Am I being penalised because I’m a northerner?
Recently I have been approached for a couple of freelance gigs at pretty top end companies. Lengthy contracts at businesses I’m genuinely interested in working with – be it luxury travel, artsy festival events, or an agency with ethical principles at its core – these all sounded like pretty interesting projects and I was happy to learn more.
Unfortunately, due to my location (I’m now based in the north) although I matched the skills and experience criteria, I was unable to get to a London office 2-3 days a week and so I have been unable to pursue any of these opportunities. As you can imagine, I find this a tad infuriating! I understand that some clients like to meet a new freelancer and go through briefs (I totally get that!), I even said I would be willing to head down to London a couple of days each month in order to make this happen at my own expense, but that did little to change any minds, and so now my inbox has gone a little bit quiet.
When I first started freelance working back in 2014, I was actually based in New Zealand. I was 12 hours ahead of my clients based in the UK and on the other side of the world – we made it work. During the pandemic, I built relationships with clients purely over zoom, launching products and rebrands for Mitsubishi, creating artwork for large scale events such as Soccer Aid for Unicef based on phone calls and emails, and have since worked with London agencies where I’ve had a single zoom chat with work sent through for me to complete, all to raving reviews. So how come although I am pretty good at what I do (I’m told relatively frequently tbh) as I can’t head into an office as regularly as some folks would like, I’m not the right person for the job?
There’s already enough barriers in the world, and honestly I thought we’d broken this one down. The world of work has proven it can be flexible when it needs to be, and yet it seems that some companies would prefer to go back to the way things have always been. Is this right? Are they getting the best team, with the best skills and the best experience, or are they getting the best team of people that just happen to be local?
It’s an interesting thought.
On the other hand, I do work with clients who couldn’t care less where I am. We video chat, we slack, we email and we get the job done – I’m glad that in some circumstances location isn’t everything 🙂