Commentary

Let's Hire The Right People, From The Wrong Backgrounds

  • by , Op-Ed Contributor, March 9, 2017
The IPA has rightly called on agencies to take further steps to achieve gender parity at the C-suite level, following the release of its Diversity Study. The industry still has to work hard to achieve its target of 40% of senior positions being held by women by 2020.

There is also an urgent need to recruit people from different backgrounds and skill sets to this industry. If your organisation is struggling with that challenge, then you could do worse than looking at MIT Professor Robert Langer for inspiration. While Langer isn't exactly a household name, it’s estimated that he has improved more than two billion lives through his discoveries. The most cited engineer in history, Langer has won virtually every major engineering and technology prize going, including the prestigious Queen Elizabeth Prize (only the second time it has ever been awarded; the first one went to the people that built the internet).

When he's not at the forefront of fighting disease as part of his role at MIT, Langer has invested his time and knowledge into a variety of side projects, such as helping restore Adele's singing voice and going into business with Jennifer Aniston to sell a revolutionary hair-thickening product.I could go on. In short, Langer is probably one of the greatest creative problem solvers of our time. And the secrets to his success? Langer challenged the status quo and used his engineering background within the field of medicine which ultimately led to a unique perspective when problem solving. 

As employers, we should strive to bring brilliant, left-field people into our organisations, and give "experience" and "fit" a little less priority now and again. Google is a huge advocate of this approach, describing its old procedures of hiring as "worthless." Explaining what Google values when hiring for non-engineering roles, former SVP of People Operations Laszlo Bock listed the number one attribute as the "ability to learn," followed by "leadership," "humility" and "ownership." Last on the list was "expertise."

This provides an obvious parallel to the advertising industry's current challenge when it comes to hiring people from diverse backgrounds. If there are not enough sufficiently diverse candidates coming through to us with agency experience, then we should be looking elsewhere -- to other industries and walks of life.

In my own experience, some of the best people I have worked with started off from outside the industry. This includes a CTO who started out his career as a rocket scientist, creatives that came from the world of product design and strategists with substantial side careers in journalism and game designing. I myself from a newspaper background at the Financial Times and only switched to agencies in my 30s.

There are certainly challenges involved for agencies in hiring such diverse people, but the rewards are such that it’s worth not only reimagining the hiring process, as in Google's case, but team structures too. Many agencies claim to have built "agile teams" in pitch decks, but how many actively encourage employees to develop their skills outside of their main specialism to foster truly cross-functional teams? It's important to consider the other side of the coin too. As individuals, do we naturally want to move away from our specialisms to develop dual -- or even multiple new unknown -- purposes? 

I would argue that it's probably not for the majority, and the world still needs people who know and excel at their chosen craft. However, opportunities for those who can flex across disciplines should be created and encouraged to complement the skills of their specialist colleagues. 

There is no doubt that great change is needed in the advertising industry and that we should rise to the IPA's diversity challenge with enthusiasm rather than resignation. Another of Langer's teachings should inspire us in this. As he tells his students, remember who you were before the world told you who you should be.

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