1. Manage
P r o a c t i v e ly
3 steps for getting ahead of
your marketing, creative &
digital staffing needs.
As marketing channels continue to proliferate, marketing organizations
are relying more on flexible workforce strategies to close the gap
between their teams’ capacity and the need to cover the growing
requirements of emerging platforms and channels. Specific technical
requirements and positions in high demand such as mobile app
development place a strain on organizations that are trying to effectively
navigate traditional as well as emerging channels. Finding ways to
harness a flexible workforce is mission critical for hiring managers in
marketing, digital, and creative organizations.
In 2012, Aquent commissioned a survey of 580 marketing, creative
and digital hiring managers to uncover flexible workforce trends in
their departments.
In this paper, we share the findings of the survey, examine the
trends, and provide a three-step process to help you shift toward a
proactive approach when it comes to meeting your organization’s
workforce requirements.

2. 2
Manage Proactively.
The current landscape
Our survey illuminates several key trends and lessons learned in
using a flexible workforce:
• Flexible workforce solutions are a critical part of successful
marketing and creative organizations
• Gaps in capacity and technical expertise drive outsourcing
• Many hiring managers react to, instead of plan for, additional
staffing needs
• Managers continue to shoulder a large workload
• Proactive workforce management practices pay off
Let’s examine each one more closely.

3. 3
Manage Proactively.
Flexible workforce solutions are a
critical part of marketing and
creative organizations
Nearly two-thirds of marketing and creative teams leverage some form of an
external workforce to help meet their marketing objectives (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Average organizational allocation
of marketing & creative work
2% Outsourced
Project Teams
Of that external workforce,
independent contractors
7% make up the majority with
STAFFING
FIRM 10%, followed by ad agencies
8%
EMPLOYEES
(8%) and staffing firm
AD AGENCIES employees (7%).
10%
INDEPENDANT
CONTRACTORS
72%
IN-HOUSE EMPLOYEES
Note: percentages may not add to 100 due to rounding

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Manage Proactively.
Gaps in capacity and technical
expertise drive outsourcing
More than 70% of hiring managers look to external resources when addressing
challenges with staff capacity or specific technical skills or knowledge (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Reasons for outsourcing marketing & creative work
3% Fill-in for absences
3% Try before buying
Other reasons for out-
sourcing creative work
6% include the desire to free
COST up internal resources for
SAVINGS
other projects (9%), to
8% address issues related to
HEADCOUNT
FREEZE
hiring freezes within the
43%
organization (8%), and
9% for cost savings (6%).
FREE UP
INTERNAL STAFF STAFF CAPACITY
29%
EXPERTISE OR
TECHNICAL SKILLS

5. 5
Manage Proactively.
Many hiring managers react to,
instead of plan for, additional
staffing needs
The findings show that nearly 6 out of 10 managers are reactive in their approach to
staffing needs, meaning they only hire temporary workers when workloads become
excessive or they lack expertise in a given area (Figure 3). Only about 3 in 10 manag-
ers are proactive, hiring prior to the start of a project (19%) or staffing up to meet a
launch date or deadline (9%).
Figure 3: Typical approach to staffing a new project
Reasons for a reactive
approach vary, with the
most likely scenarios
ONLY ADD STAFF IF WORKLOAD GETS
EXCESSIVE/NEED ADDITIONAL EXPERTISE 58%
including the fact that
urgent and important
projects tend to take
STAFF UP the energy away from
BEFORE PROJECT 19% strategic efforts. Also, the
use of flexible workforce
solutions is still a new
business approach, and
DOESN’T STAFF
UP REGARDLESS 14%
hiring managers tend to
think in terms of adding
internal staff rather than
STAFF UP
TO MEET 9% identifying ways to harness
DEADLINE
the power of a flexible
internal/external solution.
0% 35% 70%

