Calling For A Talent & Culture Recruiting Revolutionary
By: Abu Ngauja and Cindy Cabral, joint associate directors of Talent & Culture at Martin
2020 brought a fight this year.
Martin fought back.
This year, we ran circles around invisibility and outpaced even our wildest expectations.
Despite the odds, we’ve:
- Welcomed and celebrated 70 new hires
- Added nine new client partners to our roster
- Managed 400+ productions while doing buzz-worthy work for 90%+ of our clients
We’re an agency of over 350 fighters full of delusional ambition and momentum, a momentum showing no signs of slowing.
Our Talent & Culture group is looking for an experienced partner with years of recruiting wisdom to bring that same momentum and spirit to how we find, champion and nurture our agency’s next wave of talent. Someone who will fight for all types of talent. We invite any who want to be a part of transforming our space and its people—radically and equitably—to apply.
BUT before you do, some background.
Why We’re Hiring A Talent & Culture Manager For Recruiting
This role is a big deal. For our team, and for the agency. You’ll play a very personal part in the story of us—our work and our legacy—because of the people you will find and bring to Martin.
We need someone to challenge us.
We choose to be brave at Martin, stepping boldly into conversations around equity and justice. It’s terrifying. We won’t always get it right. But we’ll never stop. We’re working to become anti-racist in every move we make, striving daily to create an environment where all kinds of talent have equal access to growth and discovery. We want someone never afraid to tell us about ourselves, to turn our faces toward biases and exclusionary behaviors in where we look, how we look and how we retain talent.
We need someone with a deep understanding of recruiting but a fresh perspective to us.
Someone who has done the work of pairing people with the careers of their life for some time. Someone who can bring unconventional thinking to the way we work. We’re not looking for more of the same. Non-advertising backgrounds are more than welcome and encouraged, if there’s experience in some sort of creative space.
We need someone who can tell our story.
We’re an unconventional agency in an unconventional city. If more people knew the greatness of Richmond, they’d come here in droves. We’re looking for someone who can tell our story and tell it well—showing emerging talent why a city like Richmond is the best place to start a career, as well as why Richmond can be the best place to make a home for veteran talent.
We need someone to creatively problem-solve one of our biggest areas of opportunity.
We’re proud to have one of the strongest creative rosters in the industry. From writers to designers to technologists, our group has been behind some of the most iconic campaigns ever launched. We are so intentional about how we grow and find creative talent that we sometimes get in our own way. This person, in partnership with us (Cindy and Abu), will help Martin find the methods we need to be just as intentional in making opportunities for creative talent, but twice as fast.
A History Of Talent & Culture At Martin
From our start we have always been a place of evolution. Evolution and revolution, when necessary.
In 2018 we evolved into our Talent & Culture group—blending HR, operations, recruiting and a transformational spirit together all under the guidance of our first-ever Chief Culture Officer Carmina Drummond. From there, we set out to shatter HR norms, establish a culture of candor and transparency, make ourselves a more representative agency while investing in what matters the most to us: our people. This year saw us become an agency of urgency, one where our culture rose to meet the moment we were in.
Progress over perfection became our mantra and we built, tore things down and then built them again.
In 2019, we made the choice to rebuild our cultural philosophy in a way that centered people—those here and on their way to us. We wanted to create a culture where our people make the most impact of their lives. You do that when you feel whole and visible, and like no part of yourself needs to be sacrificed to do the work you love with people you love. The answer to us was clear.
We’d go after invisibility’s opposite: Visibility.
Visibility Is Our People Philosophy
Our T&C team exists to create a culture of Visibility—an experience where our people are seen and centered for who they are and who they will become. Thisis how we create a culture where our people make the most impact of their lives, knowing they are whole and visible.
To be a place of visibility, we need to do three things:
- Foster a communitythat is welcoming, representative and understanding
- Promote total wellbeing: mental, physical and financial
- Provide for maximum contribution, giving employees the resources to bring their best to their work
What is powerful about these tenants is how they give us freedom to ask new questions. Questions like: “What are the spaces we’re building within our walls and who are they for? Whose health are we not seeing and centering? How do we create fertile ground for mobility in all of our employees?”
Visibility forces us to constantly open our eyes, minds and hearts wider.
Visibility is what, in 2020, allowed us to:
- Increase Black, Indigenous, Asian/Pacific Islander and/or Hispanic/Latina/o/x* representation within our agency to 23.9% as of Nov. 2020 (you can find our representation data up to March 2020 here)
- Increase our percentage of Black, Indigenous, Asian/Pacific Islander, MENA and/or Hispanic/Latina/o/x new hires to 43.1%
- Keep our voluntary attrition rate below 6%, lower than the industry average
We’ve revolutionized our entire candidate and interview experience—rewriting our job descriptions for inclusivity while removing any exclusionary language or educational requirements; standardizing our interview process so the experience is a balanced one for candidates; and creating bias firewalls for interviewers prior to meetings and during feedback stages.
We’ve put corporate social justice strategies into practice, taken an entire working community from a building to the virtual space, reimagined our onboarding experience, made individual growth accessible and still manage to find time to surprise and delight our employees.
Here’s To A Bright Future
We’ve surprised ourselves by what we’re capable of, and for 2021, we’re ready to eclipse that. We’re ready for revolution.
If you’re interested in becoming a part of our team, please apply at this link. We're excited to learn about you and will be in touch if your journey aligns with what we're looking for.
* As self-identified. We use Black, Indigenous, Asian/Pacific Islander, MENA and/or Hispanic/Latina/o/x* as language representative of the times and the current categorical constructs of race and ethnicity. We recognize that identity is varied, some of these are ethnicities and not races, and that some people exist across all of them. As language evolves, so will how we reference.
