I recently sat on a panel at the IAB Leadership Summit on Marketing Technology. Despite the moderator doing their best to stay focused on what is keeping marketers up at night (viewability, ad fraud, attribution), the conversation quickly moved to addressing the inevitable question: Is there a digital skills shortage in our industry?
The digital skills shortage in Australia has been well documented. In April 2015, The Slade Group Report Australian Digital Skills and Salary Survey found that nearly a quarter of Australian business found it difficult to source employees with digital skills. Global recruiter Hays continues to report that only a small portion of marketers (18%) rate their digital skills as very good in a time when digital is becoming more and more dominant. There are also a number of anecdotal pieces, describing a hiring manager’s struggle to find digital talent across trade publications, and just last month a group of digital leaders got together to talk about how to solve the digital skills crisis.
When AdRoll launched in Australia, we knew we needed to build our team, fast. Since opening the office I have interviewed more than 150 people for positions at AdRoll. We’ve built a 30 strong digital sales and marketing team. Approximately 40% of those people come from non-digital backgrounds.
Whether you come from a digital background or not - when you join AdRoll, you are put through a training course for new employees, we call it New Roller Bootcamp. It’s a two week long full-time course where new employees learn: how the company AdRoll was founded, digital advertising vocabulary, how to optimise a campaigns in our system and much more. The program is tailored to the specific role that new employee was hired for. Without fail, every new Roller must complete bootcamp - even me, who joined AdRoll as the ANZ managing director and with over 15 years of digital experience.
Yes, I know there are some things that we don’t teach you and, in all honesty, we probably can’t teach you. We can’t teach you how to be curious about the world around you and give you a desire to continually grow and learn. We can’t teach you to be open and genuine - a characteristic we value in our employees, which determines how they work together and how they work with our customers. We can’t teach you to be innovative, passionate or hard-working. But those are all the qualities that we need our Rollers (employees) to have. (We also can’t teach you to have fun, but we can teach you how to roller-skate.)
These skills aren’t limited to people who have digital experience. 40% of my team came from non-digital positions, but are now highly successful within the digital industry.
I am not discounting digital advertising experience, but consider how quickly this industry evolves. Digital knowledge becomes outdated pretty quickly. In the past six months, AdRoll has launched a new algorithm and pivoted the entire business to sell a new customer acquisition product. If I hired a sales team who could only sell retargeting, then we’d all be in trouble right now. What makes digital employees valuable is their ability to learn, evolve and grow. They need to be curious about our industry and the world around them. This drives them to continually look to learn new skills and improve themselves. Again, that spirit is not limited to people with digital experience.
Which is why my response to when posed this question on Wednesday was simply, “No. I don’t think there is a shortage of qualified people.” I believe that hiring managers just need to hire the right people, not the right skillset.
My advice to hiring managers is to hire people, not expertise. Seek out employees who are coachable, who have integrity and who are a great fit for your team. Then, build a great training program to teach them the skills they need to be successful in your company. And if you’re lucky enough to find employees who have the specialised background you need great. But that training program will still be valuable to them, they will learn about your product, company and culture.
To those who argue that we have a digital skills shortage, I say, “you’re just not looking in the right place.”
Ben Sharp, managing director ANZ, AdRoll