Recruitment: Quest for new talent

Revolution

01/05/2007

Suzy Bashford asks what strategies recruiters are pursuing to fill the digital skills gap in marketing.

The shortage of digital skills in the digital sector has been well publicised; stories abound of agencies falling over each other to poach good candidates, and of young talent being able to command inflated salaries for their skills. However, the industry has realised it needs to think more creatively and laterally if it is to overcome the digital skills crisis.

According to Helen Coult, head of the digital team at head-hunting firm Ellis Fairbank, there has been a shift in the last six to nine months in the type of brief that recruitment consultancies are receiving. "We're getting less and less briefs saying 'we only want people applying from a purely digital background'. Now, employers are favouring integrated experience much, much more. We're seeing a sea change in employers looking for people with above-the-line backgrounds who are open to the digital channel," she says.

As a good example of a recent placement she's made, Coult cites Elin Falk, who has been hired for the role of head of digital strategy on the Bacardi account at Universal McCann. "Her experience is a mix of on and offline and media neutral, with a stint working at big brand Adidas," she says. Coult adds that these senior roles in digital often require "someone very creative and digital specialists are not viewed as the most creative thinkers".

Traditional, above-the-line agencies are quick to agree with Coult and argue that the most important ingredient of a good digital campaign is 'a big idea'. Naturally, these creative agencies believe they can fill the digital gap with their skills.

Martin Galton, creative director at ad agency Hooper Galton, speaks for many traditional ad agencies when he says: "There is a big opportunity for conventional agencies in the digital world. Conventional creative departments will naturally fill the creative void. After all, we have had a long and memorable dialogue with consumers for the last 40 years. It's just time that we switched focus."

Certainly, when Damian Blackden, director of strategic marketing technology at Universal McCann, briefed Ellis Fairbank on the type of candidate he was looking for to lead the Barcardi account, creative flair was a priority. He agrees with both Coult and Galton that digital specialists can be too narrow-minded, particularly for the bigger roles.

"There's a general shortage of digital skills but there's also a need to integrate digital. A lot of specialists focus only on digital advertising. I'm much more interested in things like branded content, which needs more 'upstream' thinking. For roles like Elin's, we need people from outside online advertising who can draw on a broader experience," he says.

In recruiting people into digital from broader backgrounds, recruitment managers need to think much more laterally about transferable skills. According to Paul Angeli, managing partner at recruitment consultancy mediaCentrix, recruiters need to stop their obsession with job titles and be more circumspect in the evaluation of CVs. He believes that, while candidates often may not boast the right job titles on their CV, they may have the right skills for the role:

"There's a job title shortage in digital, not a skills shortage. The skills are there and inherent in people's DNA but the way the web has grown up recently there are lots of leftfield job titles. This means that one type of job in one company is not necessarily the same as another with the same title in a different company," he explains.

Nick O'Connor, director of digital at recruitment consultancy Xchangeteam, tells a similar tale from his experiences placing candidates. He says recruitment managers can be "over-precious about what is a transferable skill and what is not". He adds: "I recruit people into the sales and business development divisions in media owners. You'll often get a very good salesperson, who may not know digital as well as other platforms - but what's wrong with bringing someone in from another platform? It shouldn't necessarily be relevant that they haven't sold online space before. You can train them on the platform."

Digital agency twentysix has found employing people from the direct marketing industry a particularly successful recruitment strategy. According to managing director of twentysix London Gail Dudleston, the same principles of client service and marketing apply in the digital field. "The only difference is that digital marketing is faster, like DM on steroids. But people in DM are often really keen to shift into digital as it is perceived as more exciting," she says.

Evaluating CVs

So, is there a skills shortage or not? Or is it simply a case of savvy recruitment? Angeli believes there is definitely a lack of digital skills, but believes that the extent of the shortage has possibly been exaggerated due to the inexperience of managers recruiting digital talent. Quite often these managers are young and inexperienced themselves, with only two to five years in the field.

"They haven't had much experience of managing or hiring people," he says. "They probably need a better way of evaluating CVs than just ticking a job title. It's about drilling down into the CV and understanding what the candidate has actually done. I think they could be more lateral-minded."

While many industry commentators agree with the argument that the answer to the digital skills crisis is recruiting people from outside the industry, there are some notable exceptions. Tom Millns, head of digital at agency Haygarth, for instance, does not believe recruiting generalists works, particularly at a senior level. Rather than do this, Haygarth has taken on more recruitment consultancies in the last few years to widen the net in order to catch the top digital talent.

He explains the dilemma by saying: "It's very difficult to justify taking someone on who doesn't have exactly the right skill set, especially in a senior position because you'll have to give them a senior-level salary. I suppose you could take them on on a lower salary and fast-track them, but we haven't done that yet." However, Millns adds that he is considering accepting applications for roles in creative design and build from software agencies that use the same tools, as filling these roles is becoming increasingly hard.

