Why agency employees leave and how to understand why
Creatives, planners and account teams leave for reasons beyond pay. How to run an exit conversation in an agency, spot patterns by account and act on them.
7 min readRead articleA venue earns on a few huge days a month, when hundreds of guests expect everything to work. It needs a small permanent team and a larger group of extra hands that arrive, serve and vanish.

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Share your requirementsAn event or wedding venue hires out halls, lawns and rooms for weddings, receptions, parties and corporate events. A small permanent crew of manager, captains, housekeeping, maintenance and kitchen staff is joined on busy days by casual waiters, helpers and cleaners. Weekends and auspicious dates are fully booked while weekdays can be empty. A wedding runs late into the night, with hundreds of guests, family pressure and caterers, decorators and DJs working in the same space. Each event is a one-off, and the guest remembers every failure. Staff handle food, crowds, electricals and cash. Clean-up runs till dawn, and the next event may start by noon. See HR for marketing and creative agencies.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in event and wedding venues. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
On a big date, many extra hands join, and nobody has shown them the service standards or the guests' expectations.
Several events in a week mean long nights and early starts, with overtime in cash or not at all.
Rival venues pay a little more on the same night, and a hall is short at the last hour.
Food handling, washing and waste are rushed, and a guest falls ill or complains.
A dissatisfied host shouts at whoever stands nearest, and the captain has no authority or support.
Caterer, decorator and DJ each bring their own people, and responsibility for damage or delay is unclear.
Broken glass, missing cutlery and torn drapes are charged to whoever is near, with no record of how they happened.
Permanent staff are idle on slow days, and good ones move to hotels with steadier hours.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Recruitment and Talent Acquisition; Employee Administration; HR Operations and Governance. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for marketing, advertising and creative, not in general.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
The pieces a event and wedding venues business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
A list of reliable extra staff, confirmed ahead and given a short briefing before each event.
A list of reliable extra staff, confirmed ahead and given a short briefing before each event. The recruitment process helps keep the pool alive.
Dress, greeting, serving order and what to do if a guest complains.
Dress, greeting, serving order and what to do if a guest complains. The HR documentation process helps keep it current.
Staff numbers by event size, with captains named and break times set.
Staff numbers by event size, with captains named and break times set. The attendance and leave process covers records.
A short, practical session each season with a record of who attended.
A short, practical session each season with a record of who attended. The workplace health, safety and wellbeing work supports it.
What outside caterers and decorators may and may not do, who is the point of contact and how damage is noted.
What outside caterers and decorators may and may not do, who is the point of contact and how damage is noted.
Use slow weeks for training, deep cleaning and maintenance, and set a fair way to share peak pay.
Use slow weeks for training, deep cleaning and maintenance, and set a fair way to share peak pay. See compensation benchmarking.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
A dependable casual pool and a clear hiring route for captains and permanent staff.
Service standards, vendor rules and damage-reporting that everyone reads.
Event rosters, break rules and fair overtime for late nights.
Food hygiene and electrical safety routines that match busy event days.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in marketing, advertising and creative, and one on each of the topics this page points to.

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Confirm a few days ahead, pay on time and fairly, and bring back those who worked well. Reliable payment builds a loyal pool.
Use a one-page standard and a ten-minute briefing before every event, with a captain paired to each group.
Agree the rule with vendors and hosts in writing, record damage at the time and avoid charging staff without a fair look at what happened.
Plan useful work such as training and maintenance, offer steady pay and share the peak-date bonus fairly.
Give the captain a script, let a manager step in quickly and record the issue. Most complaints settle with calm, early attention.
We would ask how casuals are briefed, who covers a no-show and how damage is recorded. A good first project is a casual pool with a one-page standard. Scope is written for you to accept or change.
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