Agencies Are Finally Dropping College Degree Requirements

When agency veteran Eva McCloskey graduated from high school, she skipped college and went straight to a corporate job. And after rising through the ranks of the insurance world, she landed at creative agency Barbarian as one of its first employees. Once considered untraditional, her path is becoming more common, thanks in part to 14 trailblazing companies, including Google and Apple, that eliminated a college degree as a requirement in 2018 and brought in those who learned on the job or at coding boot camps. The ad industry didn’t initially embrace the entrepreneurial spirit that launched many great tech innovators—including Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, neither of whom finished college. Candidates often ran into roadblocks like soaring college costs and hiring managers with more traditional mindsets. While the doors to the advertising industry aren't wide open yet for workers without degrees, agencies across the landscape are realizing that people with diverse backgrounds and less conventional schooling are valuable to a rapidly changing industry. Slowly, more agencies are welcoming job hunters with differing educational backgrounds and work experience. “I know people who, since high school, have built their livelihoods in business doing more with less or literally building businesses and ventures from scratch," said DeSean Brown, vp, client strategy and success at One & All, Omnicom’s agency serving the nonprofit sector. "Why are we not hiring those people?” Experience over education Brown has seen firsthand how the costs of college and mountains of debt could be a barrier for some. He points to his former employer Steve Jones, who never attended university yet disrupted the stock photography industry as the founder and CEO of pocstock. Those with an entrepreneurial mindset build their own businesses or go into business with someone they admire in lieu of going to college. And they have a different mindset than those who went the traditional route to college. “I was really fortunate to be surrounded by peers and bosses who were really generous with their time, and I was able to learn from them more than anyone else,” said McCloskey, who is now the managing director at the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts in New York. Chad Hetherington, CEO of commerce agency The Stable, has never required a college degree at the company he founded in 2015 because of his own experience skipping college to enter the workforce. We recognize that education can take many forms outside of the traditional classroom.Celeste Bell, evp, director of human resources, Deutsch New York He founded a production company in Australia, but wanted to scale up so he took his talents to the U.S. Now he has a diverse team at The Stable built over the past year through smart hiring and an acquisition spree. “Companies and employers just expect [college degrees]. It’s like a cemented perception," he said. But Hetherington said he expects more employers will care more about skill sets moving forward. Changing mindsets Several years ago, VaynerMedia chief heart officer Claude Silver saw the need to change the way the agency hired to create more diversity of thinking, neurodiversity, race, ethnicity and sexuality. When Silver presented the idea to CEO Gary Vaynerchuk, he eliminated requirements for college degrees to enact her strategy. “It allowed us to look [in] many different places for people that had the passion, the drive and the skills,” Silver said. Trishna Shah, associate director of recruitment and people at Big Spaceship, added that hiring based on degrees or education levels fuels inequity and inequality in the hiring process and the workplace. She argued that focusing on hiring talent who fit into predetermined expectations about school doesn't allow agencies to thrive. GroupM and Mindshare also removed the requirement of a four-year degree for many positions as a move to diversify and grow culture. “When we look at how we can bring the very best ideas to our clients and teams, having a diverse set of perspectives and people is critical," said Richetta Teal, executive director of people at Mindshare. Agency Deutsch New York doesn’t require college degrees, but states that it sees education as important to business success. That education, however, doesn’t need to be traditional. “We recognize that education can take many forms outside of the traditional classroom, whether it’s a hands-on military education, a boot camp-style training program or just dedicated self-learning,” said Celeste Bell, evp, director of human resources. She thinks agencies should look for candidates with a growth mindset, defining ideal candidates as those “who embrace challenges, who persist in the face of setbacks and learn from criticism, who are inspired by other people’s successes versus threatened, candidates that are curious, that have a great attitude, are self-motivated and not afraid of failure.”