Marc Caudron, co-founder of Pod1, is another digital agency head who does not subscribe to the view that recruiting non-specialists is the answer to the skills gap in digital. He's tried this strategy to no avail and, like Millns, now relies on around eight recruitment agencies to find him digital specialists. "We have tried to take on people from a traditional above-the-line background but it's almost impossible to expect them to hit the ground running," says Caudron. "We were hiring quite senior people but we found that was not effective because the younger staff tended to know more than them."

Caudron views recruitment as such an important issue - and the one factor currently holding back his agency - that he has hired an in-house human resources manager even though the agency has only 50 employees. He justifies this move by saying: "Success in digital all comes down to the staff you hire. I believe that the best digital agencies are those with employees who eat, live, breathe and think in the digital format and have done for years and years. That's the case with our creative department, even though the average age of a member of staff is only 24."

Rather than continuing to rely on multiple recruitment agencies and paying out multiple placement fees for candidates, Caudron's ambition is to set up an academy within the agency to grow its own talent from the grass roots. "We now generally only take on interns or candidates at junior design level and we're looking for a passion for digital," he says.

Other agencies are also beginning to recognise that cultivating their own loyal, skilled digital staff from the bottom up is the best way forward. Twentysix's Dudleston says her focus now is recruiting predominantly college graduates and school leavers. "The advantage of doing this is that we get tech people very young and train them up. They're easy to train, hungry, they grow with the agency and develop the skills we require and understand our way of thinking," she says.

Xchangeteam is so convinced that graduate recruitment holds one of the keys to the digital skills shortage that it has launched a scheme called 'Next Generation'. In this, the consultancies' clients (agencies) give a graduate an eight-week trial before deciding whether or not to take the candidate on. The only fee the consultancy charges is £50 per day, which goes directly to the graduate. Only if the agency decides to take the graduate on permanently will it incur a fee from Xchangeteam.

Continuous training

But it's not just graduate training that needs addressing. As Coult says, one of the reasons the industry is experiencing such a skills shortage in digital is because of the lack of investment historically in continuous training of staff. Now, she says, training is "imperative for the future of where this industry is going because the skills need is only going to increase".

Agencies are starting to recognise this and respond. For example, twentysix is working hard to build a culture that encourages cross-learning and development on the job, so that technical staff in particular can keep up with changes in the fast-moving industry. Similarly, Haygarth's Millns says the agency is "training staff heavily through mentoring, classroom training and lunchtime learning sessions".

Nevertheless, even after using head-hunters, setting up graduates schemes and establishing continuous training, there are skills shortages. This is why digital freelancers are able to demand high rates for their services. Angeli estimates that freelance rates are increasing 20 per cent year on year. And, while freelancers are undoubtedly a valuable resource, when extra help is needed, most recruiters agree that employing staff is preferable, particularly in client-facing roles. "Certain roles lend themselves better to freelance than others. It's not ideal to have freelancers in account management because clients don't want a different account manager every week," says Angeli. Dudleston is more direct, saying "freelancers are a nightmare - we try to avoid them where possible because they often cause more problems than they solve".

To avoid paying inflated prices for freelancers, many recruiters increasingly look outside the UK for staff. In the past, companies would not typically consider candidates without UK experience, but attitudes are changing. According to O'Connor, there is a rich pool of international talent, which is why his recruitment consultancy has launched a service called interXchange, where firms can trial foreign staff for two weeks before deciding whether to employ them.

So far this year, for example, a third of new hires at Agency Republic have come from abroad, including a Slovenian designer, a Swedish project manager and an Australian creative technologist. Agency Iris has even started a programme of sponsoring foreign students through their studies.

All these new strategies are good news for the industry because they are expanding the talent pool, rather than shrinking it by poaching from competitors. As Chris Ward, managing partner of agency Personal, says: "The industry is being forced to stop ploughing the same furrow and look to a wider landscape to recruit digital talent. The skill sets required to deliver a digital solution are deep and broad - no one individual has them and we must look to assemble talent from different backgrounds to fulfil the future potential."

HOW TO BOLSTER THE QUALITY OF CANDIDATES

• Be more open-minded: don't stipulate in your job ad that you will consider only candidates from a purely digital background
• Don't get too hung up on job titles - Think more laterally about transferable skills - Consider taking on international staff
• Use head-hunters or recruitment agencies that specialise in the marketing industry
• Invest in continuous training of staff, so they are kept up to speed
• Invest in graduate and school-leavers schemes
• Consider 'recommend a friend' schemes in which current employees receive a reward if they introduce appropriate candidates to the company