Landing the right person for your role is hard enough, but throw in a talent shortage, skyrocketing salaries, and the need to spend time actively tracking people down, and you have quite a daunting task. A new career platform designed with the Australian advertising industry in mind, Advertising Industry Careers (AIC) aims to help connect the right job hunters and graduates to the right businesses and jobs.
Founded by CEO Adam Elliott and COO Owen Joyce, AIC is set to launch in October. There are some big names already on board with AIC – Network 10, Nine, Mediabrands, UM and Initiative to name a few– as well as a number of smaller brands like Ryval Media, Oxygen360, and Principle Media Group.
Mediaweek caught up with Monique Black, head of talent acquisition at Mediabrands, to chat about her experience hiring talent and what AIC will provide the industry.
“The last 12 to 18 months have been extremely difficult,” Black says, reflecting on what it’s been like to hire people over the last year or so. “There’s been a real shortage of people in not every skill set, but most of them – and we’ve had to do a lot of headhunting. Salaries have been driven up, because that paucity of talent has made a lot more competition. It’s been a very challenging talent market, probably post-Covid lockdowns.”
The hurdles in place for people looking for talent don’t look like easing up any time soon either, with Black pointing out that wider global factors have had a major impact on the local job market – and that “Everyone’s facing the same problems across the industry.”
AIC founders Adam Elliott and Owen Joyce
“Pre-Covid, roughly 40% of talent came from in the industry came from overseas. So when that got shut down, it really complicated things.
“We’re entering into a new economic cycle, and that has changed things a little bit as well. We’re still waiting to see how that plays out over the coming months, but there’s still a real need to proactively seek people out. There’s not a lot of ad response, except at the very junior entry level. So you’ve got to contact people to explain what the role is, explain what the industry is, or explain what your company is. That’s a very time-consuming activity.”
As an early adopter of AIC, Black says that the service the platform will provide is more than just a place to advertise available positions – it will provide a place for potential employees to find out all about the ins and outs of a company before signing up.
“What we’ve come to realise is that there is no one central place for the industry to go to to look for work. People will go to LinkedIn, or Seek, or Indeed – there are all these sites out there – but no one of them is really brilliant for the industry. For us to have a destination where you can go and look at what jobs are available, but also find out more about the industry and the players in it, is brilliant.”
It’s not just fresh graduates that the AIC platform is set to benefit either, with Black also focussing her attention on those looking to change things up in their careers.
“One of the things that the MFA is very involved in is career changers, and how can we attract people from other industries who don’t necessarily know a lot about the industry, but have the sorts of skills that translate. Somewhere they can go to find out about us and to see what jobs are available, I think will be something quite valuable. There’s no central place to do that right now.”
According to Black, the key to making AIC as useful to the industry as possible lies in the number of people who get on board – competitors or otherwise.
“For it to be successful, it needs to be adopted by a large number of industry players. I would hope that for Mediabrands, being one of the larger holding companies, hopefully we’ll be able to kick off that level of interest. I know there are already others involved, so I think it’d be great to see the wider industry adopt it.
“It will help all of us, ultimately – even though we’re in competition with each other, we need everyone to get involved to make this a useful place, which will help the industry overall. A lot of the discussion led by the MFA over the last 18 months is about how we, as an industry, improve our access to talent and the development of talent. This is one of those things that I think could really help it.”
See Also: AIC: The career platform designed for the Australian advertising industry
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Top Image: Monique Black