Chinwag Jobs is pleased to welcome another guest blogger to the Chinwag Jobs blog, Liam Morgan from Cogs Agency. Liam is joint-owner and head of creative recruitment at Cogs Agency and has been headhunting and recruiting creatives, from designers to writers, since 2000, both off and online.
I don’t want to start by biting the hand that ‘rss feeds’ you so I won’t. However, I have been wondering lately how agencies can respond to an increasingly skills short, but rapidly growing and evolving market…

The paradox has always been that many Creative Directors needing to attract a wide-ranging group of free original thinkers and who can also produce effective, relevant, well-executed and engaging campaigns, end up falling into default mode when it comes to making the brave hiring decisions. In the same way agencies berate clients for going for the safe option, so too do agencies when it comes to bringing in a fresh perspective. I’m not advocating a return to the days before the bubble burst, when agencies were recruiting irrelevant skill sets to run interactive accounts. Our sector has matured but that should not mean that we become set in our ways.

So think inside and outside the blog, get out there and do a bit of face-to-facebook and see what people really have to offer, look at the huge talent and brain power outside digital too, be inventive, challenge convention. Take skills from elsewhere, who else can make brands famous in this space? Balance commercial need with out of this world thinking. Just because something is ground breaking in its creative approach does not mean it has to be commercially flawed. Consumers are increasingly sophisticated and discerning, we just need to find the right talent to come up with ways of reaching them and with the executional skills to then engage them.

Do you have these skills as someone looking at a career move? What do you want to get out of your next step? Not to go all JFK on you, but ask not what an agency can do for you but what you can do for the agency (and it’s clients) Many of them need people “who dream of things that’s never were” (JFK Dublin 28th June 1968)

So what is your ambition? Why are you different? Where does your passion come from? As one CD always asks ‘why do you want to change the world?’, perhaps more importantly how will you do it? They’ll reward you for it - because if they don’t in this market there might just be someone else who will.

How serious is the talent shortage in digital media?

After much number-crunching, the results of the Chinwag Jobs Digital Skills Survey have been released today, 23rd January 2008.

The full details are available in both HTML format (for ease of copy/paste) and also as a PDF to download.

We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the conclusions. From the results, it’s apparent that 2008 is going to be a tough year to fill the skills gaps that have appeared across the industry.

A few statistics to illustrate the scale of the issue and the impact it’s having on our industry right now…

97% of respondents find it either difficult or impossible to attract the right digital staff for their businesses

76% of respondents find it difficult to retain staff within their companies.

57% of respondents reported that the digital skills shortage impeded the growth of their business in 2007

Read the full report online:
http://www.chinwag.com/reports/chinwag-jobs-skills-shortage-2007

Download the PDF:
http://www.chinwag.com/reports/chinwag-jobs-skills-shortage-2007-download

Note: This survey was conducted from 29th November - 19th December 2007. For more details see the methodology section of the results.

PRESS ENQUIRIES:

Contact: Sam Michel - CEO, Chinwag
Email: sam(AT)chinwag.com
Tel: 0870 730 7313

Following on from our recent blog posts regarding the apparent skills shortage in the digital industry, Chinwag Live has organised an event to tackle the issue head on and get to the root of the problem.

The skills shortage in digital media is worsening. 2008 promises to be a crunch year for some and the pain is widely distributed. So what are we going to do about it?

Chinwag Live: Skills Emergency is being held at the Slug and Lettuce, Wardour Street, on Tuesday 29th January from 6:30pm sharp. With a cracking panel and free drink and snacks to fuel discussion, be prepared to hear alternative solutions and ideas on how to move past the current digital skills drought.

If you would like to come along, tickets are on sale now.

Chinwag Jobs welcomes Harry Fowler as a contributing blogger! Also a longstanding contributor to the Chinwag community’s email discussion lists, Harry is Group Digital Recruiter at AMV Group.

Cast your minds back to 98, 99, 2000 and 2001 (ok ok, 2001 to a lesser degree). The digital market sector had been sweeping all before it, dotcoms were starting up daily and there always seemed to be a launch party of some sort, with a free-ish bar.

