What is the challenge?

Talent recruitment into our business. The need to attract people from a much wider variety of backgrounds and skillsets.

Agencies now require people with a more diverse skillset including maths, data analytics, computer science and coding, design thinking, behavioural psychology as well the more traditional backgrounds like business administration, marketing, graphic design etc.

A major focus of our work in 2018 will be to promote the attraction of a career in our member agencies to a variety of colleges and courses.

We had a first meeting of this committee on Tuesday 20 February. In attendance were Patrick McConville (Wondr), Tania Banotti, Jay Taberner and agency MDs Richard Carr (Rothco), Bob Coggins (Havas) and David Hayes (Wavemaker).

What needs to be done?

We plan to hire a project manager to drive the project:

  • Identify the courses in the different universities that the industry decide are the most important for us to reach out to in 2018/19 – in other words prioritise.
  • Approach course coordinators and seek to get facetime with the students on these courses.  

The goal will be to explain the great possibilities and variety of career paths on offer in both creative and media agencies.

We will identify people within agencies who come from that background. e.g. a maths graduate to speak to students of maths about what a career in advertising looks like.  This means building up a databank of people in different agencies who are willing to speak in colleges around the country and have been briefed on our key messages. Please let us know if you are willing to be one of a bank of speakers we can call upon

We will prepare marketing materials; presentation decks for visits to colleges, flyers giving an overview of the business and the different roles, examples of what we do. We will commission short videos highlighting the many different roles in agencies.

We need to reach out and build relationships with Career Guidance Offices in each university.

Confirmed Activities

6 March - AD-Expo - our own annual career fair 

3 October - UpStarter – the tech recruitment fair. IAPI will take a stand at this in 2018.

We are very keen to hear from agencies across the range of issues this committee will cover

  • What are your greatest skill deficits?
  • Have you links to certain courses and colleges already?
  • Have you ideas about the best way to reach students and graduates?
  • Do you want to help us with this work?

Please get in touch with Patrick McConville by emailing jay@iapi.com


Talent Recruitment Committee Chair
Talent Recruitment Committee Chair
Patrick McConville
Patrick McConville
Formerly Deputy Managing Director, ICAN