6. 6
Manage Proactively.
Managers continue Steps for proactive
to shoulder a large management
workload Ultimately, the survey data highlights that a
The survey revealed that the number of hours reactive approach to staffing and recruiting
in a typical workweek continues to increase- a contingent workforce can affect both the
-more managers are working between 41 to manager’s stress level and the team’s overall
50 hours per week. Unfortunately, managers ability to reach business goals. However, there
who both believe their work life is extremely are steps managers can take to be more proactive
stressful and who strongly agree that they lack in their recruiting and hiring approach. In the
necessary resources to accomplish their goals following pages, we explore these three steps
are significantly more likely to work 51 hours or for becoming a more proactive marketing and
more per week. creative hiring manager:
Proactive workforce 1. Anticipate how your annual plan can
management practices (and will) change
pay off 2. Continually evaluate your current team’s
The research also highlighted that being performance and skills
proactive pays. Nearly half of the managers 3. Always recruit, even if you don’t have an
(47%) who are proactive in addressing their open position
staffing needs say their last hire was an excellent
skills match, which is significantly higher than
the managers who are reactive (37%) or those
who do not staff up at all (37%). Additionally,
managers who say their work lives are not
extremely stressful are significantly more likely
to staff up prior to the start of a project compared
to those who find their work stressful.

7. 7
Manage Proactively.
Step 1
Anticipate how your annual plan can
(and will) change
It’s likely that you spend a significant amount of time crafting your quarterly and annual
plans. With your strategy carefully laid out and support tactics, budgets, and resources clear,
the path to execution appears straightforward. However, no matter how hard you work to
stick to it, circumstances beyond your control can cause you to veer off course, leaving you
scrambling for the appropriate resources.
The proliferation of media for mobile devices is the perfect example—this is the hottest
channel for marketers to master. The dynamics of this channel illustrate how marketing and
creative departments have been forced to quickly adapt to new technology, and, as a result,
revise their most carefully laid plans and strategies. The device platform, development tools,
distribution strategies, and content all play critical roles, and organizations have had to adjust
quickly to master them.
More than 40% of the hiring managers we surveyed indicated that mobile app developers are
in extremely high demand (Figure 4). The majority of those managers depend on external
resources to fill these positions. Roughly one in four turn to either boutique or full-service
agencies (28%) or independent contractors (24%), and roughly equal percentages utilize
outsourced project teams (15%) or staffing firm employees (14%) to fill the need.
Figure 4: Jobs that are currently in demand
10-point scale: 0-Extremely low demand, 10-Extremely high demand Average
Rating
Mobile App Developers 23% 34% 43% 7.6
User Experience Designer 40% 37% 24% 6.8
Interaction/UI Designer 37% 39% 23% 6.8
Front End Developers 39% 38% 23% 6.7
Information Architect 44% 34% 23% 6.6
Interactive Project Managers 46% 36% 18% 6.5
0% 50% 100%
Low Demand (0-6) High Demand (7, 8) Extremely High Demand (9, 10)

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Manage Proactively.
Given the rapid rate of change in today’s business climate, it may not be feasible to
predict everything that might force you to leverage an external flexible workforce.
However, you may be able to better embrace the constant flux that’s now the norm
by asking the following questions:
1. What new technologies or communications vehicles might require you to augment
your existing team’s skill set?
2. What do you know about your customers and competition that might require you to
get a new product to market faster?
3. If your industry is highly regulated, are there any new legal mandates forthcoming
that might require you to change your product strategy and messaging?
4. What are your recurring big-ticket projects? Do they overlap?
5. What percentage of your recurring projects do you outsource and why?
6. What percentage of the work completed last year was unexpected?
7. What percentage of the unexpected work did you outsource?
8. When you did outsource the work, what were the costs?
9. Do you have headcount for more permanent employees? If yes, is there any value in
keeping those roles as contract positions?
Anticipating what might change over the course of a year will help you become more proactive
by understanding what external resources you might need and when. More important, this
knowledge will allow you to seek out relationships with external partners that can help you be
adaptable and staffed appropriately for any unexpected shifts in the market.

