The best people are the most poachable: HR for a marketing agency

A creative director resigned from an agency, took a client relationship she had built over four years, and was followed within a month by two junior designers who had worked mostly for her. The agency had known she was unhappy about the way work was credited — a campaign she had led had been presented to the industry with the founder's name on it — and had not acted, because she had not formally complained. When the managing director tried to reassign her accounts, he discovered the agency could not say what utilisation the remaining team was running at, because the timesheet system and the HR system had never been connected and the question had never been asked in hours.

Agency HR sits between two pressures: utilisation targets that reward being busy, and creative work that needs thinking time. The people who resolve that tension best are the most valuable and the most poachable, and most of what agencies get wrong is a failure to treat them as the asset they are.

CAPACITY     billable hours available, by discipline and level
             - not headcount
PYRAMID      planned, not accumulated: the shape of seniors to
             juniors the work actually needs
PITCH        held deliberately, because pitches are otherwise
CAPACITY     staffed by overloading the people already at limit
FREELANCE    decided by account stability - stable accounts get
MIX          permanent people, volatile ones get flexible cover
LEAVE        visible in resourcing before it is approved, so a
             pitch week is not approved away

The timesheet and the HR record are the same
question asked twice. Connect them.

The managing director in the opening could not answer the utilisation question because the two systems had never been joined, and that join is the first piece of HR reporting and analytics an agency needs: utilisation and billable data per individual, capacity and availability visible for resourcing, leave visible before approval, skills tagged for staffing decisions. Without it, capacity planning happens on instinct, pitches are staffed by whoever is nearest, and the people already at their limit are the ones who get the extra work.

Creative people build careers on demonstrable work, and an agency that is casual about attribution loses them to one that is not. The creative director in the opening did not leave over money. She left because the thing she had made was presented as somebody else's, and the agency treated that as a sensitivity rather than as the breach it was. Credit and attribution — on work presented externally, on award entries, on case studies, in what people may show in a portfolio — are an explicit policy, agreed in advance and applied consistently, not a matter left to the founder's judgement in the moment. Writing it down, in a page, is HR policies and governance work with a specific sector payoff, and it is the policy most agencies do not have until they lose someone over it.

1. 1

   Agree the credit rules in writing

   Who is credited on external presentations, award entries and case studies, and how. Before the next campaign, not after the next resignation.

2. 2

   Agree the portfolio position while people are employed

   What may be shown, how it is attributed. Settled at joining, it is a paragraph; settled at exit, it is a dispute.

3. 3

   Handle the breach when it happens

   A credit taken wrongly is corrected publicly, the same week. The team is watching whether the agency means the policy.

4. 4

   Say what the agency values, and pay for it

   Craft that is credited and rewarded stays. Craft that is absorbed into the founder's name leaves.

Agency relations issues frequently originate outside the agency: unreasonable demands, last-minute changes, a client contact who is rude to the account team. The agency decides, each time, whether to absorb the behaviour or address it with the client, and the team draws the correct conclusion from what it sees. An agency that will not raise a client's conduct with the client has taught its staff that the agency's commercial interest outranks their working conditions, and the good ones leave first. Protecting the team from conduct outside the brief is a leadership behaviour, and it is worth stating as policy so that account managers know they will be backed when they enforce it.

Agencies normalise intense periods — pitches, launches, deadlines — and address the cumulative effect only when someone leaves or breaks down. Tracking hours during pitch periods is resisted because the answer is uncomfortable, and it is the only way to know whether the pattern is occasional or structural. The honest practices are: utilisation expectations stated rather than implied, protected creative time within billable structures, recovery time after intense periods actually taken, junior staff protected from disproportionate crunch load, and the two juniors in the opening — who followed the creative director — not treated as a mystery. They followed her because she protected them from the crunch and credited their work, which the agency should have been doing.

• Utilisation stated, with a basis. A target nobody explains is experienced as arbitrary even when it is not.
• Creative time protected in practice, not only in policy — visible in the resourcing plan as time, not squeezed from evenings.
• Recovery after crunch, taken. A lieu day promised and never granted is worse than none.
• Juniors' hours watched specifically. They are least able to refuse work and most at risk, and their recorded hours are the honest signal.

When a senior agency person leaves, two things are at risk — the client who trusts them and the work in progress that only they understand — and both need a handover that is a task rather than a hope. Client introductions to the continuing team, led by the outgoing person; live campaign status documented with next actions; creative files consolidated and access to client platforms transferred; freelancer and vendor relationships documented; the pitch pipeline handed over; the confidentiality and non-solicit position confirmed. The portfolio and credit position, if it was agreed at joining, is a line to confirm; if it was not, it is the dispute that starts now. This is the exit and offboarding process designed for an agency, and the part most often skipped — the client introduction led by the leaver — is the part that decides whether the client stays.

Connect the timesheet to the HR record, so the utilisation question has an answer. Write the credit policy, one page, and apply it to the next external presentation. State what the agency will do about client conduct, and do it once, visibly. Those three are what HR for marketing and creative agencies work begins with, and none of them costs more than an afternoon. The agency in the opening lost a creative director, a client and two juniors over a credit it could have given; agency HR work exists to make sure the next one is given before the resignation.