Junior hires: An industry survival plan in the AI era
Building the next generation of talent isn’t just good practice; it’s essential for our industry’s future. Hannah Mirza shares why now, more than ever, we need to invest in creating meaningful opportunities for newcomers alongside AI.
The Nobel Prize committee just awarded its annual economics prize to three economists for their work on the innovation economy and for explaining how new technology has created additional jobs over the last two centuries.
But the winners also warned that there was no guarantee this would continue, with technology-led growth demanding the right conditions for “creative destruction”.
Right now, we are seeing that the use of AI is reducing job opportunities, particularly at the entry level.
UK figures from recruiter Reed show graduate jobs are in rapid decline. They’ve dropped from 180,000 to around 55,000 in the last three to four years, thanks in part to the arrival of AI.
Accenture too is cutting jobs, laying off 11,000 from its global workforce, where they can’t be reskilled to work alongside AI.
As an independent consultancy in our third year of business, we’re taking a different approach. To build our team’s skills, we’ve just completed the process of finding our next graduate recruit. On posting the role on LinkedIn, we were overwhelmed with the response, attracting more than 500 applicants in just 72 hours.
Rather than forcing applicants to film themselves answering questions and then filtering them by AI (as is common for many milk-round jobs), we narrowed it down, and I interviewed all 50 long-listed candidates over 15-minute video calls. The final shortlist of 12 attended in-person interviews at our offices, and due to the quality of talent, we’ve offered not one but two roles.
We’ve been through this process before as a growing consultancy. In November 2023, we signed up our first recruit, who is still with us, was trained by us, and is now adding massive value to our clients.
It would be easy to employ an AI to do the mundane work that new starters used to do when I joined the industry. Observing and watching were one of the ways we learnt our craft. While work has changed, we still need early work experiences to enable us to grow.
As a business focused on legacy, we know that if our generation continues to pull up the ladder behind us, then the talent of the future will have no way to gain the skills they need. In a few years, there will be no one to provide the human oversight that even the best AI tools require now and will continue to require in the future.
When we make staffing decisions, we need to consider not only the immediate bottom line but also our legacy to the industry we love. Talk to any CMO, and they say talent is their business advantage. As far back as 2020, the Economist Group and the Digital Marketing Institute reported that 74% of global marketing executives believed the industry faced a critical talent gap due not only to a lack of digital skills but also to a lack of marketing experience and soft skills.
More recently, the latest IPA Census reveals that the pipeline of talent into our industry continues to weaken. The data shows that the proportion of younger employees (those 25 and under) continued to fall in 2024, leading to a rise in the average age of agency staffers.
The truth is staring us in the face: If we don’t provide clear pathways for people to enter our industry, our talent pipeline will dry up, and our businesses will struggle.
New technology will, of course, change the way that we work, but we all have an obligation to find ways to ensure our industry continues to be refreshed and revitalised by new blood.
Hannah Mirza, CEO and Founder
