Who needs major cities? Agencies turn to remote recruitment for new talent
Agencies are hiring new hands left, right and center at the moment. We explore how big and small agencies are taking advantage of remote recruitment to build distanced teams – and find out what that could mean for staff.
Are agencies seeing the benefit of recruiting from a deeper talent pool?
One of the brighter hypotheses about the post-pandemic state of things has been the hope that remote work would, in some form, become the new normal. Staff could elect to work for agencies in national capitals from the comfort of trendier, cheaper cities, while enjoying big city paychecks – and businesses could recruit based on talent and experience, rather than commuting distances, and potentially make a saving on office space.
In addition, agencies outside the metropole hoped to benefit because they would no longer have to persuade prospective talent to move out to the sticks. Amid the hiring frenzy in the ad industry, triggered by a deluge of ad spend and client activity, how are capital-based and regional agencies actually benefiting from remote work?
Looking beyond capitals
Despite the fact that, for many staff, working from home has not been a picnic, the vast majority of UK workers are still staying home. A report from think tank the Centre for Cities found that, as of last month, fewer than 20% of workers in the UK’s 30 biggest cities had returned to their offices.
While it’s unclear how long that situation will last, plenty of marketing and advertising agencies are building their teams around remote set-ups.
The GOAT Agency, for example, has abandoned its London offices and gone fully remote. Co-founder Harry Hugo tells The Drum: “We got rid of all of our offices in May last year. We saw this as a two-year problem, and it looks like our gamble is going to pay off. Obviously, we’ve saved a lot of money on the office. But more importantly, it’s been an incredible hiring opportunity for hiring people around the UK and around the US.
“We had an office in Manhattan, so you could only ever hire people in Brooklyn, Manhattan, New Jersey – whoever could get to the office – so now we’ve got people in Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota and obviously still people in New York. The time difference is really good for us across global campaigns.
“In the UK and Europe, we have people on the ground in Italy, Spain, France and the Nordics, and all the way around the UK from Cornwall to Birmingham, to Cardiff, to Scotland, to Newcastle.
“[Before] they would have had to have been in the catchment for the offices, and that’s just not a problem any more.”
With a specialism in creating in-house teams across the world, Oliver was already equipped for remote work set-ups. But Jenny Taylor, senior talent partner, says just 94 of the 268 recruits it’s taken on board this year have been based in its home city of London.
She says: “Oliver is on a hiring spree, and more so since Covid restrictions have lifted. As the world turns geo-agnostic, our multi-disciplined teams are already seamlessly collaborating across multiple cities and countries. This model ensures we’re not missing out on great talent.”
Currently, she says Oliver is taking on new hands in Russia and Germany, per client demand in those territories. “Of course, there are those markets that are more challenging to hire in, which heavily impacts time to hire ... but we find a solution. The demand is there and it’s not slowing down anytime soon.”
Regional reach
The benefits have also been felt outside of capital cities. US agency SalientMG has hired four new staff already this year and plans to fill five further positions, all remotely. Mack McKelvey, its founder and chief executive, tells The Drum that the agency was set up with remote work in mind. “This has enabled us to recruit the best marketers across North America. Not only does it give us an extensive geographic footprint, but we are able to attract diverse employees, especially women, people of color, and LGBTQ and disabled people.”
In Dallas, in-house agency chief Chris Bellinger told us how remote working has helped expand Frito-Lay’s creative team. He says he has been “able to expand our search to include team members from Chicago to New York, to LA, to Seattle”.
He says: “It’s given us the opportunity to bring in a ton of people that may have not been interested in joining an agency in Texas.”
Across the pond in Edinburgh, The Leith Agency has been recruiting new staff away from its namesake portside stomping ground, particularly for its health and wellbeing, experiential and studio practices. The agency tells The Drum that it’s trialing “a completely flexible approach to employees’ place of work”. While it expects to hold in-person meetings with most staff at least once a month, its hybrid approach has allowed it to hire staff based farther afield than the Scottish capital.
Further south, new digital marketing shop Bonded has opened with offices just seven minutes’ walk from Newcastle’s train station – better to aid a team of remote-first workers making their occasional trips into the city center. Co-founder Steve Underwood tells The Drum it plans to draw on talent from right across the north-east of England.
Fierce competition
Of course, remote set-ups aren’t ideal for every agency. Denver agency SE2 has been able to make four new hires since May and plans to hire two more this year. But Susan Morrisey, president and chief executive officer, points out working from home comes with its own issues. “Staff have benefited from not having to commute into an office. We are finding that working from home brings its own challenges, with people struggling to find balance between their work and home lives.”
With Denver already a pull factor for potential recruits – the city regularly tops ‘Best places to live’ lists for the United States – she says SE2 hasn’t seen the same benefits from remote recruitment. “If anything, the shift to remote work has made [recruitment] more difficult,” says Morrisey. And SE2’s existing staff may be tempted away. “While no one left our company during the 18 months of Covid, we are now finding (in our agency and others) that people are moving around, feeling a new sense of freedom to try new things and work from other places.”
That competition may be driven by recruiters willing to pay market rates for agency positions, rather than tailoring salary offers to an employee’s location, as suggested recently by Google. That could mean Leithers, Denverites and Geordies getting the same salary offers as Londoners and New Yorkers.
The GOAT Agency’s Hugo says: “We’re advertising based on New York, London and Singapore salaries. The job is the job. Everyone across the business has the same pay if they’re doing the same job.”
McKelvey echoes his point: “We’ve built our ways of working around what our employees need to be the most productive and happiest.” That includes unlimited paid leave and salary based on the competition, not location. “We pay market rates, not geographic rates, plus annual bonuses.”