• by Tom Hespos , November 8, 2005

Talk to any interactive media department heads about what their biggest problem is right now. Most of them will point to staffing. There are a lot of agency positions open right now, particularly in emerging media, and not a lot of qualified folks left to fill them.

In prior columns, I've talked about the "donut hole" we have in our industry's labor market. When the first bubble burst, many entry-level new media folks fled the business, the result of having been laid off or having thought the future looked somewhat grim for the business. Those people would have been senior planners and media supervisors today if they had kept working in the industry. So positions at that level are somewhat difficult to fill, with anyone with that level of experience looking at a number of competitive offers, some of which may bump them up to director level.

A year ago, filling entry-level positions with smart college grads was comparatively easy, and enough of the industry's veterans with eight-plus years of experience were available at reasonable rates--so that anyone needing to staff up at those levels could do so with little trouble. But that's no longer the case. Instead of a donut hole, we now have a gaping void.

We'll get by. We always do. But one of the most important things we can do right now, if we haven't done so already, is to set up a mechanism to ensure that growing interactive media companies can tap into the smart folks graduating from our fine educational institutions.

When I was in school, I spent three years in the work-study program as an intern for my school's Career Development and Placement Office. I got to see how one of these departments works up close, and how companies who were willing to put in a bit of effort could benefit enormously from the outreach programs these departments set up to place their grads.

A career development director at a good school is judged (job performance-wise) on his ability to place grads. All of those wonderful institutions that rank schools take into consideration the percentage of graduates who are placed within a specified period of time after graduation as a measure of the quality of the school. In short, if the percentage of placed grads decreases, a school's rankings are at risk.

That's why these career development departments like nothing more than to have reputable companies come to their campuses to recruit. As graduation approaches, they want to see your company attending job fairs, taking resumes and coming to campus to conduct interviews with qualifying candidates. And they want to see degree candidates getting job offers.

In fact, they want this so much that they'll do most of the coordination work for you. Simply send them a job description for an entry-level position you're looking to fill, and they'll handle pre-qualification of candidates for you, getting you their resumes and setting up interviews.

We should all be seeing some of the talented folks coming out of colleges and universities. Agencies, publishers and other emerging media companies should make it a point to speak with career development professionals at schools with competitive communications programs, so they can do some hiring and start training the next generation of interactive buyers, sellers and analysts.

The first step is making that call to the career development office at the school of your choice and asking them to send you information on their campus recruiting programs. We've heard the warnings loud and clear that a large influx of money is coming into the emerging media industry. Let's be sure to be able to handle it, staffing-wise, as it comes.