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media job market
Recruiters see no pickup in hiring until 2002
By Kevin Downey
Media folks who are looking for signs of a rebound in the job market can keep looking.
Things are grim, and they will stay that way at least through the fall, with a pickup in media department hiring not coming until first-quarter 2002.
That’s the word from media recruiters.
Overall, the ad industry workforce has been slashed by nearly 30 percent from year-ago levels, with job cuts over recent months hitting the industry nearly as hard as the recession of the early 1990s.
While media departments have been hurt less than creative and account service departments, there is still only a smattering of new positions opening up for planners and buyers.
"If indeed there is a spot open here or there, then yes, there is more activity. But this is nothing like a revival," says Simmy Sussman of Sussman & Morris Associates.
"I think this will certainly go through this year, and there will be many more cutbacks coming. I don’t believe in painting a pretty picture, I believe in telling the truth."
The outlook is even more dire for senior-level talent, who are dealing with the extra hurt of a dwindling pool of positions following major agency consolidations.
Certainly making matters worse for media people is the over-hiring at the peak of the dot.com boom and even beyond, when departments were building in anticipation of yet more new business. With the job market then so tight, directors often hired what talent they could find, then worried how they would put people to use.
"There was a lot of fat that needed to be trimmed," says Amy Hoover, vice president of recruiting at Talent Zoo.
"There were some extra people and when times were good, that was fine, but it probably could have used a 5 percent thinning out."
Now, even when an agency wins a new account, it will spread existing staff to handle it, rather than add new staff.
Carat, for example, picked up the $600 million Philips Electronics and the $700 million Pfizer buying and planning accounts, but it has yet to add on new media people, even though it has hired dozens of people for other departments. A spokesman says the agency may add media people later in the year as the accounts become more active.
But recruiters add one cheery note to their grim assessments of the media job market: There are media jobs out there, especially for planners. You just may have to make some sacrifices you might not have considered a year ago, such as relocating.
"Once you get into the higher levels of supervisor or AMD, it gets tougher," says Hoover. "But if you are a media planner, but not so much for buyers, you should be able to find work."
To get the jobs, though, media people are increasingly willing to make a few sacrifices.
One recruiter sums things up this way: "I’m getting emails from folks who have been out of work for six months, so they’re doing drastic things.
"A few are considering relocation who wouldn’t have considered it before."
The one thing most recruiters agree on is that, although it seems to go against logic, salaries are not coming down dramatically.
"I don’t see salaries coming down, I simply see them flattening out," says Cathy Hurless, a media recruiter with offices in Chicago and Madison, Wisc.
"There is an awful lot of wonderful talent available, including some ‘A’ players. You have to pay for talent."
One deceptive sign that the job market may be coming back is the seeming slowdown in the number of agency layoffs.
Recruiters, however, say that this slowdown is because there’s little room to reduce staffing much further.
But they say it may also simply be the summer lull, when businesses and major business decisions tend to slow down.
It seems the reality is that more layoffs are coming, perhaps even a major one as early as this week.
There is industry-wide speculation, for instance, that True North will make cuts after being absorbed by IPG and melding its media-buying operation with sister company Initiative Media.
Even if more cuts are not made, however, recruiters say the jobs already lost will cause repercussions for years to come, since many media people are leaving the industry altogether.
"This is history that is repeating itself from 1990," says Hurless. "When we turn this around, we will see the same sort of things we saw before, meaning no training programs, and we’ll be scrambling for planners and junior people."
Recruiters say they sense general uneasiness in the market, with many looking to a quick end to the bad news.
"People want something positive to happen," reasons Patricia Sklar from Sklar & Associates, a national recruiting company based in Chicago.
"People are looking for stability and they’re looking for something positive. More than anything, they want to feel like they’re contributing to make a difference."
July 12, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Kevin Downey is a staff writer for Media Life.
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