9. 9
Manage Proactively.
Step 2
Continually evaluate
your existing team’s
performance and skills
With the evolution of technical platforms and the emergence Many organizations
of new channels, you need to continually evaluate your
employ decoupling
team in terms of alignment with current and future work.
initiatives where strategic
This exercise puts you in a proactive mindset as new
work comes into your organization. work is separated
from tactical work
Anticipating and developing new skills within your team is
ideal. If you can’t send your team out for training, it might and handled by
be good idea to bring in an expert for a limited engagement. different people.
They can work alongside your permanent employees and
inject some much-needed knowledge of a new technology.
Another way to approach a self-assessment of your team
is to slice up your project work by the skillsets required and
the level complexity of the work, rather than by project,
product line, or organizational structure. Many organizations
employ decoupling initiatives where strategic work is
separated from tactical work and handled by different
people. For example, the core team performs work that
is highly visible and original (strategic), while production
and iterative (tactical) tasks are performed by more junior
team members or by external resources. And perhaps one-
time strategic initiatives go to an external resource because
the technical skill sets are too specialized for your team to
adopt without putting other priorities at risk.

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Here are some questions to ask as you evaluate your team:
1. How consistent are your team’s job descriptions with the actual day-to-day work?
2. What are their strengths?
3. What are their weaknesses?
4. How much time do they spend working on things that are outside of their skill sets?
5. Are you asking some of your team members to do production work in addition to the
highly strategic and original creation?
6. Do you have simpler, tactical work that could be handed off to newer team members or
external resources to free up your core team?
7. What’s your gut feeling about how happy your team is?
8. Has your team taken time to pursue professional development opportunities?
9. What does your team need to look like in five years? In two years? In six months?
What is the gap and how can you move your team in that direction?
10. Are there specific technical skills that you need your team to develop or that you need
to acquire from outside?
11. Designers and writers often need to cross the boundaries into coding... Is your team
learning the latest technical skills that they need to develop for emerging platforms?
However you approach this exercise, ultimately you want to achieve an understanding of
your current situation, as it relates to what your future needs will be. This puts you in a more
empowered and proactive position when it comes to making staffing decisions.

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Manage Proactively.
Step 3
Always recruit, even if
you don’t have an open
position
As our survey indicated, 58% of managers expand their Aquent’s Heads Up
team only when the workload becomes excessive or when mobile app and
additional expertise is needed. Other situations might
MyAquent portal allow
include long-term employee absences, unexpected
departures, or seasonal spikes in workload. Knowing that talent in our network
these situations will most likely arise in your organization, to update our recruiters
you can increase your launch speed by having a pool of immediately when they
pre-qualified resources.
are available to work for
The challenge here is the time required. Given everything our clients.
marketing and creative leaders must juggle on a daily basis,
building and managing an active pipeline of talent can be a
daunting task. Continuously sourcing candidates, particularly
for in-demand positions such as Mobile App Developers,
User Experience Designers, and Interaction Designers/UI
can be particularly time consuming. Maintaining relation-
ships with active and passive job seekers on your own is a
full-time job in itself. Knowing when a great candidate is
available, or is about to become available, is key.

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Manage Proactively.
Regardless of what process you have in place for hiring contingent resources, it is important
that you assess that process by asking the following questions:
1. Who was the best source of candidates for your most recent opening?
2. How many applicants did you receive?
3. Did you feel like you received a significant number of qualified candidates?
4. When you consider the skills gap of your team, did you see those skills in
the candidates?
5. Did you feel your HR department was fully involved in the recruiting process?
6. How many resumes did you receive for your most recent opening?
7. How many people did you interview for a single opening?
8. Did you review their portfolio, their wireframes, or their code?
9. Did you assess their skills on specific software applications?
10. How long did it take from job posting to actual start date?
11. Would you consider your last hire a successful hire? If not, why not?
12. Would you consider your hiring and onboarding process efficient?
When you add all of the hours spent finding temporary candidates, reviewing resumes,
and interviewing and onboarding new employees… how much time did it take?
For contingent positions in particular, your answer should be in days or weeks, not months.

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Conclusion
Marketing and creative teams are being stretched in terms of their
workload capacity and skills with emerging technology. As a hiring
manager, you need to determine how best to balance the work
between internal and external resources and find ways to either build
capacity and technical expertise within your team, or acquire it from
external resources.
Based on our survey, your organization is likely to use some combination
of internal and external resources to complete marketing and creative
projects. Additionally, you are likely to see projects come up too
quickly for the organization to respond fast enough to relieve the
pressure. The reactive nature of these situations can lead to additional
stress for you and your team. This is where these proactive steps
come in: anticipate, evaluate, and recruit. Anticipate your future
project needs, evaluate your team and identify the gaps in capacity
and skill set, and continuously seek future team members who can
help you move your team forward. Your internal and external partners
can help with these evaluation tasks as you come up with the solution
to get ahead of your staffing needs.

