Beware, CMO: A Temp Might Steal Your Post
Economy Stokes Trend Toward Short-Term Hires in Marketing Suite
By Jack Neff
Published: September 08, 2008
BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) -- The hard times facing the marketing
industry may be only temporary, but so, it turns out, are a lot of the
jobs.
With an increasing number of companies looking to reduce the
full-time head counts in their marketing departments, and a glut of
experienced baby boomers available to do consulting stints, a growing
number of marketers are looking to fill brand-manager, project-leader
and even marketing-director positions with short-term employees.
A trend tracker on Indeed, a search engine that scans U.S. job
listings throughout the internet, shows a sharp spike since May on
listings that include the word "temporary" in ads seeking marketing
managers, directors and researchers. The spike punctuates a general
uptick in such marketing listings relative to all postings since 2005.
The percentage of online job listings containing the words
"temporary," "marketing" and "director" surged roughly 50% between May
1 and July 31, according to Indeed.com, even though the trend line for
just "marketing" and "director" remained flat during the period.
"I'm finding a lot more companies now are [using] contract
employees and consultants at the higher-level jobs, such as director of
marketing and senior brand managers," said Michael Carrillo, president
of CPG Jobs, which operates the job site CPGjoblist. He also works as a
recruiter.
While the move is clearly aimed at controlling head counts and
cutting costs, Mr. Carrillo said he believes demographic factors are at
play, such as baby-boomer employees who are downsized out of positions
but aren't ready to retire and have valuable experience.
Broad range of marketers
A variety of firms specialize in the
burgeoning area, including conventional temporary-service firms such as
Kelly Services and Manpower. They're seeing temporary marketing jobs on
the rise even as temporary employment overall has declined steadily
since early 2007 due to the slowing economy.
The surge appears to be coming from a surprisingly broad array of marketers, as well as old and new media.
An ad last week from Creative Group, a unit of Robert Half
International, for an unnamed Southern California beauty marketer seeks
a marketing director for a temporary assignment possibly converting to
full-time -- and offers someone with eight-plus years of industry
experience $50 to $60 an hour.
Apparently the same Southern California beauty marketer seeks
to round out the team with a product-development manager at $20 to $30
an hour, a bilingual media planner at $25 to $35 an hour and a
"marketing guru" at $43 to $50 an hour. Creative Group stands to be the
employer of the outsourced team.
Media companies also appear to be stepping up temporary hires.
Among temporary positions advertised online: a sales and marketing
coordinator for Time Warner's Health.com; a marketing program manager
for EchoStar's Sling Media, marketer of SlingBox; and a site manager
whose duties would include marketing of a national portal and
social-networking site from Gannett Digital, MomsLikeMe.
"Everybody is looking at head count and ways to reduce it,"
said Joe Hawley, who helped lead the turnaround of Doctor's
Dermatologic Formula for two years before the business was sold to
Procter & Gamble Co. last year.
The veteran of Avon Products, Unilever and Liz Claiborne is
now working as a consultant with his own firm, Hawley Global Partners.
While he's open to another permanent position, he's also plying a
series of consulting gigs and believes marketing -- and even general
management functions -- increasingly will be outsourced in the way
information-technology and human-resources positions have been in
recent years.
Most of these marketers aren't contractors directly through
the employer, he said, but through third-party firms such as Aquent,
which specializes in providing temporary marketing-industry help from
its own pool of permanent employees and says it serves 90 of the
Fortune 100 corporations.
The downside
"You'll look at a company and not be able to
tell who's a contract employee, who's [a permanent employee] from a
third-party resource and who's [an employee of] the company," Mr.
Hawley said.
Of course, the downside can be quality, said Dave Gallagher,
president of Boyden, an Atlanta-based executive-search firm. "Nobody is
going to leave their job," he said, "to be a 90-day temp contractor."
But Mr. Hawley said temps aren't always getting worse deals, and some can even be of higher quality.
"I call it rent to buy," he said, adding that many of the
positions have permanent potential, sometimes involve equity stakes or
involve efforts to bypass corporate salary caps, and can attract people
with broader or more current experience than permanent employees.
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