Month: June 2019

It’s becoming a trend inside agencies. Employees at minimum three agencies have given less than two weeks’ notice over the last year, according to sources familiar with recent employee departures, who have all heard from other agencies that it’s happening elsewhere too. Typically, the shortened notice is coming from junior employees with three to six years of experience in departments where there is a high demand for certain specialties, such as digital, social and content roles.

While some sources cite a lack of awareness around job etiquette and changing norms around what’s considered acceptable, others wonder whether or not these employees are even aware of the impact their early departure has. “It leaves a really bad taste in the mouth of the employer,” said the head of talent.

Why they exit early
Some think recent uptick in the rushed departures is due to new employers putting pressure on the departing employees to start the new job sooner.

“The employees are stuck in the middle of wanting to please a new employer but also being respectful of their departing employer,” said Regan White, managing director of human resources for Omnicom Media Group. “That puts them in a tough spot. We’re counseling employees when they give notice [to give the two weeks] but we’re seeing that more and that’s due to a tight job market. When you find an employee you like, you want them there ASAP.”

It’s not just pressure from new employers. Other factors are at play. For one, the shorter notice periods are on the rise in sections of the ad world where there is a higher demand with more positions to fill than qualified candidates to fill them, according to agency sources.

That demand, coupled with the rising cost of living for employees in a number of markets has led to a lack of loyalty.  In turn, employees are now willing to jump ship faster for $10,000 to $15,000 more in salary because that increase in salary could change their standard of living. “They’re going because it means they may be able to have one less roommate or join their friends in getting a beach house for the summer,” said a human resources executive.

Essentially, people are job-hopping to get more money — and the traditional idea of a two-week notice is going out the window. Notice periods vary by country but in the U.S. a two-week notice has been the standard for decades, as employers like to use the window to find a replacement for the departing employee. At the same time, that employee can typically finish up their tasks and, depending on the agency’s pay cycle, collect one last paycheck without burning bridges.

But people aren’t thinking this way.

Lasting effects
Agencies are made to explain why the person has left early internally as well as to clients and dissuade them of notions of bad blood. Other agency employees are left to pick up the slack of other employees who leave early. “It doesn’t necessarily affect the person doing it as much as the people left behind,” said the independent agency’s head of talent of the short term impact.

Those who have experienced this say it’s happening with younger employees who aren’t thinking about the long-term impact and who are making decisions based on a solid job market, as unemployment is the lowest it has been in roughly 50 years.

“It used to be that people considered work to be like a marriage, a commitment that you would be making for a very long time but that doesn’t exist anymore,” said Phyllis Hartman, HR consultant for PGHR consulting. “There are more people needed for jobs than candidates available [for some jobs]. With less loyalty, there’s not as much worry about reputation because you can find another job instantly.”

But even with a tight job market, employees should be wary of this ask from new employers as it could be a sign of a difficult employer, said founder and CEO of global performance marketing agency Acceleration Partners Robert Glazer. “It’s easy to think short-term in a hot job market,” said Grazer. “There’ve been no repercussions to job hopping in the last five years so no one knows the downside. But people backchannel and they will remember the last thing you did.”

It can matter down the road too. “For people who have given less than two weeks and are adamant that they aren’t going to change it leaves a mark,” said White.

Another downside of high demand in the job market is ghosting: Candidates that are completely disappearing somewhere during the process of chatting with potential employers whether that’s via email, after interviews or in some cases after accepting the offer. Typically, this comes from the same candidate pool. 

“If we wait to make an offer or there’s another step and someone else has already made an offer then that candidate is gone,” said White. “I don’t think they know to go back and say ‘Thank you’ or let us know they got another offer. They just disappear.”

Regardless of what the employees are doing, the companies that are seeing these quick departures may need to take a look at their company culture, according to Grazer. “If the company doesn’t want these issues then they need to know who their unhappy employees are,” he said. “They need to put pressure on their managers. If your employees are all out interviewing then you’re not having these conversations with them. The company needs to create that environment if they want employees to be honest.”

“If the company has a plug and play attitude with employees, then they are reaping the seeds of what they sow,” said Allen Adamson, brand consultant and co-founder of Metaforce.

The post ‘Flabbergasted’: Agency employees are quitting without two weeks’ notice appeared first on Digiday.

