How We Made An Ad Agency The Best Place To Work in 2019

"Don't join the company, it's a complete mess. They don't know what they're doing and most of the good employees have already jumped ship." As a candidate, imagine hearing those words from a former employee of the company you had just received an offer from. What would you do?

Join anyway... at least that's what I ended up doing. In 2017, I took the offer from Howard Daniels to join the Talent Acquisition team at GroupM. Despite the warning in bright red letters from my colleague at the time, I decided that this was my calling, my next big challenge, my raison d'etre. This is the story of how we changed that narrative from "jumping ship" to "the best place to work in 2019".

For those unfamiliar with GroupM, we are a "media investments management company"... essentially we're a holding company for ad agencies and media buying companies. A complicated and vast neural network of sorts - as I hope you can already tell, we're not big fans of simple and straightforward.

I was brought in to help recruit for Xaxis, GroupM's programmatic media buying arm, and mPlatform, the company's centralized advanced technology and analytics suite. Initially I was skeptical when Howard told me I'd be recruiting for programmatic talent and would have to help with account management and sales needs as well.

It was horrifying that I had no clue what programmatic was, but even worse was that I didn't even know what an account manager did. The next year for me would be the biggest learning experience of my life and in retrospect, one of the best decisions I have ever made (more on that in another post).

It has now been a year and a half and I can truly say we've changed what it means to work at an agency (not just internally, but externally as well).

Let me tell you how we did it.

One Big Move

It all started with the move.

There were murmurs and whispers since early 2015 that GroupM's senior leadership team would be consolidating all of our agencies into one building. Well in 2018, we finally made it happen. Kudos to Kelly Clark, Kristin Mooney, Brian Gleason and the many other forward-thinking individuals who made this project a reality.

To give you some context into the complexity of all this, our leadership team made it possible for five thousand employees who were once sitting across eight locations in NYC to work under one roof at 3 World Trade Center (now that's a feat!). To up the ante, we let the entire neighborhood know we're here with one of the biggest and "dopest" company block parties to ever embrace the city. Check it out!

As to our offices, we retrofitted it to each agency's needs and wants. We now proudly boast inclusive spaces across fourteen floors with some of the best views of the city, a terrace overlooking the Hudson, and even a Game Room. Don't believe me? Take a look:

We Made Life Work For Our People

Agency life is very demanding - we win clients, we lose clients, we commit to overtime to perfect client pitches and stay late to make sure campaigns are optimized. Amidst all the ups and downs, it sometimes can feel like there is no work-life balance. Yes, we recognize that our employees have families to get to - many of them are parents and others come from the deep corners of Connecticut and New Jersey to get to work every single day.

So we decided to make life work for each and every one of them with a few new initiatives including our LifeWorks (pun intended?) policy. What is it you ask? Well we decided to empower our employees to work when and where they choose, within reason, so long as they meet our team and client expectations. Our top priority, from a business perspective, is the excellence of our services to our clients and our employees stand behind that. So in return we let them stand or sit from wherever they choose.

But wait, we didn't stop there. We decided to invest in the well-being of our employees. How so you ask?

Well what if I told you we had an onsite clinic? (oops, I just did). Yes, our GroupMD Wellness Center is available to all of our benefits eligible employees and is staffed with nurses, physical therapists and even a behavioral health counselor.

For mothers, our spaces are equipped with Wellness Rooms in case they decide to bring their little ones to work and need a private area to breastfeed...and when it's not in use, employees are empowered to take power naps (wink).

There's so much more to being at GroupM than just working with some of the top clients in the world and I dare you to explore some of those benefits here.

Recruiters Working Together

You know what really sucks about large holding companies? Having to apply for the same role across different agencies and then feel like you're in the middle of a war between two hiring managers who are supposed to be on one team. For a long time, that's how GroupM operated and we had our fair share of drama. It sucked but how could we centralize talent across all of our agencies when we didn't even know one another?

Enter Michael Wright. I swear he's not as morose as this picture makes him out to be, quite the opposite actually.

In another lifetime Michael had led Talent Acquisition for GroupM in APAC before leaving to do the same for a popular ride-sharing platform in Asia.

Well GroupM wanted it's man back and they knew just what kind of project would keep him busy.

Michael was tasked with corralling 40+ recruiters and proving to us that we were greater collectively as opposed to working across our siloed agencies. I think he would agree that doing that was a piece of cake...well with the help of Diana Blancone that is.

The tougher task was getting buy-in from the heads of each of the agencies, essentially by telling them that he would be taking away their beloved recruiter(s) and supplanting them with a full roster of talent acquisition experts.

It did take some time but he and our Senior Leadership Team did it.

Our team now sits across six functional recruitment areas and our candidates are now considered equally for all opportunities across each of our agencies. No more infighting and no more drama, we're now focusing on improving our candidate experience.

In the meantime, here's a breakdown of the six recruitment functions with the extraordinary leads for each team:

• Executive Search, Howard Daniels
• Analytics, Edward Cruz
• Core, Nicky Moona
• Future Talent, Stephen Echeverri
• Programmatic / Ad Ops, Rebecca Spinac
• Search & Social, Mariko Kunitomo

I have yet to meet a group of leaders who are as caring and as selfish for their people as these guys are. Thank you, we could not have asked for better managers, mentors and friends.

Oh and by the way, in the midst of all this we also decided that our employees are some of our best candidates. Not only do we look for every chance to promote them for open roles but our Internal Mobility team, led by the wonderful Gillian Ramos, works with each employee to see how we can position them for success across all of our agency openings.

Now that's baller.

Far From Perfect

To sum it all up, we're the gold standard for agencies.

I kid, we're actually far from perfect or gold for that matter. We have our share of problems like every company does, whether that's understaffed teams, tough clients or rough quarters.

We understand that we can't control everything but the things that we can, we do.

We do whatever we can to keep our people happy, engaged and passionate about working at the world's largest media-buying company...and that's partly how we became the best advertising agency to work for in 2019.