There was a huge influx of people coming into the sector who had all the passion but few had commercial acumen. ‘Suck it and see what happens’ would have been a fair reflection on the hiring policy of many a company and that in certain cases would work, so long as you had enough people who know what they were doing and could teach/train/imbibe to those willing and eager to learn.

What we have in front of us now is a larger, grown up market, still on the cutting edge, still breaking boundaries and continually evolving. If we didn’t have a skills shortage don’t you think it would be bloody worrying as we’d all be behind the game.

Good people are hard to find in any market, that’s what makes them good. When you find them, look after them, nurture them and make them even better. They’ll work harder and you might just find that loyalty is not dead after all.

If as a graduate you had the option of say.. a) coming to a major city and working in a sector where the starting salary was £25k or b) coming to major city and working in a sector where the average starting salary was £20k, where would you go. And before anyone jumps down my throat and with the ‘money isn’t everything’ line, it still has to be taken into consideration.

If you want the best grads, the brightest minds, the most ambitious bastards out there, then start competing again. Take some risks, look at different sectors, look abroad. Invite people in, don’t wait for them to knock your door down or if you do, don’t complain about a skills shortage.

——–

Harry Fowler is on the panel at the forthcoming event Chinwag Live: Skills Emergency on Tuesday 29th January. Book now to get the early-bird rate of £25+VAT (expires 25th Jan, £40+VAT thereafter). Price includes drinks and snacks.

It’s 7am on 2nd January and your alarm goes off, for a second you think it’s in your dream but then you get the obligatory sinking feeling in your stomach which confirms your fear. After hitting the snooze button a couple of times, you resign yourself to the fact that you have to get up, get dressed and go back to work, how inconvenient!

Of course not everyone feels sorry for themselves during the first commute after Christmas but apparently a staggering amount of us do. According to an article by Recruiter Magazine, 7th January was the busiest day of the year for British job hunters, with over half of all UK employees searching for a job online on that day.

The research was carried out by Jobsite who took a poll of 1,500 people, 42% of which said they would be looking for a new job in January and 61% said they would be starting on 7th January.

The Recruiter article goes on to say;

…. posting vacancies online will be the most effective method of attracting candidates this year, as jobhunters are now most likely to search for a new job via the internet – 48% of people polled say this is the easiest way to look for work. A further 22% will look through ads in the papers, whilst one in 10 will only apply for a job if they hear about it from friends or family.

Interesting stuff!

Chinwag Jobs has been named as a finalist in the Onrec.com Awards 2008 for the Best Technical Innovation Award. You can see the full list of finalists here. (Is it just me, or are there a *lot* of finalists..?)

We’re very happy to have made it to the finalists stage, and fingers crossed we’ll win!

We’re looking forward to the Chinwag Live: Skills Emergency on 29th Jan, in particular to ruminate with the good and great of the industry on how we overcome the dearth of experienced talent. One thing’s for sure, the digital industry as a whole will need to be more creative.

Amongst the many discussions we’ve had with companies in 2007, a trend has emerged of UK companies working with agencies, or even opening their own offices in Estonia.

I’ve been intrigued by this ever since I was invited to Tallinn by Robin Gurney from Altex to talk to a gathering of 200 new media folk. Aside from being a lovely city, I was surprised to see so many people- Estonia is a teeny country - interested in new media and the average level of knowledge was at least as good as I’ve experienced at most UK events, if not better.

Robin’s coming along to Skills Emergency as a guest contributor to share his perspective on how UK firms have used Estonian talent.

He’s also organised another event at the Estonian Embassy in London on Friday 11th at 3.30pm. The event is to launch www.angloestonian.com which is the website for a project which matches some of the best Estonian new agencies with the best companies and agencies in the UK. Already senior people from companies like Virgin Games, Lateral, Ogilvy Interactive have confirmed they will attend and I’ll be popping along.

It’s free and invite only so you will have to contact him direct (via email or give him a buzz on 07894 997925) for a ticket (about 15 left as I write this so be quick) or for more information.