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Diversify Your Staff For Deep And Meaningful Results For Your Clients

Despite its roots in liberal San Francisco, Uber lacks equality. Uber's diversity report revealed minorities are underrepresented, especially at higher positions. Blacks and Hispanics fill only a small percentage of company roles, and other Silicon Valley giants have similar demographics. In fact, the U.S. Census Bureau discovered Silicon Valley’s workforce is 2.2% black and 4.7% Hispanic, which are minute compared to other tech hubs' workforces, like Houston (11.9% black and 12.6% Hispanic) and New York (7.3% black and 9.6% Hispanic). These companies have received poor PR for their homogenous workforces, but it’s important to identify why diversity is so important in the first place. Pepsi was criticized earlier this year for its commercial that unintentionally belittled the Black Lives Matter movement, and the marketing team behind it was, in part, to blame. A recent poll found 42% of marketers feel the brands they work for don’t reflect a racially diverse or contemporary society in their marketing efforts. Clearly, there’s room to improve here. Still, it’s never a good idea to hire minorities for diversity’s sake. Diversity brings value to a company through its connections to a broader range of customers and clients. Especially for advertising agencies, customer connection is the name of the game. Who wouldn’t want more? Unfortunately, agencies aren’t known for being the most diverse workplaces either. These days, clients can catch agencies off guard with questions and conversations about diversity. Mad Men painted the advertising industry as overwhelmingly white, male and heterosexual; many clients want to know whether that’s still the case. Agencies need to be on their toes and explain how they’re representing other genders, ethnicities and sexual orientations. It’s No Longer Just A Man’s World Researchers who study diversity break it down into two [...]

The Advantage Agencies Have In The Recruitment Game

It doesn’t matter whether you’re in a large suburban market or a small rural one. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a big shop, a small shop, a specialty shop, or a digital shop. Agencies across the country are struggling to find, recruit, hire, and retain great employees. It just one big recruitment game and do you know how to play it well? Even as marketing, advertising, and promotional managerial positions are expected to increase by 10 percent through 2024, agencies struggle because everyone — not just agencies — is trying to attract the same employees. Everyone in business is looking for people who are digitally savvy, who understand content, and who can sell. One would think that with employment rates for marketing, advertising, promotions, public relations, and sales managers rising faster than the national average for all occupations, talent wouldn’t be hard to come by. However, agencies traditionally can’t compete with large corporations that pay more, have better benefits, and allot larger budgets to their marketing departments. But there’s one card agencies hold that corporations don’t: culture. There’s an atmosphere — created when an agency brings together a group of like-minded creatives and leaders — that automatically attracts the most talented individuals. It’s addictive. Employees won’t want to leave, and recruits actively seek out those environments. While corporations can implement culture initiatives, agencies automatically have an upper hand when it comes to creating cultures that marketing and advertising professionals will love. However, there are additional steps agencies can take to truly seal the deal when it's recruitment time and also when it comes to retaining talent. Give them an opportunity to move up. Both employees and recruits recognize that, at an agency, the advancement and professional development opportunities are [...]

High Employee Turnover? How to Get Interview Tests Right

Hiring managers can be a little narcissistic. When interviewing job candidates, they favor people who remind them of themselves over those who are most qualified. They're not alone: Everyone's got a streak of narcissism to some degree. But hiring managers directly influence who works at your company, so it's a good idea to keep their self-love in check. Yet the standard interview process does the exact opposite. Unless you're Google, your hiring process probably looks something like this: Interviewers bring in candidates, ask a few questions, do way too much of the talking, and give jobs to the people they like the most (translation: the people most similar to them). Unsurprisingly, a high percentage of these "mini-me" hires turn out to be duds. By the time you realize someone is a bad fit, you've wasted resources, upset clients, and frustrated your other employees. Fortunately, you can avoid all these problems by integrating screening and performance tests into the interview process. Test drives for potential hires Companies often rely on personality tests and social media screening to weed out lackluster candidates. But personality tests are poor predictors of whether people will perform well, and candidates know that potential employers scrutinize social media, so they craft their Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles carefully. Their online personas may not align with who they are in real life. If you really want to know whether someone is a fit, you need to run better tests. The first step toward identifying high-quality candidates is comparing them to the best people in their fields. My company does this by using a list of top performers in other agencies and assessing applicants alongside their standout peers. We analyze how similar their behaviors, motivations, [...]

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