In defence of working at agencies
Susan Redden Makatoa grits her teeth when job seekers tell her they don’t want to work in agencies. Here, she reveals why – despite the sometimes absurd demands from clients – nothing compares to agency life.
Before you @ me, I’ll freely admit I could be biased after spending around 15 years in agencies – I obviously drank the Kool-Aid early. But I wasn’t blind to the drawbacks.
When Susan Redden Makatoa asks potential candidates if they’d work in an agency, they often say no
Were timesheets a pain in the bum? Oh my god, yes. Were there occasional long nights and weekends? Yep – a federal government department that gave us 72 hours over the Australia Day long weekend to respond to a pitch deserves a dishonourable mention here. Were there times when clients asked for the impossible? Absolutely – wanting mainstream coverage for bronze busts of racing driver Ayrton Senna comes to mind.
Yes, you get variety but the problem for me and my team is that the ‘occasional’ long night ain’t so occasional, it’s the norm. And it’s exhausting, demoralising and bankrupting hard workers of enthusiasm. During my interview, it was stressed that work/life balance was super important and everyone went home on time or very close to it, not so true in reality. I completely understand why there’s currently such a lack of talent in the industry from Account Managers up, they’re burnt out and so they want to go in-house. I know this because my team and I are being hit up daily by recruiters who are desperate to fill the many agency positions available. We’re desperate to fill a number of positions ourselves, which means we’re under-resourced and so current employees have to pick up the slack, and we’ve actually been told by the powers that be that we have to work harder and longer hours until we can fill positions (with no additional remuneration or benefit). In the past, we’ve been successful in employing others fleeing their workhorse agencies, but nowadays most want to escape agency altogether. The industry needs to wake up as most agencies promise work/life balance but very rarely deliver. Imagine if we failed as hard at communicating the truth to clients or not delivering on promises. We’d have no clients. Maybe that’s why we have no staff.
Preach! Unfortunately most agencies are modern day sweatshops, the hours they make people work really should be illegal – in most cases, it likely is. The salaries the senior execs demand are ridiculous, if these GMs and CEOS stopped thinking they were worth as much money as a doctor, they might be a lot more profitable and not have to burn staff to the ground, which only results in more turnover. However I know the best projects I’ve ever worked on were in agency, there’s no doubt you get some incredible fun experiences – but long term I value my health and balance more than my career, so I left the agency world. Also if any agency is talking non stop in the interview about they’re ‘work life balance’ I say – run. They’re talking about it because they feel guilty about it, a company with real work life balance doesn’t need to constantly try to convince themselves of it – they just do it.
I spent around 11 years all up in agencies so I share Susan’s view on the gamut of experiences you get and the skills it gives you, alongside understanding the two posters above POV. Like any industry, there will be bad apples, and the low cost of entry to setting up your own agency drives a bit of that I think. Being a good consultant and running a business are often two very different skill sets. And the industry needs to take a long hard look at itself and some of its practices (WIP wastage, internal briefings and pitching for work you haven’t a hope of getting come to mind) to ensure it does its best not to burn people out.
But at the same time Susan is 100% right, it is the best training for anything in-house, or the general business world will throw at you. Life is too short to work with dickheads and if you’re constantly being asked to burn the midnight oil, with no return (monetary or otherwise), leave. There is no shortage of work out there (including in agencies) that will let you have a more sustainable balance.
Come work in our industry. The hours are long but the pay is….well its not low, but its not great either. Have hobbies? A family? Forget them. No don’t look at all the other jobs across the road…come to us.
Also our industry has a bad ethics reputation. Free ping pong.
Contribute your mental, emotional and physical energy and get rewarded based on your timesheets. No thanks. If you understand your true worth work in-house or start your own business.
Sometimes I feel like I’m the last person who likes working in not only agencies… but big agencies!
Yeah…nah.
Im sitting on the fence with this article. After 12 years of agency experience, I left and went client-side. Did I love the campaigns I got to work on? Absolutely. But was it worth all the pain? Not at all.
@AgencyBS says it correctly – its become the norm to work these ridiculous long hours with little / no thanks or recognition. To me it almost seems agency life is going backwards.
Work /Life balance is non-existent – and if they say that its massive for them, then I ask you to try work from home one day, and I am sure you’ll get a multitude of excuses as to why you are needed in the office.
Unfortunately my own experience is not great, after my family needed to step in and ask me to leave my job and help me pay my rent until I found a new job as they could see it was taking its tole on me. Late nights, high stress, harassment (yes it still exists), sexual orientation discrimination (also still exists), bullying – and all this was done through one agency that is extremely well known in Sydney.
Fast forward a couple of years, and I have to say leaving agency was the best thing i could do for myself.
Until agencies learn to really value their staff and mean what they say, staff will continue to leave and there will be massive industry shortage.
‘I’m a recruiter and would love to make some money on all those agency brief roles I can’t fill so I’m gonna write a puff piece, that’ll fix and override all those REAL life horror stories’
Sorry but almost dying, losing friends and family to stress isn’t worth putting a Ford on the opera house.
had to be said
Hahaha I laughed upon finishing reading this article, the author is in recruitment… *face palm
Gone from agency to client side- Best decision I’ve ever made. Ever! Period.