Julia Langridge

Julia Langridge

Happy New Year

Our festive mood continues………. So popular was our recommend a friend offer in December that we have decided to extend it for the month of January so you can still earn a gift if you recommend someone to us. If we successfully place your friend, we will express our thanks in whichever of the following ways you choose:

• £250 cash
• £250 Selfridges gift card
• £250 D&D London restaurant vouchers
• £250 Apple gift card

We need the details of your recommendation this month but you’ll get your gift as soon as we place them. Just ask your friend to mention your name when they call us on 020 7287 1171 or email us at cv@direct-recruitment.co.uk.

And don’t forget we have exciting roles in planning, account handling, data, creative, digital, project management and on the clientside, so would love to hear from anyone working in these areas.

Happy New Year from all of us at Direct Recruitment.

  Julia Langridge

People are still commenting on this piece that appeared in Campaign back in July. It certainly resonated from my perspective as a recruiter because I hear these sorts of concerns and worries every day. It’s probably best you just read it but what I will comment on is the section that talks about the need for more ‘rigour in the interviewing process’. I couldn’t agree more and this is something we do very well here at Direct Recruitment. Most candidates will leave us feeling that they have been thoroughly interviewed and that we therefore know all about their experience, their personalities and exactly what they’re looking for. We’re seen as the ‘1st interview’ in the process and are happy to give career advice and CV/interview tips to anyone who has hit the ‘career crossroads’ Zoe is talking about.

The industry won't survive if it fails to nurture its talent
By Zoe Osmond Friday, 15 July 2011 12:01AM Campaign Magazine

Staff development and retention are problems that need to be tackled now, Zoe Osmond says.

As an industry, we're not known for the high quality of our recruitment - we nick talent and we don't train talent. We steal talent and pay lip service to talent, and the industry won't survive if we keep doing this."

Last month, we were lucky to have Sir Martin Sorrell appear on stage at a Nabs "Audience With... " event to answer questions from a panel of execs from all corners of the industry, crowdsourced through social media.

He talked passionately about recruitment, training and staff retention in the industry, and observed how we're way behind other sectors in this area - and from the conversations the Nabs careers coaches have every day with people from across the industry, I have to say we find it hard to disagree.

The high churn rate in the industry speaks for itself, and is indicative of the hiring policies, retention plans and poaching that plague the business.

Meanwhile, the fear of people wanting to leave, or the trend of flitting around the globe to tempt out the opposition's talent with our chequebooks just to dump them after nine months if they don't achieve lofty targets (something Sorrell calls the Jesus Christ phenomenon), shows a degree of insecurity that is not healthy for a service-led industry.

We've also noticed a dangerous trend towards allowing talent to burn out, or forcing people out of the industry around the age of 40, often when they have the most expertise - something that doesn't happen on the client side.

With all of this going on, it becomes clear why we're getting increased calls to the advice line from younger members of the industry who are struggling to find their way. Recent figures show that 78 per cent of people calling for careers advice are between 20 and 39 years old.

The industry must look at what it can offer its staff to keep the talent interested over and above the pay packet, and we need to start listening more to what our staff actually want.

At the Nabs career service, headed up by Soraya Shaw, the opening conversation with our clients is normally: "I don't know where to begin, and don't know what to do." People are crying out for unbiased careers advice and original ideas on how they can continue their progression while learning new skills.

Our careers coaches regularly hear that the increasingly fragmented nature of the business means that specialists also need to become generalists, but the only way they can do that is to move to another company, because so few businesses offer them the real opportunity to progress and, in doing so, broaden their experience.

One idea that came up was offering staff the chance to work in another part of the industry and with another business on a threeor six-month swap scheme. Your employee comes back energised, full of ideas and happy to be working for such a great company - client companies will ensure their marketing people learn all aspects of the business so they can really add value.

There are also initiatives such as the Marketing Hall of Legends, our own Fast Forward course and speed mentoring sessions that can be taken into account - they're cost effective and great ways to energise staff and fuel cross-fertilisation and networking knowledge.

