Editorial Articles

Working alongside the IAB’s new Talent Task Force initiative, Propel is looking to combat the skills shortage with the digital industry. 

Our digital economy maybe showing encouraging signs of recovery, but many businesses could be in danger of damaging their future development if they don’t take necessary steps to avoid costly mistakes in strategically growing their talent pool.

Working with the Talent Taskforce has allowed us to be part of an initiative which can inform on the growing range and mapping of careers available long-term and ultimately get graduates recruited back into the space.

Leveraging experience and knowledge gained from helping our sector survive and then flourish beyond the dot com crash of 2000-2002, we firmly believe that businesses need to seriously consider their long-term strategic recruitment as we now enter this post recession phase.

We set up Propel in the midst of the dot com crash and became a business that grew alongside the recovering digital industry. We are now working very closely with clients, candidates and partners alike, to advise how important strategic recruitment can be in post recessional times, referring back to the dot com crash revival to help them avoid making the same costly mistakes.

We witnessed the regrets employers were faced with as a result of implementing long-term recruitment freezes and lowering hiring budgets. Back then we recognised the massive part we had to play in the reparation of candidate faith in the digital industry as a direct result of these ill-fated decisions.

Similar to eight years ago, we believe that these oversights tend to be more prevalent within larger companies where the immediate reaction was, and once again has been, to cut all hiring and make blanket redundancies.

The greatest impact of these large company freezes is at the graduate and senior professional levels. We have seen little to no graduate hiring in the last year, a repetition of 2000-2002 performance which will once again leave the market with a severe “mid level” candidate shortage in two to three years’ time.

However, when it comes to actual recruitment, many employers have equally been using the downturn to benchmark and groom future employees. Many have simply chosen to start recruiting directly for roles that were only tentatively budgeted for, or are seeing as many candidates as possible for the sake of testing the water, leaving a trail of disillusioned potential hires.

Of course, the positive sides of doing this will have been meeting a lot of potential candidates and hiring the best on the market at reduced costs. But the negatives are much more profound, with short and long-term damage to reputation in the recruitment marketplace.

The digital recruitment marketplace has a big voice and when an application is declined, someone is left feeling rejected. Do this a lot and you have a group of disheartened Tweeters who can collectively and directly damage your brand reputation.

We believe the solution is to remain strategic about the volume of candidates you interview and how you deliver feedback. One of the valuable roles of a good recruitment agency is to help a company position its business in the recruitment market and also filter and limit the candidates they meet.

To be honest, our role is much more than simply advising on recruitment and we are seeing clients realise the potential of treating us as an extension of their PR as well as HR function.

A business focused on successful recovery also needs to look at its direct hiring needs and to demonstrate realism in its expectation from the talent market. We work across the whole digital landscape so we are able to advise, predict and to some degree, moderate talent volume and salary benchmarking.

It is impossible to stabilise salaries in digital media, as there will always be companies willing to pay that bit extra. But companies that succeed in hiring the best talent are the ones that can demonstrate consistency and a proven career path.

It’s these career paths that we are now focused on helping to mend and shape as the market once again begins to buzz with emerging technologies and start-ups.

Emma McNamara, Director & Melina Jacovou, Co-Founder
Propel London