Why Unconventional - The Problem of Talent

---

“Talent is limited” or “Talent is a problem” or “It’s the same talent everywhere” are a few common things you can hear these days. That’s what everyone in the traditional/conventional agency setups seems to be saying but is that the real problem? Or is the real problem hiding in “Why all of that?”

It starts with the classic retainer-based revenue model that traditional/conventional agency setups are stuck with, for a product that only seems to have been commoditized over the years.

With undercutting relentlessly threatening their toplines at all times, they have nowhere to go to stay profitable other than going down hard on talent and all related costs. How else do you maintain those “healthy margins” in a people driven business after all?

Talent has always had to do more in traditional/conventional agency setups but now, lesser talent is being expected to do even more. Lesser in quantity, to keep the overall headcount low and lately, lesser in quality in terms of relevance or experience to keep per unit cost of talent lower. Do check average salaries of your traditional/conventional agency setups, especially at the entry and mid levels – aka the workforce!

As a result the traditional/conventional agency setups may have seen more churn in the recent decade than ever before. A lot of talent has turned and continues to turn entrepreneur.

Thanks to the spectacular landscaping done by start-ups across categories, talent from the Creative fields now too has a wide spectrum of aspirations, learnings and opportunities to go solo or as they say “f*** this…I am gonna do something of my own”.

Back in the traditional/conventional agency setups, the lesser talent which is expected to do more work is not just struggling because of capacity and capability issues but also because of the periodic assault on its motivation by means of annual appraisals.

Accurate measurement of individual worth or performance in traditional/conventional agency setups seems to be somewhat, tricky. More often than not, “who is appraising whom” plays a more significant role than “who is being appraised for what”. And when the bell-curve rings, you get the cyclical talent migration which mimics nature’s best.

At the receiving end is a perpetually stretched and stressed Client ecosystem which has to spend disproportionately higher time, at times just to get a workable output from its traditional/conventional agency partners. One, out of the many partners that they have to deal with every day. This very one partner whose direct and indirect costs have to be constantly justified to the CEOs/CXOs because the hard-attributable metrics to measure their ROIs are somewhat still evolving.

This one partner who may have promised them 100% of talent X but has promised the same to three other clients, because of which none of them may be getting more than 25% of the committed talent, even in theory. And after adding the exhaustion, stress, frustration, burnout etc. of that talent which may actually be overworked and underpaid, scaringly lesser value, in reality.

A partner who may be winning awards like clockwork at fixed times of the year in the most coveted forums but struggling or even failing to keep timely deliveries in line with the most basic expectations from Clients in terms of quality or quantity of work or at times both on an everyday basis.

A partner going all out in media about its supremacy and commitment to Clients but actually putting its Client’s productivity, efficiency and even their KRAs at risk every day. Because it is not built to give its Clients the real value of their money – quality and quantity of talent.

Unconventional being an aggregator of talent does not have any of the above-mentioned issues. We do not have fixed talent or related costs. Our overheads are negligible. We do not have topline pressures to keep a “system” running.

We aggregate need-based, relevant talent which can work on customizable milestone-based project fee model e.g. 50-50 or 50-25-25 or 25-25-25-25 etc. and we are committed to provide 100% transparency to our clients throughout the process.

So, Clients get what they pay for and talent gets paid for the value they deliver. Connect with us to know how we do it!