The Mid-Level Conundrum
by Miriam Hanna, Director
There’s no doubt that corporate affairs agencies are facing a challenge this year. Clients want more for the same (or less) money, and the pressure is on to get the most efficiency and productivity out of client teams. The mid-level is feeling the pinch more than others, what most consultancies would call an Account Manager. This level is experiencing greater issues with retention and hiring. So, why is it so difficult to hire and keep great people at that level?
Burnout
When clients feedback that Account Managers are leaving to go travelling and not coming back to the industry, alarm bells start ringing.
Granted, this is a generation of the pandemic who missed out on gap years and opportunities to travel but to have a fair number of those people not return, suggests the experience hasn’t been good. If you struggle to retain Account Managers, remember that those at the more senior end of the business will inevitably get pulled into more junior-level work, causing frustration and risking further retention issues. Think carefully about resource planning before it gets to a crisis point.
Impact of the Hybrid World
There’s no escaping that the generation that joined the corporate affairs industry during the pandemic years have had a very different experience to those prior. As standard, they have only ever worked in a hybrid or flexible environment. Those trained virtually, simply didn’t get the same opportunities to learn through osmosis from other members of the team and have developed a more task-orientated approach. That leads to difficulties when looking for proactivity and the ability to do the big picture thinking. As a result, we’re seeing a huge variation in skillset that needs serious time and investment to address.
Changing Role
How does the role of an Account Manager evolve in a world where there is an inevitability to AI featuring more and more, and taking on the execution work? If Chat GPT can generate a first draft of a social media content calendar and an Account Manager just needs to review it, how does their role evolve to doing more high-value work?
This is where the greatest potential sits for an evolution of the mid-level of an agency. As an aside, some agencies are looking to support their businesses with a new structure and developing Creative Directors, Client experience and maybe even BD teams. With the agency landscape evolving, let’s hope that the mid-level will be able to benefit from significant development.
Salaries
There is no doubt that salaries at this level have climbed. And being frank, there is a school of thought that they have not gone up nearly enough. Living in London is expensive, as is commuting. If there is a swing towards spending more time in the office, then a discussion around pay will need to be right alongside that. Put simply, people won’t travel into the office more regularly if it will negatively impact them financially to do so!
MadlinHanna Consulting is a recruitment consultancy specialising in public affairs, corporate communications and financial PR. Contact us in London on +44 (0) 20 8088 4102 or in Brussels on +32 (0) 2 586 38 98 for more information or a confidential conversation about these services and more.