No room at the agency inn? – illustration by Mitchell Murphy-Reid
The job market for juniors is hard as hundreds of grads compete to join the agency rat race. Lola Bellamy-Hill reports on current trends in CV land.
Overcast skies follow me one morning outside a Ponsonby café. I’m waiting for a director of account management to arrive so I can introduce myself.
For six months, I’ve been on countless coffee dates as I try to make myself known in a highly volatile job market for graduates. In fact, I haven’t gone to many traditional job interviews. Junior roles are few and far between right now. When there are, you can guarantee another 200 applications next to yours by the end of the day. I don’t blame you guys for being blasé about them – anyone would be overwhelmed. Everyone in this field, regardless of seniority, gets shuffled around. Juniors have to find a place in the deck before we’re even in the hands of a workplace.
The director turns up, we shake hands, make pleasantries and conversation. It’s an illuminating talk. I’m always fascinated to ask about the journey people’s careers have taken them on. The work is nice, but the human side is always more thrilling to me. I ask him about trends he thinks will become more prevalent in agency-land recruitment in the foreseeable future. He tells me everybody is struggling for clients, projects and budgets.
Glorified job trials
With that economic constraint, three and six-month contracts provide a bit of breathing room – no annual or sick leave for Finance to bite their nails over. In this sense, he explains, they’re glorified job trials. Our 30 minutes disappear fast, and I thank him profusely for his time. He tells me: “Let’s keep in touch.”
Later that evening, I catch up with two friends over drinks. They’re a junior creative team who had secured an internship at an agency. But what was a contract for three months suddenly became one month.
They ask me how the hell I’ve managed to go on this city-wide agency tour – no one is even replying to their cold-call emails.
Shrinking timeframes
Another pair of creative friends also secured a three-month internship, though they weren’t retained anywhere in-house afterward, and have been met with similar silence. I hear through the grapevine that yet another friend, a creative intern at a different agency, was let go to make room for an established copywriter.
I’m astonished to hear how these timeframes shrink rapidly. How is any good work meant to be done on borrowed time? A few weeks later, I’m in the offices of a multi-national to talk to a director of recruitment. I mention this trend – he’s noticed it too.
“I’ll get requests, ‘Can we bring this guy on for a month?’” he says. “But I always ask them, ‘Why?’”
He says it’s cruel not to provide something concrete. People have responsibilities: rent, food, families. They deserve stability, and it doesn’t sit right with him to exploit people’s desperation.
On the flip side, it seems everyone is hiring at a senior level right now. They’ve all run off to London, or New York, or wherever.
A recruiter for another agency tells me it becomes, for senior hires, a betting game.
“But, in my experience, these specialised hires have missed out on coming up through the grunt work,” she notes, “so they’re not as in tune with the culture, which translates to work missing the mark a bit.”
Safe… but stale
There’s a consistent groan in most of my talks with senior industry players that creative output has become stale.
Another friend, an established junior creative of two years in a digital agency, bemoans how executives shut down his concepts for something safer. I wonder if, in uncertain economic times, playing safe is a more reliable way of retaining clients – even if work doesn’t break through.
The reality for grads is unstable contracted micro-gigs, leading to stale creative output, with investment in seniors that may not be as tapped into the culture. These are not the trends executives have noticed.
I’ve been writing this article at my local café and bouncing drafts to the staff when the caffeine rushes die down. One shares a story of two ad executives who had a meeting there recently.
They noticed many have left for greener pastures elsewhere. “Good luck if they think they’ll make it in Australia,” they mock.
Bring the flavour
So, what’s the solution? I propose a challenge: the Euro Summer Migration is coming up, and it’s the perfect time to bet on a junior. The rat race is already hard enough for grads as we fight over scraps of work. Let us help you make a feast with thrilling new flavours.
This story comes from NZ Marketing magazine issue 83, Jun-Aug 2025. Why not subscribe? Get four issues a year for just $50 (including delivery) if you autorenew.
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