Recruiters urge agencies to look beyond adland for fresh talent
The ad agency talent squeeze needs to be addressed by agencies looking beyond the industry for talent, a panel of leading industry advisors has warned.
Cassie Sellars, Virginia Hyland and Nick Williams: “Unfortunately we spend a lot of the time in this industry training up and attracting really good young talent then we let too many of them leave”
Nick Williams, founding partner of Williams International, warned that the Australian advertising industry had become a “net exporter” of talent in the middle and senior levels creating a serious gap that needed to be addressed.
Speaking at Mumbrella’s Secrets of Agency Excellence panel about the talent challenges facing agencies, Williams said the net needed to be cast wider to keep new talent flowing into the industry.
We should urge agencies to look beyond recruiters. Recruiters are directly linked to the turnover of large volumes of staff. They are after one thing and that’s their cut from placing someone in a job.
I have to disagree with you OpsInsider, there are many talented recruiters out there who operate with nothing but integrity. It is hard work being a recruiter, especially in a small industry such as advertising and comments like don’t make it any easier for those who have the right approach from an ethical perspective.
Hi OpsInsider,
(while of course, you could argue that I would say this), I don’t believe turnover can be ‘blamed’ on recruiters, for a few reasons.
1. In my experience, very few candidates leave a job/take another job because they are told/encouraged to do so by a recruiter. It paints a pretty bleak picture of the grown adults in our industry with their own careers, goals and life plans, to believe that they are coerced into changing solely on the advice or coercion of a third party. Ask yourself whether you would change jobs just because a recruiter encouraged you to. While of course, often recruiters play a part in sharing information about available roles with candidates they’re working with and managing that process, retention is a leadership and management issue. Very few people leave roles in companies they believe in, where they are well managed, remunerated and challenged and where they believe they have a future.
2. there are actually fewer independent recruiters in the industry than at any time over the past 15 years. The onset and growth of linkedin and other search methods has led to many agencies investing in in-house talent department and recruiters, who cover off a large volume of the roles themselves. Many (probably the majority, but I’ve never bothered to count) of the firms who my company competed with 10 years ago now no longer exist. Ask anyone working in an ad agency who they are receiving the most approaches from and I will guarantee you that they receive far more contact from in house agency talent specialists rather than from headhunters.
Nick, It is understandably tough for recruiters given the issues that surround the industry that remain unresolved. The current outcomes discussed at SAGE are unlikely to be addressed by simply hiring talent from outside from the likes of Google and Facebook.
If the industry is bad at valuing people over 40, bad at offering flexible work conditions for parents, women over 35 giving up on the industry and 70% of people leaving inside 10 years, shouldn’t the industry be focusing on a culture of change as its current culture of rapid churn hardly paints a bright picture of the future.
And surely people from outside the industry will run head-on into the same issues and leave for the same reasons.
It appears that one of the industry’s greatest skills is ignoring the bloody great elephants in the room.
I don’t disagree with much of what you say Tony. As a caveat, part of my point on stage in terms of ‘importing and exporting that isn’t featured above, was the need to continue importing talent from other advertising markets as well until we can develop and utilise enough local talent in the correct way
But I absolutely do believe that we’re still criminally inefficient at harvesting and getting maximum ‘use’ from our talent and experience. Movement between industries is common across most categories – I don’t have the numbers to access, but I would believe that there’s a large industry churn in accounting or banking or law etc etc. But my guess is we’re worst than most
Having said that, I do think the industry has got substantially better over the past 10 years in certain areas.
There are definitely more flexible work arrangements than before – ability to work more often from home, greater 3 and 4 day work weeks.
And female representation on leadership and exec groups is streets better than it’s been before (outside of the creative department, which is still depressingly male dominated). By my count, 11 of the top 20 agencies have a female Managing Director. More than half of all Heads of Client Service and about half the Head of Strategy are now female. CEOs lag behind but I believe as the female MDs ‘move up’ in the next five years that level also will become more representative.
Don’t think recruiters is the cause. I think superficial things – a clubby, clique-like mentality among agency staff, that means only people you feel you can party with will get hired, along with a general lack of family friendly hours and overall shite salaries for all except the top brass (thus ensuring that young people who share flats and those without mortgages are the only ones who can afford to work there) – ensure that many talented people leave and go client-side.