Involved

Adaptability seems to be the buzzword for dealing with our current environment. How will companies and people adapt to survive the next business cycle?

While there are many answers to that question, may I offer one way of looking at it. Look to hire creative people. More specifically, look to hire people who were involved in artistic clubs while they were in college and beyond.

I have been involved with the arts in Southern California for many years. In 2006, at the age of sixteen, I attended a summer camp sponsored by the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. To call it in arts camp was an understatement; you could sign up for workshops in musical theater, camera acting, screenwriting and dance—to name a few. The majority of the staff that ran these workshops were all working artists in some way. Either they were staff writers on a television show, graduate students in playwriting, working dancers for music videos, character actors from television shows and classical theater companies, and cast members from the original Broadway cast of A Chorus Line. I attended the camp for a month apiece over two summers. A year later, many of my friends were accepted to the UCLA Theater School, and my habit of supporting them and their friends led to my intense involvement with the arts in LA. Not only that, but they are the reason that I became a Bruin myself. During my time on campus, I fostered many connections with both the theater department and student-run arts organizations, and I still maintain many of those connections. My fascination with the arts was with me until my very last class, when I wrote my senior thesis on metis, the ancient Greek personification of ingenuity and creativity.

In writing that thesis, one thing became abundantly clear to me. The human race needs creativity in order to survive. We need it in order to help us adapt to the challenges we face as a single species on this planet. We need it to help us deal with environmental challenges, food insecurity, emerging pathogens, educational disparity, income inequality, the rise in automation, as well as the many other problems that we face in our society. I am not here to offer silver-bullet solutions, but any company that has hopes of creatively addressing these problems (not to mention a company that needs to adapt in order to survive into the next quarter), has to place his hopes in hiring creative and artistic people.

These creative and artistic people can come from anywhere. A cursory glance of someone’s post-college resume can tell you whether they were involved in a dance group, a chamber orchestra, a choir, a student theater company, or they managed the student art gallery. Many of my friends who are professional actors and dancers are currently out of work. While they wait for theaters to reopen and Broadway companies to get back on their feet, the one whisper that I keep hearing from them is the need for us to stop looking at involvement in the arts as a glorified hobby. I don’t know the exact source, but some of my friends have found statistics stating that the arts bring several billion dollars into the American economy every year.

I am not here to talk about that. I am here to ask companies to consider the value of a potential employee who was involved in artistic pursuits in any way—whether it was as a hobby, a creative outlet, a social need, or whether they are a former professional looking to change careers. It seems odd that anyone’s artistic talent is not taken into account when they’re being interviewed for a job. Now, more than ever, it is time for employers consider the following. These are not definitive, but they are things to consider:

·        A dancer or choreographer is also a keen planner, with an eye for details that other candidates might miss. They can break larger projects down into smaller meetings, and identify any potential wrong turns before they become a part of the larger project.

·        Someone involved in a choir or a cappella group also has an eye for detail, while they are already used to hearing (and thinking about) songs or arrangements as specific parts that blend to form a whole. They would be ideal for identifying individual talents, and thinking about, if not demonstrating, how those individual talents can contribute to a larger team.

·        Someone involved specifically in an a cappella group—where the goal is always to produce an a cappella cover of the given song—is skilled at seeing and hearing things in a different way. In addition to what I mentioned above, a really good a cappella group manages to make the human voice sound like an instrument. Anyone involved in singing in that form can also tell you (if a project goes to bust), what an alternative would feel like—or even if that alternative idea is better than the idea that your project originally went with.

·        A musician (one would hope) is confident both in their own place in the symphony and in their ability to play solo. Hiring someone with a background in music means you’ve hired somebody who understands the complexities of completing projects, and someone who understands the little details that might make a project work or not.

·        Songwriters and composers are skilled at provoking emotion and connecting to personal experiences. Those types of people would be ideal for helping out with projects that need that certain emotional spark to get them going.

·        Anyone involved in a theater company would understand the complexity of fundraising, would be willing to ask practical questions about how much a project would cost—both in time and money---and would be willing to give you a realistic estimate about how you can achieve your goals.

·        Any visual artist or photographer is skilled at—hopefully—visualizing a project in a different way than the brief might present, and they could also point out various ways in which a project might not work.

These are just some of the ways that artistically-inclined people might benefit your company. These people have untapped skills that would greatly benefit the new economy and every new economy after that. I urge you to consider hiring them today.