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Manage Proactively.
Marketing and Creative
Workforce Trends Survey
Information
This survey was conducted online by Inavero on behalf of Aquent,
and included 580 responses from marketing, creative, and digital
professionals. It spans a variety of industries and organization sizes
across the U.S., providing commentary from industry professionals
on how their marketing, creative, and interactive teams manage their
marketing, digital, and creative needs. More than half of all respondents
worked for companies with a global reach, and one third reported
leveraging marketing resources outside of the U.S.
The survey took place in June and July, 2012. Respondents included
marketing, creative, and digital professionals on lists provided by
Aquent as well as respondents from an independent online panel of
marketing leaders. With a pure probability sample of 580, one could
say with 95% confidence that the overall results have a sampling error
of +/- 4.1% points. The sampling error for data from sub-samples is
higher and varies.

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About Aquent
Aquent is the only global staffing company dedicated to marketing
and creative services exclusively for Fortune 1000 companies. The
world’s most renowned global brands come to Aquent for high-caliber
freelance talent. Its division, Vitamin T, provides mid-sized and ad
agency clients with faster, easier access to in-demand interactive
talent. Aquent and Vitamin T have built an impressive network of
more than 400,000 marketing and creative services professionals,
including print and interactive designers, UX designers and developers,
copywriters, content strategies, branders, managers, market researchers
and more.
To learn more about Aquent, visit aquent.com or call 855.767.6333.

16. 16
Manage Proactively.
Your Path to Proactivity Starts With
These Questions...
Anticipate how your annual plan can Continually evaluate your current
(and will) change team’s performance and skills
1. What new technologies or communications 10. How consistent are your team’s job descriptions
vehicles might require you to augment your with the actual day-to-day work?
existing team’s skill set?
11. What are their strengths?
2. What do you know about your customers and
competition that might require you to get a new 12. What are their weaknesses?
product to market faster?
13. How much time do they spend working on
3. If your industry is highly regulated, are there things that are outside of their skill sets?
any new legal mandates forthcoming that might
require you to change your product strategy and 14. Are you asking some of your team members
messaging? to do production work in addition to the highly
strategic and original creation?
4. What are your recurring big-ticket projects?
Do they overlap? 15. Do you have simpler, tactical work that could be
handed off to newer team members or external
5. What percentage of your recurring projects do resources to free up your core team?
you outsource and why?
16. What’s your gut feeling about how happy your
6. What percentage of the work completed last team is?
year was unexpected?
17. Has your team taken time to pursue professional
7. What percentage of the unexpected work did development opportunities?
you outsource?
18. What does your team need to look like in five
8. When you did outsource the work, what were years? In two years? In six months? What is the
the costs? gap and how can you move your team in that
direction?
9. Do you have headcount for more permanent
employees? If yes, is there any value in keeping 19. Are there specific technical skills that you
those roles as contract positions?
need your team to develop or that you need to
acquire from outside?
20. Designers and writers often need to cross the
boundaries into coding... Is your team learning
the latest technical skills that they need to
develop for emerging platforms?

17. 17
Manage Proactively.
Always recruit, even if you don’t have an
open position
21. Who was the best source of candidates for your most
recent opening?
22. How many applicants did you receive?
23. Did you feel like you received a significant number of
qualified candidates?
24. When you consider the skills gap of your team, did you
see those skills in the candidates?
25. Did you feel your HR department was fully involved in
the recruiting process?
26. How many resumes did you receive for your most
recent opening?
27. How many people did you interview for a single
opening?
28. Did you review their portfolio, their wireframes, or
their code?
29. Did you assess their skills on specific software
applications?
30. How long did it take from job posting to actual start
date?
31. Would you consider your last hire a successful hire?
If not, why not?
32. Would you consider your hiring and onboarding
process efficient?