Talent Marketplace Offers Adland Antidote To "The Great Resignation"

Agency staffing levels have always been tied to revenue and account wins and losses and staffing during the pandemic has been particularly volatile given sharp losses two years ago followed by a rebound last year and so far into 2022.

And the industry is now facing a talent crisis that some call the “great resignation” as people are leaving the industry in pursuit of more stable careers and lifestyles.

Now recruitment company MarketerHire is launching a new service called MarketerHire For Agencies to help Adland quickly staff up (or down) according to needs. It is primarily a platform for hiring well-vetted contract and freelance project/account and discipline specialists as opposed to full-time senior management staff positions.   

The service has been in beta test mode since last year with companies including WPP’s GroupM and WPromote using the service to hire hundreds of employees to staff up and rebuild project and account teams. The recruitment firm says it has seen a 90% match rate among those early adopters.

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The beta phase made a believer out of Toby Hoare, Global Client Leader at WPP. “The marketing services industry has long been plagued with a repeated dilemma,” he said. “Be forced to turn down business and revenue when there is demand, or maintain an expensive, under-utilized team when business slows.” He says MarketerHire’s new agency platform “is finally freeing agencies from this seesaw, enabling them to better forecast, staff, win clients and bolster their bottom lines.”

MarketerHire has tapped Jason Chitwood to manage the new agency platform as general manager.  He’s credited with 25+ years of experience developing B2C and B2B growth marketing campaigns at global Fortune 500 corporations, Ad Agencies, and pre-IPO Start-ups.

Most recently Chitwood was global head of consumer marketing and consumer business general manager for tech-focused learning platform Udacity.

Previously he served as global head of engagement & retention campaign marketing at Adobe. Earlier he served in account roles at agencies like Wunderman, Grey and FCB.

“Staffing volatility is an age-old problem in the agency world,” says Chitwood. “It’s been exacerbated by the overall instability of the workforce caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. As a former agency executive, I’ve experienced firsthand how this imbalance hinders an agency’s ability to win and staff business.”

MarketerHire For Agencies, he adds, “was built to alleviate this very dilemma, enabling agencies to staff quickly when they need it, without unnecessarily bloating their employee bases when they don’t.”

Chitwood is based in San Francisco, although a rep notes that the service is entirely remote.

According to the company the new platform leverages a proprietary combination of AI-driven technology and human expertise to match available jobs with qualified marketing experts in as little as 48 hours (versus weeks or months using other approaches) to ensure timely staffing and optimal matching.

Pre-screening includes an additional layer of behavioral analysis to identify experts with personality attributes directly related to agency success, according to the firm.

The company also offers tailored purchasing strategies and pricing models to reflect agency budgets and billing processes and account managers to help anticipate subject-area expertise required for each project, forecast project headcount, and manage operational needs.

Analytics and reporting have also been designed to optimize project match and acceptance rates, staffing speeds, job longevity, and rate of return, enabling agencies to increase efficiency and revenue.

Learn more about the new service here.

 

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