With generous budgets and multiple workstreams, there is a client-led assumption that experienced staff are easy to find.
We’ve built a culture of expectation about how quickly a full client team can be built, at a time when the contest for talent is greater than ever. To meet this need during the FIFA World Cup™ and Expo, we saw manpower agencies replacing client HR functions and agencies becoming magicians – neither of which is sustainable in the long term.
While there are some students with specialised degrees, nothing beats experience. As any agency leader knows, the time it takes for junior staff to become effective requires investment, training and ‘time in post’. That naturally creates a delay between hiring, and when a junior colleague is ‘ready’ to step into the high-pressure environment of the client’s world.
Competition has always been fierce for good staff, but today, it’s a real challenge, particularly at mid-level, where it has become a seller’s market for anyone with between five to seven years of experience.
A variety of panels and speakers will be discussing the themes of media and marketing. To get your tickets…. The second Campaign Saudi Briefing event of the year will be taking place in Riyadh on 12th October 2023. A variety of panels and speakers will be discussing the themes of media and marketing. For more details, click here.
Experienced staff
Compounding this are client expectations around the time it takes to onboard. With markets like Saudi booming, and staff gravitating to the biggest opportunities, the demand for experienced staff is unprecedented. That makes client requirements for staff with 10 or more years of experience almost impossible to find.
Today, there is a high level of pressure at agency level on countries that have demonstrated the capacity to communicate national narratives internationally, and staff who worked on these large campaigns are now looking for their next challenge.
The problem is more acute in the UAE and Qatar, who are competing against the gravitational pull of attractive opportunities in the Kingdom. Without a concerted effort to match salaries and conditions, other markets will see a decline in capability longer term.
This is a unique challenge in the GCC region, where there is a finite talent pool and less of a push to develop home-grown staff through communications education.
How do we fix this?
Agencies need to accept that this is largely a problem of our own making, compounded by big global events, because the opportunity to work on these projects attracted the best people. But the way that agencies and clients interact in the Middle East is different, where seconded staff as well as those with agency expertise are required.
To chase revenue, agencies have positioned themselves as being able to provide strategic advice, tactical execution and turn on the manpower taps.
It takes an honest conversation when speaking to prospects to change this current situation. And though it’s always tempting to fill the 20-person brief at a minute’s notice, it’s something that is getting harder to do. Even networked agencies are finding this increasingly difficult.
Standardising our titles
Agencies need to work alongside client procurement teams to let them know what is possible. Where embedded staff are required, a greater understanding of our own internal skill sets is essential. As anyone who has recently placed a job ad for an account director or public relations officer will know, the Middle East sits at a crossroad between east and west, and you are inundated with applications from HR specialists and accountants.
Growing home-grown talent
We can attract more domestic talent into local communications study and careers by working more closely with tertiary education providers across the Gulf and to show the career pathways for graduates in this space. It’s a challenge, but one we are excited about.
The GCC has demonstrated it can host mega events and is now ‘on the circuit’ for them, so the future for comms graduates is looking bright.
There are also numerous large projects on the horizon, such as COP, so there’s greater pressure than ever for the region to achieve a global share of voice, and comms support is widely accepted as the way to do this.
The time is now
The volume of new briefs is increasing, and therefore so is the need for top talent to work on future global projects.
There are some things we can do to ease the pressure in the short term. With continued economic growth in multiple markets, the demand for high-quality staff is likely to continue, so the key thing we need now is to build future talent, and that means working with our world-class universities to increase the graduate pool and to encourage more students to choose the field of communications as their future career.
By Justin Kerr-Stevens, CEO at BLJ Worldwide
