Attracting Diverse Talent

Building an employment brand

To ensure a sustainable, brilliant future for our industry we need to attract the best and brightest talent. Importantly, this talent needs to represent all of Aotearoa New Zealand.

This means we need to attract more diverse talent; it means welcoming more Māori and Pasifika Peoples; it means providing a viable career opportunity for those with disabilities and the neurodiverse; and it requires our work environments to be inclusive spaces for all.

The first stage of this journey is to develop an employment brand for our industry.

The Challenge

"I simply didn't know this world existed. Schools and universities don't tell us anything about this."

Simply put, unless young people have a personal connection to our industry, they don't really know we exist. This challenge is amplified among under-represented groups.

Ironically, we've got a visibility problem.

The Plan

We are developing an employment brand platform with the following objectives:

1. Provide potential talent with the resources to better understand the career opportunities available in our industry; to see 'people like me' succeeding in the advertising industry; to break down the barriers and misperceptions that currently exist. We'll provide pathway advice and enable students to understand what they need to do to be best prepared for a career in advertising.

2. Increase our relationships with tertiary providers – going beyond the universities, to forge relationships with pathway organisations, skills-based institutes – to reach more potential great talent.

3. Gain greater reach, inspiring school students to imagine a career where they can be creative and earn good money in a long-term career.

4. Collaborate with member agencies to build connections with key secondary schools to enable face to face engagement.

5. Explore industry-wide work experience and internships to enable students to see inside our industry and remove the fear of the unknown.