And aggressive moves in acquisitions and delivery from companies like Walmart and Amazon have only shifted Instacart’s role for the rest of the industry further into focus: The company is now valued at $7.9 billion, having raised $1.2 billion in venture capital last year alone in three separate funding rounds. According to Instacart, it’s profitable in most of its mature markets, and profitable on gross margins per-order when not accounting for administrative expenses.

In the same way Shopify has helped direct brands scale online, Instacart wants to do the same for grocery, an area that’s still under-penetrated online: According to eMarketer, only 2% of food and beverage sales take place online. That means there’s a lot of ground left to cover, and Instacart’s main goal is making sure the first time a new customer shops for their groceries online, the experience doesn’t turn them off.

“Candidly, it’s an OK experience right now industry-wide,” said Ganenthiran. “It needs to be as good or better than the store.”

Ganenthiran explained how Instacart is plotting its roadmap for grocery’s online turning point, the influence of the delivery wars being fought by Amazon and Walmart on the business, and why the company won’t open its own grocery store.

As Instacart develops new avenues of business, how are you thinking about your role in brand and retailer relationships?
We see an opportunity to drive a ton of growth with our CPG brand partners with our advertising products. As the customer is coming online, brands need to find new ways to connect. So Instacart wants to be at the forefront for brands to connect with customers at the point they’re buying their groceries, to help them be more precise with their marketing and the measurement in return on investment.

It’s a completely different dynamic today [in retail advertising], and everything is moving faster. Fifteen years ago, I started my career in brand management at P&G and I would show up to work every week, look at my market share reports, and it would go up .1 or down .1 — and that’s all the share we were fighting for. The customer in the digital environment is choosing who to put in their basket when buying their groceries online. The digital opportunity, and challenge, is once a customer puts a brand in the online basket, that’s pretty sticky — much stickier than in a physical environment. So marketers are in a fight to get in that basket first. We offer brick-and-mortar grocers a way to capture dollars that are leaking from Facebook, TV and Google, with the purpose of bringing these grocers to life online.

How does the activity in the grocery space, particularly from retailers like Amazon and Walmart, influence Instacart’s business?
Nothing has helped us more than the brick and mortar grocery industry realizing that their customers need e-commerce. There have been multiple inflection points in the journey of Instacart, and one of those inflections was the Amazon-Whole Foods acquisition. That was a tipping point that forced innovation in e-commerce.

Instacart’s role in that journey was to be the technology leader and innovation partner for our 300 grocers. Walmart and Amazon’s moves have shown us and our retailer partners that the customer needs things like pickup. Walmart specifically has proven that. So that’s why we’re scaling pickup aggressively as we are. All the other competitors are causing us to work with our retailers to bring more innovation to market, be it deeper enterprise solutions, better service or new ways to connect with grocers. The competitive pressure is the best thing that can happen to us. It serves as a tailwind, because retailers then realize that customers want this service.

“At some point, an IPO is on the horizon.”

Does Instacart plan to open its own stores or launch its own brands?
I want to be unequivocal and direct about this because it’s been speculated about for a long time: Instacart will not be in the grocery business in terms of owning our own merchandise or launching our own brands. We work in partnership with our retail partners. Our reason for being is to be a software and logistics layer for the grocery industry. We have no interest in backward integrating into the category.

At the highest level, it’s not the business we want to be in. We don’t want to be grocers. Digging deeper, it makes no sense practically or economically for us. Our hack on this system was proximity: We have access to 22,000 retail stores today that are located next to the consumers with the exact assortments that the customers in that area want to shop for, at the price point and with brands that matter to that area. The reason Instacart has pioneered in the industry was that original insight, that proximity matters. Not just for logistics and getting stuff to customers cheaply, but because these grocery brands grew up in these communities. We think it’s a fool’s errand to try to build another company to compete with that.

What does Instacart’s roadmap look like from here? Is there an IPO coming up?
We’re currently in the process of making sure our retailers will know exactly what the customer wants, when she wants it, and how she wants to get it. It sounds simplistic, but it’s all solving different technical and product problems that require different levels of understanding.

Today, we are a late-stage private company. We’re in a position where the business works on a unit-economic basis, and we can be considerate about an IPO. We’ve been consistent that we intend to be an independent company. That’s the only path. We can stay private as an independent company, but at some point, an IPO is on the horizon.

The post Instacart’s Nilam Ganenthiran: ‘We don’t want to be grocers’ appeared first on Digiday.