Hiring creative talent—how to recruit in a post-certificate, post-portfolio school world

In 2023, Creative Circus, the advertising portfolio school in Atlanta, will close its doors after 27 years, a victim of COVID, restrictive tuition and the growing demand for digital-first skills. While it might be too soon to write the obituary of the entire genre—similar portfolio schools continue to operate—it’s a good time to reappraise how we seek a more diverse workforce in the deepest talent pool the industry has ever seen.

Here are three strategies:

Portfolios: less polish, more potential

Without the cookie-cutter assignments and mandatory national young-up-and-coming creative awards entries, portfolios of entry-level talent are going to start looking different. And that’s a good thing. We’ll start seeing less-predictable, more creative thinking birthed from internet culture and fueled by consumption, interest, and real-life experience rather than seasoned lecturers who copy and paste their syllabi.

Bad news for the portfolio reviewer who discards books not assembled with familiar, Ikea-showroom precision. It means we, as a collective, need to take a breath and retrain ourselves to recognize potential. We’ll need to shift expectations from hiring pre-packaged creatives to recognizing, nurturing and mentoring unpolished talent, agnostic of path. And it means we’ll need to shift our search even more to TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and other digital platforms.

As creative leaders, we’re already more accountable than ever for making our industry more diverse. Now we have the chance to be more inclusive by putting in a little more effort, looking past the actual work and into the thought behind it.

Credentials: more obsolete than ever

Like a lot of industries, advertising has its own nasty habit of equating certain institutions (certain programs, certain shops, certain number under number lists) with gold stars when evaluating candidates—checking boxes instead of individuals.

But are institutions still the best way to find creative minds born of and trained by the internet—where almost all resources are a (free) click away? We think not. Creators today aren’t looking to pay a hefty sum to sit in a classroom and learn about “big ideas.” They already have an audience on TikTok and an opinion about monetizing on TikTok vs Reels. There is nothing academic about this group. This should feel like freedom. The only judgment that matters is your own taste level. Replace the pay-to-play doorkeepers with personal brands.

Delete the job descriptions requiring four-year degrees or internships. Lean into internet presence and look at those already creating as opposed to those positioned to.

Recruiting: Trust the next generation

You don’t know what you don’t know. But you know who knows? Youth. Think about it—who better to trust than your junior talent? They have the network and the mindset. They can look at potential recruits in a much more modern way than you can, recognizing the skills and strengths it takes to be “in the weeds.” It’s like reverse mentorship, but for recruiting. It’s recognizing that more junior talent has a better perspective than you do.

Brief recruiting through junior members of your team. Listen to them and advocate for them to be involved in the process. The industry is moving faster than ever, and as hard as it is to admit, seniority doesn’t equate to superiority when it comes to finding new talent.

Creativity is and will always be about the new. We’ve been raised, rightly, to be suspicious of ruts, and of claimed repetitive processes leading to breakthrough outcomes. Don’t be afraid to unlearn. It’s about time the creative professional class applied our creativity just as much to shape the industry as we do with our clients.

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