In the classic film The Graduate, protagonist Ben Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, returns home with a freshly-minted college degree, and at a celebration in his honour is cornered by a drunken family friend who offers a bit of unsolicited career advice. “Plastics,” the man says.
Today, anyone advising jobseekers considering a career in advertising, marketing or public relations would utter a different word: digital.
Of all of the talents in short supply in Asia, the digital skill set is the most sought after and the hardest to find, according to employment consultants across the region. Even in Japan, which one might expect to be ahead of the curve - technologically speaking - digital rules the recruitment roost.
“There is a wonderful guy in the market,” says Ralph Saunders, a consultant at the Tokyo office of recruitment firm Hudson, describing a placement case now in progress.
“He is number one. He is perfect. He was making ¥6.5 million (US$60,000) last year. If my client can
get him, he could command 11 or 12 million. That is how rapid the rise in value is in the market.”
What makes this so exceptional is that Japan has the lowest pay rises across the board for all industries surveyed by Hudson. One-third of employees questioned received no pay rises at all during Q4, 2007.
Saunders says the most desired candidate is a digital specialist who has a traditional marketing background with a big brand. “In the past, you could come out of publishing or TV and make the transition into digital, but now more clients want someone with a couple of years of digital under their belt. They don’t want them to make those transitions on their time.”
Japan is no anomaly. ‘Digital’ was the unanimous reply from all recruitment specialists across Asia when asked for the hottest skills in the industry. “I have seen situations with up to 30 per cent increases in the digital area for very strong candidates,” says Aruna Alimanchandani from Hudson’s office in Hong Kong.
Karen Kwan, a director at Hudson in Singapore, agrees. “We are seeing demand for pure digital skills. It is planning, creative, understanding how it all works, the front-end, the back-end and the engine. Anyone who can tie it all together holds a trump card.”
PR headaches
The online world is new, evolving, and growing leaps and bounds, so a lack of digital talent comes as no surprise. Less expected is the shortfall of the most fundamental industry skill - an understanding of marketing.
Recruiters say companies will pay a premium for that elusive person who grasps marketing on a conceptual level and can execute plans in whatever discipline - above- or below-the-line - that happens to be their forté.
Of the traditional disciplines, PR faces the most severe turnover and lack of career candidates. “PR is a perennial headache for many companies,” says Richard Broadhurst, a manager at Ambition Hong Kong.
“There is a massive shortage of strong candidates for PR agencies. It is difficult to identify people with a strong PR agency background, as well as people with a strong desire to stay within the PR environment.”
In full agreement is Duncan Cunningham, Aquent’s regional director for Greater China.
“They have a tough time of it,” he says. “In the PR agency space, there is a need for PR professionals who understand health care and technology and banking and finance.
“With the Olympics coming to Beijing, and across the whole of China, every major city is holding events. Foreign event marketing companies are finding it difficult to recruit talent.”
In the short-term, people with skills such as MICE and CEI will be in high demand, Cunningham adds.
Rising salaries
While agencies are having a hard time of it, the talent squeeze is welcome news for employees, especially those in Greater China. “From a recruiting standpoint, the war for talent has been won by the talent in the market, ” says Aquent’s Cunningham.
But if talent has won the war, what spoils go to the victor? Money talks, and talent feels entitled to yearly salary increases. In the 2006-2007 Aquent Orange Book, a monitor of human resources for the marketing, communications and creative industries, more than 80 per cent of Chinese employers (Hong Kong included) anticipated increasing staff salary, with levels of anticipated pay rises hovering above and below 10 per cent.
Reported retention strategies varied. Interestingly, agencies with low or moderate turnover reported ‘career development’ as their most important strategy. The second ranked tactic was performance bonuses.
Likewise, in Hudson’s report on employment trends in Asia for Q4 2007, media, public relations and advertising companies in China reported the highest salary expectations among their staff for all industries surveyed. Sixty-five per cent of employers said they ‘often’ or ‘very often’ received demands for salaries higher than they were willing to pay.
According to Hudson’s Alimanchandani, inducing people to switch jobs in Hong Kong requires a salary increase of between 10 and 15 per cent. Other motivators include training, opportunities for career development within an organisation, and the chance to be associated with big brands.
Agency exodus
Talk to recruiters long enough, however, and it is easy to understand why there is an advertising and PR agency talent shortage.
In Greater China, salaries for agency jobs are at parity for equivalent jobs on the client side but for the former the workload is much greater.
“The client side is the Holy Grail for many candidates and rightly or wrongly it doesn’t mean they are going to move to a better environment,” says Ambition’s Broadhurst.
“Many forego outstanding career opportunities with PR agencies because of long work hours with demanding clients.”
A similar dynamic exists for advertising. “We often talk to advertising agency candidates who are still at work at 2am more than one night per week. And they are not compensated for that kind of effort,” Broadhurst adds.
“The business models agencies adopt - unless they are large agencies - can be unprofitable until they win a very large account.
“Their commissions in general have been drastically reduced due to client demand. They try to wring as much productivity out of their people as possible.”
Kellie Grimsley, a managing consultant for advertising and communications at Hudson in Shanghai, also sees the flow from agency to in-house. “For senior and mid-level there is not a big disparity in salary, and the main driver in most cases is a better life balance,” she says.
“In other markets, people are quite comfortable switching back and forth from agency to in-house and vice-versa. Here, if someone has only worked in-house, unless they are determined to experience the other side, I don’t think they see any value in going to an agency. There is no advantage for career development.”
In Singapore, where a buoyant economy is spurring headcount growth, advertising and public relations agencies are under increasing pressure to find recruits.
Insufficient numbers of young people are entering the field, while mid- to senior career A-graders are cherry-picked by clients.
“We are terribly talent-short,” says Hudson’s Kwan. “This is primarily culturally-driven. A young person in Asia is likely to have been molded by their parents to head toward the more, say, professional industries. Banking, for example, seems to win a lot of kudos.
“Young people do not view advertising, media and PR as industries of choice. So relatively fewer are entering the sector.”
Those who do choose advertising do it out of a love for the work, and they quickly achieve star status if they stay. “The A-graders leave the sector all together and go to the promised land of the client side,” says Kwan.
“If you move to a FMCG company, they will often have really great training programmes in place. The Procter & Gambles of this world train their graduates for two years.
“There are a couple of big agencies that have training programmes, but the majority of them don’t.”
Nor do they have policies in place to deal with the problem of employee burnout. Kwan explains: “They can’t afford to be as flexible as some big companies on allowing employees to work from home, to have flexible hours, that sort of stuff.”
