Hiring Freeze Starts to Thaw as Advertising Business Hunts for Talent

After a nearly yearlong hiring freeze and having shed 14,000 employees, WPP chief Martin Sorrell had a bit of good news last week: The holding company is staffing up.

It’s a welcomed announcement for an industry that lost almost 200,000 jobs between December 2008 and January 2010. Advertising and public relations firms from Edelman to OMD to BBH are adding to their ranks, crediting a stronger business outlook and a need to add people with new skills.

“Agencies had to respond to what was going on in 2009 by making some massive cuts,” said Pat Mastandrea, founding partner-CEO of the Cheyenne Group. She said that when the market started to turn around in the fourth quarter of 2009 and budgets started to grow back, you had agencies that were too lean. “Now those agencies are in the process of having to address that by recruitment. And it’s even stronger in the first quarter of 2010 than it was in the last quarter of 2009.”

A search on LinkedIn jobs revealed nearly 1,300 agency listings for positions ranging from account executive and account director to senior account executive and business development specialist. That’s still a far cry from the number of jobs lost, and it’s hard to believe the industry will ever equal the size it once did. But the recovering economy, new business and an uptick in spending from existing clients has Edelman hiring “in a big way,” said Laura Smith, managing director-U.S. human resources. And it’s not just replacing the jobs it cut last year. “It’s mostly growth,” she said. “At this time last year we had 25 positions open, and today we have a little over 100.”

Alan Cohen, U.S. CEO of Omnicom Group’s OMD, said his agency’s increased hiring is driven by the health of the media business in general and the amount of new business the agency has brought in over the past two years.

Social media recruiting
While many agencies are still working with recruitment firms, some like BBH and Edelman are relying heavily on social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn or their own Web sites.

Edelman’s in-house recruiters have been trained to use social media to seek candidates, especially for the digital positions, said Smith. “We don’t put ads in the paper anymore and it shocks me that companies still do,” she said.

Agencies are also seeking new types of hires. BBH Labs announced last week on its site that it’s “looking for a rare breed of person,” for whom “technology is your oxygen—you need it every second of the day and always want the freshest air, but you understand that not everyone is like you, so you can translate it into natural consumable language.”

Ann Brown, founder of recruiter Ann Brown Co., said it’s not just digital jobs that are being filled. “Fortunately there are a number of agencies evolving the way they need to be and are hiring people with 360-degree experience,” Brown said. “They don’t want to train anybody in digital if all they have is a traditional background. They want people coming in to look at things from all sides.”

Edelman’s Smith said the agency has been hiring people across the board in practices areas such as corporate, public affairs, health care and technology.

Brown said that while CFOs are still keeping the reins pulled tightly on certain aspects of spending, they do appear to be feeling more comfortable about filling some of the slots vacated through layoffs last year.

Harris Diamond, head of Interpublic Group of Cos.’ Constituency Management Group, said, “There is and will be hiring going on” in areas such as social innovation. “But there are other areas of our businesses where, frankly, you just lose some people and there won’t be replacements for them.”

“There are signs of life, but I have to be honest: For the last 2½ years we have had little jumps in hiring for four to six weeks and then it will settle back down,” said Paul S. Gumbinner, president of recruiter Gumbinner Co. “We do have more jobs in the house right now. … I’m just not sure it’s going to last.”

Filed by Michael Bush of Advertising Age, a sister publication of Workforce Management. To comment, e-mail editors@workforce.com.

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