A paragraph from the Advertising Age report on the “culture” at Havas Chicago warrants additional commentary:
While Havas took a beating on social media for the video, Sarah Pak, VP of strategic accounts at Robert Half’s The Creative Group, says that she is seeing more agencies trying to stand out by being brazen about their personality. “Even though the market is so tight for creative and marketing professionals, our clients are still requiring personality and cultural fit to be No. 1,” she says. “If you fit the culture, then we’ll make sure you are happy here. But you have to fit our culture first.”
Sorry, but the VP from Robert Half is a half-wit. The moron explains why our industry is such a mess in terms of diversity and inclusion. Plus, she shows how recruiting firms—besides being ignorant and useless—are complicit in maintaining the discriminatory exclusivity.
The No. 1 requirement is personality and cultural fit? What happened to experience, performance and talent? Does a candidate’s potential factor into the equation? And don’t trophies trump all of the above?
Take a peek at job postings from recruitment firms. There’s never a bullet point indicating the imperative for personality and cultural fit. Indeed, job postings typically feature a laundry list of skills and capabilities specifications—usually written by the hiring agency versus the recruiter. Is the VP of strategic accounts implying hiring agencies and recruiters hold side conversations to define personality and cultural fit?
As Havas Chicago demonstrated, leaders who hype an agency’s personality and culture are narcissistic, delusional jackasses. White holding companies have commoditized creativity, turning the overall advertising industry into a generic dung heap. Painting walls with graffiti images—and hosting Halloween parties with soft porn dancers—are smokescreens designed to conceal mediocrity.
Recruiters believe they’re “seeing more agencies trying to stand out by being brazen about their personality,” but candidates view such places as analogous to old men donning bad toupees and driving fancy roadsters.
No comments:
Post a Comment