For a creative agency like MOCEAN, nothing is more fundamental to our success than how we hire and retain talent. Based on our CEO Craig Murray’s initial vision, we’ve had a 30-year legacy of discovering, mentoring, and promoting talent across the company. In fact, I benefited from this culture myself: after becoming the company’s first intern in the early 90’s, I returned ten years ago, first as an editor, then creative director, ECD, and now Chief Creative Officer. I’m now part of a leadership team dedicated to growing MOCEAN as an agency unique among our competitors that great creatives love to call home.

Below I share some of what we’ve learned, in hopes we continue to inspire generations of artists who become leaders, at our own company and industry-wide.

Minding The Gap

There’s a talk from Ira Glass where he mentions “the gap”: The space between what a young person starting out knows is great work and what they’re currently able to achieve. Some creative leaders may see that gap as a candidate's limit and look elsewhere, but at MOCEAN we’re curious about it.

Instead of evaluating a candidate’s reel or book solely at face value, we like to ask what they think of it. If a candidate is self-aware enough to articulate what they were aiming for even if they didn’t quite achieve it – and driven enough to not give up – we know they’re committed to doing the work that will close that gap. In short: vision, passion, and determination outweigh the exact state of their portfolio.

Growing Great Ideas

We aim to hire entry-level candidates when they’re passionate about something. Sure, they need to be good at whatever the initial position requires, but we’re also thinking about how this person will be part of our future growth.

We’ve found it’s critical to know the passions of our new hires and put them into the meetings and opportunities that connect with those passions as soon as possible. For instance, a newly-hired coordinator had interests in photography, filmmaking, and writing, but had just graduated with only student and personal work in her portfolio. Even as a coordinator, we made sure she was in every client meeting with access to every brief. We encouraged her to submit concepts, including for a long-time client’s big custom launch teaser.

With mentorship from the creative leads, two ideas made the final deck and one was selected to be shot, with an A-list star performing the dialogue she wrote. The teaser went on to win multiple awards, proving good ideas aren’t always tied to experience, as long as you create a collaborative, supportive space for people to bring their voice.

Building Decades Of Teams

Our industry is crazy demanding, with long hours, a deluge of projects, and compressed budgets. In this climate, some businesses drive a roster of younger, lower-cost talent to burnout, with high turnover rates as part of the business model.

Conversely, we’ve found our longevity as a company comes from decades of following Craig and our President Michael McIntyre’s founding ethos: focus on the wellness of our people. We’re proud to say MOCEAN maintains nearly twice the industry average employee retention rate, including dozens of employees with us 10-15 years. We attribute our record retention to a focus on work/life balance, the needs of parents and families, social events, encouraging time off, work-from-home flexibility, celebrating team wins, and most importantly, ensuring an employee’s hard work leads to their growth.

There’s a Catch-22 when starting out: the better you are at something, the harder it is to move up, as business demands make it difficult to disrupt a well-running team. But we’ve made it our goal to do the opposite, by encouraging people to stretch beyond their current job title, prioritizing new opportunities for young talent, and celebrating milestones across the company when people move up.

Creatives Leading Creatives

While it’s critical to our success to have good leadership, promoting people from makers to a manager of makers can be challenging: putting down their instrument and picking up the conductor’s baton initially feels like they’re leaving their creative life behind.

But I live by the belief that to be a good manager of creatives you must keep growing as a creative yourself. We encourage our leaders to stay close to the work they love and keep pushing themselves creatively, while supporting their growth as leaders with management training sessions and one-on-one coaching. This engenders trust among teams who see their leaders not just as managers, but also as fellow makers.

We hope each person’s dedication to their art & craft is an inspiration to the person next to them, pushing us all to do our best work. Given the ever-increasing demands of our industry, it’s in all of our best interests to do right by our people, to make it our priority to find them, grow them, and teach them to do the same for others.

You can learn more about MOCEAN’s work at MOCEANLA.com