Applying for jobs and recruiting new talent can be a stressful process, no matter which side of the coin you’re on. A new career platform designed with the Australian advertising industry in mind, Advertising Industry Careers (AIC) aims to help connect the right job hunters and graduates to the right businesses and jobs.
Founded by CEO Adam Elliott and COO Owen Joyce, AIC is set to launch in October. There are some big names already on board with AIC – Network 10, Nine, Mediabrands, UM and Initiative to name a few– as well as a number of smaller brands like Ryval Media, Oxygen360, and Principle Media Group.
Mediaweek caught up with Elliott and Joyce to chat about what the platform will look like and what users can expect from it.
AIC is designed to shine a spotlight on the advertising industry, and for the pair, that means promoting opportunities across all disciplines. To help generate interest from candidates, AIC has formed partnerships with Paramount and Mediaweek.
Elliott: “It’s for creative agencies, media agencies, publishers, ad tech businesses, it’s for people whose business is built on helping develop those marketing solutions for advertisers. We are the most dynamic industry, we understand the power of marketing, yet we’re not taking those same marketing principles and bringing that to life for recruitment. It’s time that we start to take that approach.”
By focusing solely on the advertising industry, AIC will be in a unique position as it’s able to tackle specific hurdles that the advertising industry faces. Having spoken to several companies and individuals while developing the platform, the pair have collected some staggering stats.
Elliott: “Some companies are facing a really high turnover of 30 plus percent, particularly some of the bigger players. For some of the smaller players, of the companies we’ve been talking to that are now on our platform, they might only have 30 or 40 staff members but they’ve spent more than $250,000 on recruitment costs. That’s significant.
“They don’t necessarily have the resources, manpower, or people power to drive some of it, and also some of the existing channels they are using aren’t necessarily delivering the quality of people. We’re trying to help them connect the dots on all of that.”
For users, the AIC platform will work in a similar manner to other job board websites, but it will also provide a more in-depth look at the companies and teams behind the posting, helping potential employees find just the right match for them.
Joyce: “The front end is a pretty typical job board experience, you can set up job alerts and search for jobs by category, location, and keywords. We want to have some advertising space, but purely to promote graduate stuff – training courses and things like that.
“But the key thing is that when you’re investigating jobs, it’s not just about a job listing, it’s about learning more about the company – so we’re encouraging companies to produce tonnes of content around their Employer Brand. We know not every company has that from day one, so you can start off with a paragraph of text and a few photographs, but we want the companies to build as much content as possible over time.”
Highlighting education and landing roles for graduates is a major point of difference for AIC, and one that aims to help new graduates find the right fit to start their careers.
Elliott: “We’re hearing from some of the HR and Talent Acquisition teams we’ve been talking to that they’re getting grads and people in at junior levels, but often they’re leaving after six to 10 months, they just go ‘this isn’t for me’. Part of the reason that they’ve identified for that is that people are being put into the wrong streams of the industry – people are applying for the wrong role, and they’re not identifying the skill set early enough.
“We want to try to help minimise those impacts. We need loads of different people with loads of different skill sets and different types of personalities to be successful in this industry. We’re a very diverse industry.”
Whilst AIC brings jobs to potential employees, the pair point out that the platform isn’t designed to compete with Seek or any other online job boards, but rather provide a resource that adds to what’s already out there.
Joyce: “We make a point of telling everyone we speak to that we’re not competing with Seek or LinkedIn, that’s not our intention. In fact, when you advertise jobs on our platform, you can point your candidates elsewhere to apply – because the other thing we recognise is that a lot of these clients already have a very set recruiting process. As soon as you try to change that, things can go awry.”
Without a crystal ball, it’s almost impossible to see what is over the horizon. Set to go live in October, Joyce says that the platform will move with the industry’s needs, as well as through the increasing level of user contribution. No matter how the site evolves, however, there will always be one clear goal in mind.
Joyce: “What we look like in October this year versus next year will be quite different, we will have education programmes and a whole bunch of tools and services that will help both candidates and clients. The whole idea is to grow the industry, a lot of businesses can’t grow at the moment because they just can’t find people.”
Elliott: “We see ourselves as a tireless advocate for the industry. We want to promote and share the stories of what makes the industry great – the companies, what they do, and the individuals that make it happen are really at the centre of all of this.
“The industry is constantly evolving and driving consumer behaviour change, so it’s brimming with opportunities for people to grow, progress, and evolve their careers.”
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Top Image: Adam Elliott and Owen Joyce