• by Larissa Faw , June 15, 2020

With more than 40,000 advertising layoffs and furloughs due to the COVID-19 pandemic, two new initiatives have been launched to help industry jobseekers find positions.

FCB’s “My Link Is Your Link” initiative encourages employed creatives to help give visibility to those who need work by switching out online portfolios.

A website for the effort is divided into two portals, those wanting to help and those needing help.

Although the project began as an altruistic initiative conceived by three creatives in Brazil, they believe it can easily extend globally across other platforms. “Even the advertising agencies can join in, publicizing those creative professionals they would have liked to keep but had to let go. And professionals from other industries can also use this,” explains Bernardo Tavares, senior copywriter at David SP. “This way, the code becomes a new format for publicizing talent, by using the visibility other professionals, or even agencies, may have.”

The website will soon have versions in other languages in addition to English, and the code developed will be made available to the tech community on GitHub, where programmers will be able to develop it further.

Separately GetWanted, a marketplaces where people can anonymously search for new jobs, is addressing the unemployment crisis with a new tool called Switch. Individuals upload their LinkedIn portfolios to the site and the company will match them with opportunities at the desired salary.

Since the company launched Switch, founders note that 18% of the laid off talent are coming from companies within the advertising industry. Most (31%) are account executives and mid-level marketing managers (21%), In total, unemployed workers hail from around 1,000 different companies.

On the employer side 9% of companies hiring are from the advertising industry, with the vast majority (75%) related to mobile advertising, including adjoe and admazing. Although the company doesn’t track data on job hires, it analyze who gets contacted by companies on the platform. The most desirable roles currently offered on the platform related to advertising are senior performance managers (25%) and SEO/SEM managers (19%).