The Challenge
IPG Media Brands Head is one of the UK’s leading digital marketing agencies – working with some of the biggest brands around, IPG “Advise where best to place their advertising and we can structure those deals for them,” IPG Media Brands Head of Digital Alan King explains.
The company operates in a competitive sector, where the war for talent can get intense – finding the right people with the necessary skills is not easy in such a fast moving and dynamic industry.
Given that, IPG went in search of a solution to their talent acquisition challenge. The journey led them to Arch Apprentices, a training provider who have carved out a niche in the Digital and IT apprenticeship space.
The Objective
Sarah Mitchell, IPG’s Head of Talent Acquisition said that from the off, Arch was ahead of the game in finding the right people to fit IPG’s needs. “The process has been quite simple,” Mitchell says. “Arch came in and took the time to understand the roles we were recruiting for. They did all the work – sourcing the best CVs, advising us on how to proceed, inviting people in for interviews and run it like a normal recruitment process.”
Jason Moss of Arch Apprentices says “Working with a company like IPG Media Brands means understanding their very high level demands: they need good people with the right attitude – and they need them quickly and with the minimum of fuss. That’s what we aimed to provide.”
Alex Norman runs IPG’s Ad Operations team. As such he’s been impressed with the calibre of candidates put forward by Arch to begin Digital Apprenticeships. “They’ve come into the role with great tenacity and enthusiasm for digital,” he says.
“They tend to be young, and so they’re very comfortable with technology. We also find that they’re very savvy about the demands and trends within the tech space.
“Anyone coming in at apprentice level is already used to the technology so they get up to speed quickly.”
How Arch Apprentices helped
So what of the successful apprentices themselves? For Edward Gilbert, pursuing an apprenticeship at a fast growing company like IPG Media Brands was a no-brainer. “I thought it was a great way to get into the industry,” he says.
“It made a lot more sense than spending three or four years at University and racking up thousands in debt with the possibility of not finding a job in what’s a very competitive sector.”
Luke Brightling was taken on as a digital apprentice in 2015, and he says that, having looked at a range of apprenticeship training providers, Arch had the best options available. “I went for the briefing session and found that IPG looked like a really good company to work for. So I came for the interview and it seemed like the right fit for me.
Gilbert has come on leaps and bounds in his apprenticeship so far, spearheading a project that involved integrating a range of analytics tools, DCM and publishing data to help a major client decide on its digital strategy. “We bring all that together and talk to the planners and buyers top understand what metrics they need from us to do their job better.
The future
More progress has followed. Alan King reports the first apprentice to enter the scheme got a full time job straight away, while others are already showing great promise.
“We’ve been successful so far,” King says, pointing out that when it comes to hiring the most talented people, the right mindset was more important than specific experience. “That that means we want people who code in their spare time – digital natives that live and breathe technology.”
The scheme is still in its early days, but clearly, for IPG and their high flying apprentices, the sky’s the limit.
