DEL.ICIO.USAtlanta firms struggle to lure top web designers
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
At one time they were just the scrappy little kids at large Web-design agencies.
Years later, they consider themselves some of the pickiest around when it comes to hiring for their own interactive Web shops.
RICH ADDICKS / raddicks@ajc.com
The SuperGroup president Brad Lewis (right) and CEO Gabe Aldridge chat near the entrance to their Inman Park office, which was modeled after the movie ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’
“You have to be creative, and you have to enjoy what you do. That’s hard to find,” said Gabe Aldridge, one of three principals with The SuperGroup, which operates out of an eclectic high-tech office in Inman Park.
It’s an ironic situation — a company that is hiring but can’t find the right people with ease — given that the state’s unemployment rate in November rose to 7.5 percent. But The SuperGroup’s owners place most of the weight on the “interactive” part of their work — and finding local talent with those skills is still tough, they said.
Though Atlanta is ripe with technology companies, it does not have the same cache as New York or San Francisco when it comes to cutting-edge interactive design companies. That limits the talent pool and the attractiveness for out-of-town recruits.
Joe Schab, a managing director for digital marketing company LBi, said finding highly skilled designers is problematic regardless of economic conditions.
“This industry is growing so rapidly,” Schab said. “We’re in a perpetual war for talent. We largely have not had difficulty in attracting really good people. That being said, we also know those people are in demand elsewhere.”
For entry- and mid-level jobs, Schab said LBi will look in Atlanta, mostly to keep recruiting and hiring costs lower. For senior-level jobs, the company will cast a wider net — New York or San Francisco, Dallas or Chicago — though it has filled some of those jobs with locals.
Chris Wallace, another principal with The SuperGroup, said “we have to scour the whole nation to find people, and sometimes the whole world.”
The firm, which has 15 employees, recently hired designers from Ecuador and Thailand.
“There’s difficulty in attracting talent,” Wallace said. “Atlanta isn’t known as an interactive hub.” But, his pitch to prospective employees is simple:
“‘Don’t move to New York. The place you want to work is here,’” Wallace said.
To hire, the Super Group bypasses corporate headhunters, who first look at someone’s education, skills and years of experience. High-techies may need not apply: Wallace went to art school, Aldridge has a degree in poetry and Brad Lewis, the third principal, is a theater major. All three play in bands.
“We don’t have one computer science major on the staff,” Lewis said. “We look for people who, if we weren’t employing them would be doing this stuff anyway. They eat, sleep and breathe it.”
They want people who can design an interactive Web site from a client’s request of nothing more than “do something cool.”
The firm’s recruiting tool instead is a Web site for the FWA: Favorite Website Awards, started in 2000 to showcase cutting-edge Internet sites. Wallace considers it the “creme de la creme of the interactive awards.” The winners are from the top 20 or 30 interactive agencies — the ones that designers want to work for, he said.
But that means the SuperGroup could compete against the likes of Razorfish, an interactive advertising firm owned by Microsoft.
Seattle-based Razorfish, which has a large office in Midtown Atlanta, employs more than 2,000 workers worldwide and has offices in every major city, including New York, San Francisco and Chicago.
Shannon Denton, senior vice president and general manager for the Atlanta office of Razorfish, says the cusp of innovation — people trying stuff that’s different — is in New York and San Francisco. He considers Atlanta to be a follower.
“After things have been tried a little bit, Atlanta will jump on the bandwagon,” Denton said. “It won’t be a leader.”
Razorfish vice president Scott McVay said the interactive design market in Atlanta was fragmented and lacked a major agency leader until about a year ago. That’s changing, he said.
“We’re having more and more success in finding qualified people here in Atlanta, and we’re finding it easier to bring people to Atlanta,” said McVay, who has lived here for eight years.
“The ideal person, if you think about the types of people we have, include people on the technology side, user-experience side, strategists. What we’re looking for is a person’s ability to truly understand customer needs and then translate that into an experience. That’s kind of a nuance trait.”
The economy continues to affect the industry but still offers opportunities for those with the qualifications.
LBi, which has 60 full-time employees in its Atlanta office, was “in a massive, massive hiring mode,” earlier this year, Schab said. That has stopped for a while, and business has slowed, but Schab said they haven’t faced the material slowdown that others have.
“Budgets are being reduced, clients wait longer to sign off on projects, and when they sign, the projects are smaller,” he said. But his view of 2009 is “pretty good” at least for the first half of the year.
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