The state of hiring:
Finding the ‘unicorn’ in an excess candidate market
With more people out of work and fewer jobs, 2023 was bleak for the marketing workforce, but there’s
reason to be optimistic in 2024.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves set out details of a new Budget Responsibility Bill earlier this month – announced in the King’s Speech – that would give the Office for Budget Responsibility powers to scrutinise big government announcements on spending and taxation.
The move comes following former prime minister Liz Truss’s “disastrous” mini budget in September 2022, which sent shockwaves through the markets and caused sterling to fall drastically, mortgage rates to surge and forced the Bank of England to intervene to save the pensions sector from collapse.
“This government’s defining mission is to deliver economic growth,” Reeves said in a statement. “However, growth can only come through economic stability and a commitment to sound public money so never again can a government play fast and loose with the public finances.”
While the new regulation is intended to not let history repeat itself, the effects from the mini budget in September 2022 across the advertising and marketing industry are still prevalent – particularly when it comes to hiring.
‘Companies are doing more with less’
According to PMW’s own data, the total number of jobs advertised within marketing dropped by almost two-thirds (62%) between 2022 and 2023 – going from 1,212 to just 459 respectively.
Of those, head of departments (for example, head of marketing, head of brand, digital lead) experienced the biggest decline in job postings last year, falling by three-quarters (75%) from 96 in 2022 to 24 in 2023.
It was closely followed by entry and junior level roles (for those with five years or less experience), such as campaign officer, digital marketing executive, marketing associate, which saw a 71% drop in jobs advertised: going from 245 to 71 respectively.
Gareth Cartman, founder of growth recruitment agency Example, says: “Companies are doing more with less, for as long as that can possibly last.
“There has been a lot of political uncertainty in the UK pre-election, and certainly after the Truss budget, foreign investors were very hesitant to invest in UK businesses.”
This, Cartman explains, has had a “knock-on effect” with candidates being “hesitant to jump from one job to another, especially to companies who may not have the security or high profile to command the best talent”.
During the pandemic, Jodie Clayton, associate director – marketing, digital and e-commerce at Major Players, points out that there was mass hire in the performance marketing space and many organisations “massively overspent” as they’d been “reactive”.
But at the tail end of 2022, following the mini budget, Clayton says she saw a similar trend to Cartman emerging: with the “job market really starting to drop… we started to see huge numbers of redundancies and people out of work”.
As a result, businesses had to “completely restructure”, and “we probably saw it go through its worst last year”, she adds.
Total jobs within marketing
Total jobs by senority
Hiring managers’ search for the ‘unicorn’ left ‘potential candidates behind’
While the overall picture was of a decrease in the volume of job roles across the board, “especially agency-side”, there were some positions that have been in high demand, Cartman highlights.
He says: “Some positions have been in high demand particularly in retail which has remained strong – that’s often why you see programmatic doing very well.”
PMW’s own data shows that job roles that either specialised in programmatic and biddable or included elements of it, actually saw an increase. The number of jobs advertised in this specialism stood at 58 in 2022, but jumped by 81% to 105 in 2023 – and it was the only area to see a rise.
Total number of jobs by speclialism
Performance marketing jobs experienced the biggest decline with 87% less roles advertised in 2023 compared to the previous year: going from 86 to 11. While jobs roles involving SEO had the lowest decline at 48%.
All this results in an excess of candidates for a low number of jobs – and that has been the case in the UK for at least 18 months now. For hiring managers, Cartman believes, some “feel they have the pick of the market”.
“The knock-on effect here is that hiring managers feel they can find a unicorn, but in reality that behaviour results in a long hiring process as they search for that unicorn, leaving high-potential candidates behind,” he says.
But the excess pool of candidates in the UK is not just down to the layoffs, Cartman points out, it’s also “because of the number of international masters graduates who have a two-year work permit”.
“So when you have over 100 applications for a job role, certain hiring managers take the approach that they’ll look at the first 20, or they’ll take the first good ten CVs they receive, and discard the rest,” he says, adding that “hiring is exhausting”.
But there is reason to be optimistic, says Clayton, as since January this year, “the market has slowly started to pick up”.
“We [at Major Players] are starting to see more roles coming through...and we’ve seen a 17% growth in placements from Q1 to Q2.”
This is also reflected in PMW’s data, which shows job roles in partnerships and affiliate marketing is already up by 30% in the first three months of 2024. While other specialisms such as paid, digital and performance marketing are also seeing smaller, but notable growth.
Clayton attributes this uptick to more “stability” in the UK, despite still some economic challenges lying ahead.
And that’s what investors want, and the UK, certainly in comparison to its European neighbours, is more stable. This in turn is likely to see businesses invest more and as result the job market should open up more as the year goes on.
Premium content editor: Jyoti Rambhai
Editor: Robin Langford
Designer: Jide Eguakan
Data visualisation designer: Rhea Ramtohul
Data projects manager: Carolyn Avery
The data in this report is from Haymarket Media Group's jobs board (PMW's parent company) and covers January 2021 to March 2024. The information in this report is correct as of July 2024.
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