After a few questions, I learned that he had missed an opportunity just around the first lockdown. He\u2019d been hired, but his first day fell in the second week of the first lockdown when most agencies in Belgium started realizing they were in for a rough few months ahead with clients canceling campaigns.\u00a0 The agency that had hired him revoked his contract, as they had been heavily impacted revenue-wise. Sad, but understandable. He\u2019s been applying left and right since, but without any success. Everyone wants several years of experience because training on the job is too hard with teleworking. It\u2019s been two years now, so he\u2019s losing patience.<\/p>\n
The above is recognizable for many.\u00a0 I myself had decided somewhere in between two lockdowns to stop recruiting juniors because we weren\u2019t able to onboard them correctly. We had too much work once clients realized digital was all that was left, and we couldn\u2019t handle the endless stream of questions a junior generated via chat or video. So instead of hiring juniors, we went for seniors that we could plug into the teams with minimal effort.<\/p>\n
We saw however that several of the people we recruited during that period weren\u2019t the most productive.\u00a0 They had around 3 years or more of experience at another company, excellent hard skills, but weren\u2019t able to integrate or combine (tele)work and personal life. \u00a0A lot of \u201cseniors\u201d (i.e 3 years or more of experience) changed jobs during COVID.\u00a0 Turnover has always been a problem in the sector, but in the last years, I\u2019ve seen a level of turnover I haven\u2019t seen before. Looking back, I think people changed jobs because it was something they could quite easily change in their lives, for the sake of changing something during the monotonous COVID months. In the end, they were still be doing video calls at the kitchen table in their new jobs, feeling alienated.<\/p>\n
So even though the senior people we hired during that period were able to help us in the short term, they definitely weren\u2019t very motivated or as productive as we\u2019d hoped.\u00a0 Most of them left within 18 months. Ironic, when you know there was a whole bunch of motivated graduates almost begging to get started.<\/p>\n
In July 2021 we realized that waiting for motivated unicorns to apply to our open positions wasn\u2019t a strategy. We had to create them ourselves, and have a system in place to keep creating them.\u00a0 As CLICKTRUST had been delivering training for years, we decided to review and complete these trainings and turn them into a complete two-week bootcamp designed for high potentials with little or no experience.<\/p>\n
We ran the first bootcamp in September, and again in October.\u00a0 The speed at which we were able to onboard the newcomers was excellent, allowing them to very rapidly add real value to the teams.<\/p>\n
It was a key move. We are now finally able to recruit based on soft and fairly common hard skills, increasing our talent pool massively. We can now teach people in a structured manner what they need to know to do their jobs, whether that happens in person or through video.<\/p>\n
Since then, we\u2019re offering this bootcamp to all companies who are fed up with waiting for that perfect trilingual with 3 years of performance or paid media experience\u2026. We\u2019re organizing trainings specifically for newcomers who are just hired.<\/p>\n