Creative recruiting is about more than matching a resume to a job description.
At its best, it is a conversation. What does the company really need? What is the candidate capable of? How does the team work? What kind of environment will help someone bring their strongest ideas forward?
That is where Felicia Wagner, Senior Recruiter at Portfolio Creative, spends much of her time. Her work lives in the space between skill and fit, between what is written on paper and what becomes clear when you actually talk to someone.
Felicia works with all kinds of creative and marketing professionals. From designers, copywriters, marketing specialists, strategists, and data analysts to creative directors, art directors, CMOs, and other leadership positions, the roles vary, but the goal stays consistent. Felicia strives to help companies find the right creative talent and help candidates find opportunities where they can do their best work.
“I’m constantly talking to people so I can really get the full story of what somebody is capable of, what they enjoy doing, what they don’t enjoy doing,” Felicia says. “By the time we get the candidate to our hiring manager, they really understand the full picture of who’s coming onto their team.”
A Career Built Around Connection
Felicia’s path into recruiting feels natural when you hear her talk about people. She has always valued connection, both at work and in her personal life. She finds fulfillment in bringing people together, connecting someone to an opportunity, or making sure the right conversation happens at the right time.
Before joining Portfolio Creative, Felicia worked in nonprofit and restaurant industry roles, earned a master’s degree in HR, and kept finding herself pulled toward the people side of work. Recruiting was always somewhere in the back of her mind.
Eventually, everything lined up. She connected with Portfolio Creative co-founder Kristen Harris, joined the team, and has now been with Portfolio Creative for nearly five years.
“It’s really just part of what I do,” Felicia says, and this perspective shapes how she works with candidates and clients. For Felicia, recruiting is not just a transaction. It’s about building relationships through listening, understanding, trust, and follow-through.
How the Day Starts
Felicia begins her day by getting prepared and ready, always with a cup of coffee.
After that, she quickly moves on to communication and setting priorities. She checks her email, handles urgent needs, follows up on interviews, and meets with the Portfolio Creative team in the morning.
That team touchpoint matters. Creative hiring has a lot of moving parts. A role may need more pipeline support. A candidate may need interview coordination. A client may need help clarifying what the position really requires. Priorities shift, and the team uses that time to talk through what needs attention first.
After the meeting, Felicia spends most of her day recruiting, building talent pipelines, and connecting people with opportunities at Portfolio Creative’s clients.
These tools help Felicia stay organized. Bullhorn, Portfolio Creative’s applicant tracking system, stores candidate information, resumes, notes, and relationship history. LinkedIn Recruiter helps her find new talent and stay in touch with the creative market. AI tools can help with communication, admin tasks, and gathering role details, but they never replace the human side of recruiting.
Portfolio Creative is a boutique staffing firm. The conversations still matter most.
Technology helps Felicia stay focused and efficient, but the work always comes back to understanding people: what a client needs, what a candidate brings, and where the two may genuinely align.
Why Job Descriptions Only Tell Part of the Story
Felicia often sees people assume that a job description tells the whole story, but that’s a common misconception.
It cannot.
A job description may capture skills, tools, responsibilities, and expectations. It rarely captures the team dynamic, communication style, creative process, pace, or kind of person who will thrive in the role. A resume has the same limitation. It can show experience, but it cannot always show potential, motivation, collaboration style, or the full context behind someone’s career path.
This is where Portfolio Creative’s approach stands out.
Felicia and the team come from creative and marketing backgrounds themselves. Felicia and Jamie Wells, Client Services Manager, both bring marketing experience to their work, which means they are not simply reading job descriptions and matching keywords. They understand the roles, the realities of the work, and the questions that uncover what a team actually needs.
“We come to the table with more than just the perspective of someone who has read a job description,” Felicia says. “We know the right questions to ask to get a little bit deeper.”
This deeper understanding saves time for everyone. If a role isn’t matching the current market, Portfolio Creative can share feedback earlier in the process and help adjust the job to attract better candidates. If a candidate looks overqualified on paper but is actually a great fit based on their goals, experience, and motivation, the team can highlight that in the conversation.
Felicia has seen that happen firsthand. A client had been looking for the right person and had not found them. Portfolio Creative quickly turned the search around because the team already knew candidates and elevated a candidate who would have been easily overlooked if they’d only looked at resumes.
Hiring managers have a lot on their plates: deadlines, teams, and deliverables. Portfolio Creative focuses on recruiting daily so the team can find candidates with the right mix of skills, experience, and personality fit.
