Panel Discussion on the Talent Disconnect at ANA’s Masters of Marketing Conference
Paul Kurnit, clinical professor of marketing at Pace University, led a discussion to gain different perspectives on the advertising industry’s talent challenge at the Advertising Educational Foundation’s Symposium event held during ANA’s Masters of Marketing conference. Chris Macdonald, president of McCann North America, Ravi Dhar, professor of management and marketing at Yale School of Management, Renetta McCann, chief talent officer at Leo Burnett, and members of the National Millennial Community, Veronica Mingrone and Eljay Feuerman, discussed the challenges of traditional job applications, how Millennials can better sell themselves, and ways to make the advertising industry more attractive.
Ravi Dhar, professor of management and marketing at Yale School of Management: Marketing is seen as inauthentic. It’s seen as “putting lipstick on a pig.” These beliefs are a big barrier for recruiting. Most people want to work at the new tech companies, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Amazon, and Google. The talent challenge is this belief, but there are ways to address it. At universities, we fail to innovate in the first-year curriculums. I compared syllabi from 1970 and 2015, and they were 80 percent identical. The problem is that if you innovate in the electives and not in the core courses, people will not want to go into marketing. The most popular marketing courses at Yale are not in marketing. Persuasion and Behavioral Economics are popular courses.
Renetta McCann, chief talent officer at Leo Burnett: In marketing, a lot of our work is designing for the future so we need to rethink the idea of “readiness” overall. There is a problem with knowledge flow between generations. Organizations were built to have knowledge go up and down, but ideas flow in different directions, and we haven’t been able to move knowledge around in a way that gets it to the right places. Inclusion, regarding race, gender, and other demographics like socioeconomic status, are at the far edge of what we’re talking about.
There’s an abundance of talent. There are 80 million Millennials, so numerically, the talent is there. What we have to do is find new ways of sourcing that talent. There is a resume dilemma. Keyword searches look for capabilities, but it’s mindsets that help people be successful.
Now that we can be efficient at finding talent, we have to ask: Are we screening to find long-term employees? People who can go further might not pass the first test. The speed of change is making it harder to have mentor-apprentice relationships that works well. Because of technology, there are emerging job functions. Data scientist is a bigger role than it was four years ago. Hybrids of roles are emerging. There is a marriage of account people and strategists, for example. How do I recruit for a role I haven’t defined yet? We have to find talent in different places as a result. Qualified candidates come from a variety of backgrounds.
We have to find bridges to the talent we need. That talent needs a connection to the industry. The missing piece is that academia and the advertising industry have to come together. We need to have communication through the pipeline. We can make it more frictionless. We’re all enamored with internships because they mean that students have a little bit of experience and context for the ways we work. But we’re not necessarily looking for skills or capabilities for entry-level positions. We’re looking for people who are ready to work the way we work. Without context, entry-level employees may be less skillful in their jobs. I think that learning, beyond training and development, is important because we need people who can learn on the spot and quickly apply their skills and capabilities. I wouldn’t start with application, I’d start with learning. We’re trying to hack our own on-boarding process. What would happen if onboarding was a collaborative experience?
Eljay Feuerman, and Veronica Mingrone, members of the National Millennial Community: Marketers have to segment their audiences because targeting them is the only way to reach them. But Millennials are often grouped into one big target audience. Millennials should be segmented into smaller groups rather than targeted as one big holistic group. If you’re authentic as a company, you will attract Millennials. Some Millennials want a nine-to-five job, and some who pride themselves on being stressed. If you pretend to be like Google, you’re going to get Millennials into your office, but they’ll end up being grossly dissatisfied. Brands and agencies are desperate for new and different thinking, but they’re looking in the same places. If a company is willing to look at smaller universities, then the staff of those universities will believe that their students have opportunities at big jobs, and that will cultivate the belief in those students that they can get those jobs.
There is a talent disconnect, but there isn’t a lack of talent. Advertisers have the opportunity to cultivate new thinking, but it starts from the top down. If you look for candidates at small schools, you’ll get average applications, but you’ll also get exceptional ones. It’s not just about the school; it’s about finding the right person.
Teaching the most educated generation can be tricky. Millennials have spent a lot of time in classrooms, but when it comes to job retention we’re having an issue teaching them. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want to learn. Mentors and advisors would help because they were just in school where we got a lot of feedback. Our mission is to change the conversation around Millennials and recruitment.
Panel Discussion
Paul Kurnit, moderator: What is the meaning of work?
Renetta McCann, chief talent officer at Leo Burnett: Work has always been an avenue for self-expression to some degree. It serves a purpose in our lives, and that meaning shifts over time. We’ve always got to be monitoring those changes. I believe the role that the internet has played has accelerated the meaning of work. How many of us go to LinkedIn to find the next five things we should be doing. We have devices that expand the conversation about work, so it has to be part of the conversation when we’re talking about talent. People don’t just want a job. They want a job to fulfill a purpose. The more we accept that, the more we can account for it.
Eljay Feuerman, member of the National Millennial Community: The meaning of work is figuring out which skills you have and how to utilize them. I went into advertising because I’m a writer and a storyteller. I realized that maybe one out of 1,000 novelists get to change culture, but how many advertisers get to change culture? Hundreds or thousands. I said, “How can I best utilize the skills I have in the professional environment?” The work I do should be an extension of myself.
