4 types of agencies that should be hiring juniors right now

Many agencies eventually identify the need to bring in talent from elsewhere: people who’ve seen the problems before that we may be encountering for the first time.

We typically imagine the senior hire, from a business not unlike ours, coming in to improve the efficiency or increase the breadth of what we already do. I’m going to encourage you to think of the junior, coming in from another walk (or stage) of life, who deals with the problems we are seeing for the first time from their vantage point on the ground.

If your agency matches one - or more - of these four criteria, you should be seriously considering hiring more juniors than the rest of the market is telling you that you need.

1. The agency wants to market on a channel that has recently emerged. The user base of that channel - a social platform for example - consists primarily of young people who are not yet senior in marketing firms; older audiences either have not yet migrated to the channel or do not yet see its significance. This is why agencies with a lower average age have been more able to embrace new platforms: the staff have grown up with it and do not have the baggage of incumbent platform use. Rise at Seven found it easier than most to accept and correct for the fact that the public is using Google less - and e.g. TikTok and YouTube more - because our staff was too young to be entrenched in Google use themselves. They already searched on social platforms and knew how to query them properly before they arrived. If you find yourself frustrated that your staff isn’t embracing new technologies quickly, perhaps you should consider bringing in some people who know no different?

2. The agency wants to market to a younger audience: if the agency’s clients market to a young audience then your current staff will not be as well placed to understand the cultural norms of the audience, nor will they be able to give the client confidence that they do understand. Consequently, an agency marketing to a younger audience will need some ratio of junior staff to avoid marketing campaigns that smack of “how do you do, fellow kids?” Rise at Seven found an easy positioning advantage when working with brands targeting a Gen Z, primarily female, culturally aware audience, because we had a lot of those people; brands like Klarna and Boohoo could look at our workforce and gain confidence that we got who they needed to get. In short, we matched their ideal agency profile.

3. The agency has a desire to be office based primarily i.e. staff are expected to spend several days per week in a physical location together…but that location is not in a major city. If you want to build a workforce in one of the UK’s second cities, or in a rural location, it is unlikely that you will be able to find enough experienced staff nearby and you will, at some point, need to train them yourself. For the avoidance of doubt, the cities in which there is an abundance of marketing talent in the UK right now are London and Manchester, or potentially Leeds; everywhere else you are likely to run out of pipeline at some point (with a number of other cities potentially able to sustain 1 or 2 larger agencies). If you are in another city, ask yourself: who will we need in 2-3 years? And who will train them if not us?

4. You want to do good things for society: perhaps you’ve been offsetting carbon emissions by getting trees planted; maybe you’re a B-Corp; perhaps you just have kids and are worried about the world they are inheriting…you are, in one way or another, interested in sustaining this world or giving something back. Giving someone their start in a world that enables Musk, Altman et al to destroy their futures for corporate profits; and that government policy has given short shrift of late; is a really nice thing to do, to be honest, isn’t it?