The Human Side of Creative Work
Felicia has recruited in many industries, but creative professionals stand out to her.
Creative people often bring a strong sense of identity and passion to their work. Many have had to carve out their own path, stand up for the value of creativity, and keep building careers in a field that is both exciting and challenging.
That makes the conversations more personal.
Felicia enjoys hearing how people found their way into creative work, how they use creativity every day, and how their skills can help the right team. She also gets to see the results—the work, the ideas, the craft, and the impact creative professionals have within an organization.
For clients, that impact is just as meaningful.
Hiring managers often come to Portfolio Creative when their team is stretched thin, deadlines are piling up, or they need specific expertise. Bringing in the right person can help meet deadlines, reduce burnout, maintain quality, or finally move a key project forward.
“We’re not surgeons. We’re not saving people’s lives,” Felicia says. “But sometimes it does really feel like we’re talking to folks who need somebody on their team to help push them through the finish line.”
This is the goal behind every placement: making sure people feel supported, empowered, and ready to move forward.
Communication Builds Confidence
Recruiting involves many people, good timing, and a lot of trust. Candidates have to plan interviews around work, family, and life. Hiring managers juggle approvals, team needs, project schedules, and business priorities.
When everyone’s on the same page, it’s easier for people to bring their best selves to the table.
For candidates, transparency helps them prepare, know where they stand, and make informed decisions. For clients, it keeps the process moving and reduces confusion about candidate availability, expectations, and next steps.
Felicia believes communication is one of the most important parts of a recruiter’s job. It builds trust, gives people clarity, and makes the process smoother and more human.
When something needs to improve, whether it’s a candidate’s interview style or a client’s job description, honest feedback can make all the difference.
What Candidates Should Know About Working With a Recruiter
Felicia wishes more candidates knew that Portfolio Creative is here to support them.
Many creative professionals don’t realize there’s a recruiting partner focused just on creative and marketing roles. Others may not know what to expect when they first talk to a recruiter.
Felicia wants candidates to know that the conversation is meant to help them, not make them feel nervous.
Portfolio Creative isn’t the internal hiring team. This lets our recruiters give honest, helpful advice before a candidate meets the client. They help candidates understand the opportunity, prepare for interviews, articulate their strengths, and find ways to improve.
The more open candidates are, the better the team can help them.
“You can kind of relax when you talk with us,” Felicia says. “We’re helping you get the job.”
You Do Not Have to Do It Alone
Whether someone is considering a new role or trying to make a hire, Felicia’s message is simple: help is out there.
Hiring can feel overwhelming. So can searching for work. Both involve decisions that affect real people, real teams, and real lives. Portfolio Creative helps make the process more focused, informed, and manageable.
For hiring managers, that means you’re getting support from a team that understands the creative and marketing space, asks better questions, builds pipelines in advance, and helps identify candidates who may not be obvious from a resume alone.
For candidates, it means having a resource who understands the market, offers guidance, and helps connect your experience to the right opportunity.
Felicia also knows that life outside of work shapes how people show up at work. As a parent to a young daughter, she understands the reality of balancing career, family, responsibility, and ambition. That perspective helps her relate to candidates and hiring managers who are juggling more than a job search or an open role.
People need support. The right recruiting partner can provide it.
Creativity Beyond Recruiting
Outside of recruiting, Felicia’s creative side shows up through writing and video production. Her undergraduate background was in media production, and she still enjoys editing, music mixing, overlays, filters, transitions, and shaping raw material into something cohesive.
Writing, though, has always been one of her first creative loves.
She uses LinkedIn to share stories, connect her work to broader life experiences, and build relationships beyond her immediate network. In one instance, a post she wrote resonated with a group of people from other countries living in the U.S. who had lost jobs or were looking for work. That connection led to a virtual conversation she never would have had if she had not shared her writing publicly.
For Felicia, creativity is another way to connect people.
That thread runs through her work, too.
Let’s Connect
Whether you’re exploring your next creative opportunity or looking for the right person to strengthen your team, Portfolio Creative is here to help you move forward with more clarity and confidence.
Start with the resources that fit where you are now: sign up for The Brief, Portfolio Creative’s bi-monthly eNewsletter, for creative hiring insight and career perspective; check out our blog for practical guidance from inside the creative and marketing talent space; or visit our Portfolio Creative link hub for open roles, hiring resources, and ways to connect with the team.
Because in creative staffing, the best matches are not built on keywords alone. They are built on relationships, context, and the human details that make a role work.