Grimmer outlook
for laid-off media folks

Recruiters: Hiring won't really pick up until mid-02

By Kevin Downey

    First the bad news, and plenty of it.
    One out of five ad agency jobs has already been cut in the past 10 months, and recruiters say even more cuts are yet to come in the final two months of the year.
    They don’t expect agencies to begin hiring until January, at the earliest, when many companies will be working with new budgets.
    Most don't think agencies will begin rehiring in significant numbers until mid- to late-2002.
    Moreover, new hires that are brought in can expect to earn less, with salaries coming in at 10 percent below what they were just a year ago for the same position.
   Now, on to the good news.
   The good news is that media people, already less affected by layoffs than people in account services and creative departments, will be the first hired back.
    The slimmed ranks of media people are already being felt.
    "I think that we’re still feeling the effect of not having as many people in this discipline as there should be," says Amy Hoover, vice president of recruiting at Talent Zoo.
    "It’s so numbers-intensive that a lot of people don’t get into it because they want the more glamorous side of creative or the sales side of account work."
    And as bad as things may seem, these recruiters say, there are open media jobs out there now, and some people are getting hired.
    They say the media people finding jobs are the ones who maintain industry contacts and actively look for work.
   "You need to stay top-of-mind in people’s heads," advises Simmy Sussman of Sussman & Morris Associates. "The worst thing to do is sit in front of a computer screen and wait for something to happen."
    The media job market is expected to remain tight for a while, though.
    In the past month alone, media companies like MTV Networks, Clear Channel radio, U.S. News & World Report, Time Inc., Rodale publishing, and Brill’s Content/Inside.com have cut hundreds of positions.
    And advertising agencies like Leo Burnett Worldwide, TBWA/Chiat/Day, and Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners have laid off dozens of people in all disciplines.
    Moreover, the Myers Reports found that advertisers are planning to slash budgets by 12 percent in the next two quarters.
    Making the situation worse for people looking for work is that many agencies have learned to operate with smaller staffs as the economic downturn lingers. That’s particularly true for publicly traded companies that need to justify expenses.
    While functioning with a lean staff might suggest that agencies are holding onto top talent, recruiters say job cuts have been widespread, with talented workers being shoved out the door for those with fewer skills.
    "Sometimes when there is a layoff, it’s the people who were the last to get hired who get cut. But it’s not always like that," says Patricia Sklar from Sklar & Associates, a national recruiting company based in Chicago.
   "There are times when human resources people call and say, ‘Help these people; we had to cut them but they are great.’ At other times, they say it was time to do some weeding."
    The result of cutting talented media people, not surprisingly, is that agencies will be hurting for experienced staff when the market is healthy again.
   That happened in the early 1990s after a slew of mostly junior-level jobs were cut.
    "I liken it to when all the mergers were taking place and nobody was hiring and everybody was consolidating," says Kurt O’Hare of O’Hare & Associates.
    "Nobody was bringing in trainees, and when the marketplace came back a few years later, there was nobody to fill the jobs. That fueled some salary escalation but it also created a hole in the talent pool."
    At the same time, some recruiters say the ad industry needed to trim its workforce by 5 to 10 percent.
    While job cuts have far exceeded those levels, recruiters say that agencies were over-staffing when dot.coms were pushing ad spending to record levels just two years ago.
    Agencies were hiring in anticipation of an increased workload but often found themselves with inexperienced people when the dot.com economy went bust.
    "It goes back to when there was such a desperate need to fill these media slots that perhaps it wasn’t always the best talent that was brought onboard but it was the most readily available talent," says Talent Zoo’s Hoover.

November 6, 2001 © 2001 Media Life

-Kevin Downey is a staff writer for Media Life.