Another issue that we've highlighted is the rigour in the hiring process. We barely scratch the surface of the time and effort other industries invest in hiring. We don't do any real testing in this industry, we just look at what accounts they've worked on, maybe do a quick psychometric test and show them to their desk.

You don't find this on the client side. I know businesses that run two-day assessment centres, which sound like some form of futuristic internment camp, but are actually dedicated interview days when prospective employees not only sit through solo and group interviews, but are psychometrically tested to within an inch of their sanity and enter role-playing games and test scenarios. Such testing is not for all, particularly in our creative industry, but greater due diligence can be good on occasion.

The people we talk to really don't know how to get the wider experience they crave - we've termed it the "careers crossroads" - and it's up to the industry and Nabs to help them take the right road.

Zoe Osmond is the chief executive of Nabs

  Julia Langridge

According to The Evening Standard on 17th May, City vacancies dropped by 16% in April and candidate numbers fell by a fifth on last year thanks to 2 bank holidays and the Royal Wedding. A similar trend has been felt here at DR but what’s surprising me is that the market isn’t bouncing back quite as quickly as I would have expected. I’m concerned that candidates are worrying about the economy, whether it’s a safe time to be contemplating a job move, whether they’re better off staying put? I know it’s easy for me to say but in some ways, there’s never been a better time to move. I have so many hugely successful, through-the-line agencies in desperate need of highly qualified, integrated Account Managers and Directors, that you really would have the pick of the crop if you dare take the perceived risk.

Having watched Business Nightmares with Evan Davis the other night, in the spirit of Gerald Ratner, I’d like to be brutally honest and say that we’re actually quite good at what we do here. We treat you as an individual rather than a number, preferring to tell you to stay put if that’s the right course of action for you. So if you’d like to just pop by for some genuine career advice or interview practice without any pressure to switch jobs, please give me a call and we’ll meet for coffee.

Julia Langridge

It was so heartening to read the ‘Crossing the Divide’ article in Campaign 4^th Feb about people making the move from clientside to agency. All of them commented on how easy it was to make the transition; “no big deal” as one of them said, so why does it happen so rarely? It’s long been a bit of a bug bear of mine that many agencies rule out clientsiders when looking to fill account management roles because I did just that back in 94 and really didn’t find it remotely difficult. In fact I absolutely loved it and much preferred it to working clientside. 

Everyone is crying out for AMs at the moment, but there are hardly any out there thanks to the lack of graduate/junior recruitment that went on during the recession. So finding the skills-set elsewhere seems like the sensible thing to do. If a candidate is bright, engaging, energetic and has good marketing experience from a reputable company, I really do think they ought to be given equal consideration. Once on the agency side and having quickly got to grips with the creative process, they can truly add value - in some cases knowing more about the business issues and challenges that their clients face than perhaps their agency colleagues do.

Julia Langridge

I read an article in the Business Section of The Sunday Telegraph the other weekend and was not surprised to see the old age issue of gender being bandied about. In this case, the article was talking about the different ways in which men and women react to failure. According to research conducted by the Clayman Institute at Stanford, men viewed lower levels of achievement as success whereas women saw it as confirmation that they weren’t up to the job.

Without getting into the pre-conditioning of women, girl power and all that stuff, I did find it interesting from a recruitment perspective because I’ve always been struck by the difference between men and women at interview when it comes to salary. Almost without exception, men think they’re worthy of a substantial salary hike when moving jobs and will simply ask for it. Their female counterparts however, even though brilliant and possibly better than some of their male colleagues, are more modest in their approach and end up commanding less money as a result.

I don’t believe that women need to lower their voices to Thatcher levels or grow a beard to compete, but with the market becoming tougher and client expectations ever higher, I think it’s important that women account handlers remember that they’re naturally talented at client service thanks to their innate ability to multi-task, amongst many other things. So don’t be so tough on yourselves, remember you’re good at what you do and have the confidence to ask for what you rightly deserve.