Ravi Dhar, professor of management and marketing at Yale School of Management: Part of the meaning of work is that different people construct their work differently. How does the employer frame the job?
Kurnit: “The what” versus “the why” is huge in terms of teeing it up. We had a conversation earlier, and Ravi, you talked about failure.
Dhar: One of things I hear about is this idea of how Millennials take to negative feedback.
Veronica Mingrone, member of the National Millennial Community: I don’t think that Millennials in general don’t want negative feedback. It’s all about how you give it. I think we just want it, period, as soon as things start to fumble a little bit. I don’t think failure is a bad thing, but I think it needs to be caught early on.
Chris Macdonald, President of McCann: There’s no such thing as failure. Failure equals learning. When people experience failure, they evolve. They change what they want to do. The work-life balance has evolved. We’ve kind of reframing the way it works. Work is about people finding value in work they love. People who don’t love their work are under pressure due to technology and being “on” all the time. Work-life balance is an amazing thing because it’s about how you blur the lines between the two.
Kurnit: Eljay found McCann this summer, and McCann found Eljay. What stands out for you when you’re finding that talent? What is the single piece that you’re looking for?
Chris: What was fascinating was watching them change. People who were quiet on day one began to speak up. You’re not looking for one thing. There are creative strategists. We had a broad range, and it’s about who had the best skillset for whatever we were looking for.
Feuerman: One of the things I loved was the hiring process. I applied for other opportunities and was asked, “Where is Western Connecticut State?” or told, “We don’t hire from Western Connecticut State.” McCann had this thing called an illustration application. There were boxes with questions on it where applicants had to illustrate their answers to each question. It was the only application that let me tell them who I was beyond my resume and that’s why I wanted to work there.
Kurnit: Renetta, you took Veronica and Eljay to lunch today. What did you learn from each other?
McCann: I learned, and I was already primed to believe this, but how thoughtful they are about their experiences and how much they analyze, internalize, and review. It reminded me that the best part of the youth is that they have this quality of reflection as well as an ability to do work. Perhaps in corporations, we’re using expertise as a surrogate for fit. We really have to get into mindsets, behaviors, and values. All of us might benefit from rethinking those kinds of things.
Mingrone: The biggest takeaway was that we have these views about what it’s like to look for a job, but I’ve never sat down with an HR person or someone who leads recruitment to see what the other side looks like and why the processes are the way they are. It was enlightening because we get caught up on ideas like “it’s not our fault that the system is like this,” but knowing how the process impacts our day to day was helpful.
Feuerman: One of the things that stood out was that she gets it. We go to companies and we end up preaching a problem and that is an issue. What we’re trying to do is work together to find a solution, and there isn’t just one solution.
Q&A
Q. What age range do you define as Millennials?
A. The actual cusp is 19 to 34, but I can’t imagine how a 34 year old feels about being compared to a 19 year old. At the end of the day, Millennial is an age range, not a generation. But that’s the point that we’re trying to get across: there isn’t one Millennial mindset or way of thinking.
Kurnit: There’s the issue of life stage, and then there is the issue of shared experience.
Q. What needs to change in the marketing industry to keep people interested in working in it as they go through different life stage changes, such as becoming a working mom, needing to take family leave, or taking care of elderly parents?
A. We operate under the fallacy that when people get their first jobs in their early twenties that they’re fully developed as people. The truth is that there are different life stages and adults change and develop over time. We’ve done research at Leo Burnett that demonstrates that between that ages of 30 and 40, there are major life changes. People get married, have babies, buy homes, and move. We’re thinking about how can we make that period inside the agency work a little bit better for our employees? This is also the time when people decide if they really want to make it to the top. The top is sending all the work down, and middle management really grinds out the day-to-day work. Businesses have to be flexible and think about how they can allow people to do “step asides” from their careers without taking them too far off track.
There are numerous ways of creating more flexibility. People work really hard and love what they do, but employers have to say “we’re here for you, and we’re trying to make it easier for you to do what you love doing. The conversation should be framed around people’s career aspirations.
Q. How will the way we work and the marketing industry change in the next 10 years, and how are we going to communicate that in a way that makes it attractive to the new workforce?
A. If I had answered that five years ago, I would have been wrong because it keeps changing. I think the question should be, “How do we keep reframing, rethinking, and giving purpose to what we do?” We also have to reconfigure what people think marketing is. We have to be strategic.
Q. Do you hire from majors besides advertising?
A. Yes, we’re targeting much more broadly. We have to work within the realm to a point. Creative writing is storytelling in longer formats, and we’re moving to longer formats. Creative writing majors will be more interesting to an agency in five years than they are today. Sometimes applicants don’t do a good job of transferring the skills they have that are relevant. They should break down the activities they’ve done in school, at internships, or in volunteering and make connections to the job requirements. That will make them look smart and impresses potential employers. You should also be open to “adjacency.” Maybe you can start in Public Relations and then move to the creative team. Be open to starting in one place and moving around.
Source
"Panel Discussion: The Talent Disconnect." Paul Kurnit, Clinical Professor of Marketing at Pace University and President of PS Insights; Chris Macdonald, President of McCann North America; Ravi Dhar, Professor of Management and Marketing at Yale School of Management; Renetta McCann, Chief Talent Officer at Leo Burnett; Eljay Feuerman, Member of the National Millennial Community; Veronica Mingrone, Member of the National Millennial Community. ANA 2016 Masters of Marketing Pre-Conference. 10/19/16.