We spoke to Samantha Hornsby (pictured above with Mae Yip), co-founder of ERIC, about the free careers app which is inspiring and reviving the creative industry job hunt for young people who want to get into creative industries. It provides a streamlined experience by connecting young people with all of the available opportunities in one place.
Sam originally started ERIC alongside best friend Mae Yip in 2016. ERIC is an acronym, standing for the company’s values. Sam laughed:
“People always ask us this question! ERIC stands for Empower, Represent, Immerse and Create – we want young people to feel at least one, if not all of these things by the time they leave the app.”
Through their journey, Sam and Mae have defied expectations of founding and running a business as two long-term female best friends and have learnt pretty much everything as they’ve gone along:
“The risk and rewards is an equilibrium – high risk, high reward, every day is a learning curve, you don’t know the stuff that you don’t know. Every single thing you have to learn on the job. There’s nothing that could genuinely prepare you for marketing, how to raise investment, you have to work it out as you go along.
“That’s one of the biggest challenges, but one of the things that makes running a business so incredibly fun. I get to try out new techniques every day and genuinely see the impact that they’re making.”
The now go-to creative careers app began as an events business in the realm of careers fairs, with Munya Chawawa being one of the original hosts and supporters of ERIC’s journey. Sam told us:
“We completely redid the careers fair model – we’re credited with pioneering the ‘careers festival model’ – we wanted to make these fairs fun and interesting to go to. They were really successful and we managed to help 200,000 young people connect better with creative industries over about six years.”
The pandemic forced the company to pivot and development for the ERIC app began in 2021. Although it might not have been the cofounders’ original vision, it has been a natural progression and has in fact aided ERIC in their mission to make creative industries more accessible for young people.
“Our mission has always been to connect young people with the creative industries in an events format that’s very time and location specific – not every young person can have access to that event.
“It’s not good if you want to make sure that every young person in the UK and possibly the world has access. It’s much more accessible as an app.
“We now promote other people’s events on the app, we’re in a nice spot where we don’t have to create any events and promote other people’s hard work and ensure that thousands of young people are seeing it.
We realise now, only after we finished the events was how much impact they made on young people in general – they truly were life changing for a lot of people. But through the app, we’re breaking down barriers for people that would never see one of our events – they might be based rurally, have less financial resources to travel, might not be able to attend and now they have access too.”
The ERIC app now has nearly 1,000 users and hundreds of new downloads daily, helping to spread the word on all things creative opportunities. However, for Sam, accessibility for creative industries begins from the bottom up and needs to be more prominent within schools.
The British Film Industry commissioned a report by ERIC on why young people are choosing to enter the screen industries less and less. Sam said:
“That report had such a colossal impact on the way that the film and television industry interacts and reaches out to young people. I really feel like I have properly changed the entire attitude of an industry when it comes to getting involved in careers, education, money, time and effort into training up young people.
“The screen industries have simply not been connecting with young people early enough to be competitive with other industries that young people choose, like STEM and healthcare – outreaching to schools, putting their careers on the map and young people are choosing other industries. It’s much harder to know how to break into such industries then, which is where the cycle of nepotism begins.
“I really want this to be a focus of ERIC going forward, putting more emphasis on how much more the creative industries need to be involved with schools. We need more young people to come into the industry but that’s never going to happen if young people don’t know anything about creative careers, and definitely not if young people aren’t up-skilled enough to be confident to apply for these competitive jobs.”
Looking at the future of creative industries and the recent surge in AI tools, Sam commented:
“Everyone is so worried about AI but that’s negative propaganda – research shows time and time again that creative industries are one of the least likely jobs to be automated by AI – we need an attitude shift when it comes to how we communicate creative careers to young people, and how future-proof and big the creative industries are. The more we keep doing what we’re doing, the more we will be able to lead awareness to the creative industries.”
Image courtesy of Samantha Hornsby