a leadership role! My very first job was to wrangle a coterie of Texas freelance journalists, food critics, interns and colleagues for weekly deadlines. After that, a few years running social media for newspapers in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and D.C. with the help of a single, blessed direct report.
For a couple of zany years I convinced hundreds of Atlantans to volunteer for free to produce massive flash mob dinners, movie screenings, farm workdays and sessions designing agricultural robotics.
And from there, four years of a traditional corporate management role - a typically intricate matrixed environment with dozens of working relationships from agency to platform.
Joining a great team!
There's a delicate balance working with teams - you need to provide the structure so that deadlines are met, but at the same time you need to ensure that each team member has personal achievement goals that keep them motivated and in the game. Maybe it's weird, but I love this challenge!
I like to run these types of teams, and I like to join them.
YES.
With other THD leaders, we made frequent visits to both the ATL and CA offices of our partners at Facebook/Instagram, Google/YouTube, Twitter and Pinterest to work on strategy. We specifically focused on data partnerships: How to design social ad units that would deliver financial results for brands.
As an example, with bifold goals of finetuning our targeting and building out a revenue reporting model, we paired with Facebook on Market Exclusion on/offline attribution studies, utilizing Hadoop-scale data from our internal CRM/DMP partners. Our semi-on-site Facebook Partner team (Shoutout Beth, Yomei & Raquel!) was instrumental.
We also partnered directly with numerous other companies as they tested ad products: Instagram, Twitter/X, Snapchat, Houzz
As the product owner of the Pinterest channel, I represented THD in numerous beta partner tests of ad creative.
YES. I believe that these are two crucial distinctions in the varied world of social media marketing: 1) Did your campaigns have hard KPIs (direct revenue, app installs) and 2) Did your company invest money into the production (and testing) of creative?
Started doing blogging and content promotion for alt-newspapers in 2003. I was an early & loud advocate of things like RSS. We live-blogged the 2008 election from Florida using Typepad and promoting links on MySpace!
My trusty pen and paper! I'm constantly sketching to communicate layouts, user flows or concepts.
I write detailed briefs and have been known to insist on ritualistic use of Basecamp, Jira, Asana and other project management tools.
I'm an old hand at presentations.
But I’m truly a stickler for my beloved G Suite spreadsheets.
I can hack together a Wordpress site with basic HTML/CSS and I speak enough tech to work fluidly with dev teams. My standards far exceed my personal capabilities and I'm grateful to work with skilled practitioners.
Coming up with airtight, rock solid ideas that will get better over time. My signature campaign - "The Home Depot Style Challenge” ran for eight years!
I believe I’m strongest at pragmatically evaluating how any given tool can fit into an existing workflow. Software comes and goes, so you need to be able to assess how new functionality can help your team achieve their goals - without getting distracted by the shiny.
My partner got an outstanding job offer “over the hill” and we landed in Santa Cruz. I never thought I'd live blocks from the ocean!
Given enough time, I can absolutely memorize every image in your asset database.
Shredding paper, stamping things, getting the first print for proofing, red pens, multi-tab spreadsheets, figma group jams.
