Are recruiting practices hindering diversity at agencies?

Despite ongoing DEI initiatives and commitments to hiring and retaining staff of color in the wake of the 2020 racial justice protests, ad agency staff remain largely white. Behind the scenes, agency staffers think they know why: a lack of diversity in the agency recruiting pipeline. Efforts to address underrepresentation of people of color at ad agencies start with the recruitment process. Anonymous posts on various social media platforms reveal that industry employees believe the issue isn’t that agencies aren’t hiring candidates of color – it’s that such candidates are extremely rare, given the historical barriers in the ad industry to candidates who do not follow traditional educational and career-building pathways. “I sometimes feel like we have this delusion that ther