• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, December 15, 2016

Creative staffing agency The Creative Group is out with their latest research regarding the anticipated hiring practices of agencies in 2017. The study was conducted with over 400 telephone interviews reaching approximately 200 marketing executives who were randomly selected from companies with 100 or more employees and 200 advertising executives randomly selected from agencies with 20 or more employees.

The study found that 12 percent of marketing and advertising executives plan to hire to expand teams with new positions and 67 percent plan to hire at a maintenance level filling positions which have been vacated. No respondents indicated they would be reducing staff but 20 percent indicated they would not be filling vacated positions.

Of the areas marketing executives indicated they'd be ramping up, web design and production was mentioned by 25 percent, content marketing by 22 percent and print design and production by 20 percent.

Fifty-five percent of advertising and marketing executives said they are challenged to find creative professionals today, up 14 points from six months ago. Hiring managers at midsize advertising agencies (50-99
employees) expect the greatest difficulty, with 70 percent of respondents reporting it is somewhat or very challenging to identify the talent they seek. When asked which types of roles are hardest to fill, the top responses were web design/production and content marketing.

In an effort to circumvent hiring challenges, 15 percent of ad execs and 11 percent of marketing execs plan to increase the use of freelancers.

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