Good agency talent is fu**ing rare. Or is it?

Retention, performance, hiring. Almost half the agencies I work with come to me on one of these. "There's no good talent out there," the founders say. Let me unpack that, because I don't think it's true.

I'm not a recruiter. But I've helped 55+ agencies assess their existing teams and get the right people in, and I know a thing or two about building high-performance agency teams. So here's what's actually going on.

The talent didn't disappear. The exits opened.

The talent issue has been building since the early 2000s. The internet broke the full-service model, and dozens of lower-margin specialist shops appeared, none of which could afford top-tier people. Then three exit routes opened at once.

In-house teams scaled. Tech companies started paying £40K more at entry level. And the fractional market formed as a genuine career path for senior talent. COVID accelerated all three.

So now agencies are losing senior talent to fractional work, mid-level talent to in-house, and at the same time they're cutting the entry-level pipeline with AI - the pipeline that used to feed the whole system. The people didn't vanish. The structure that held them changed.

What actually attracts high-quality talent

When I say "high-quality talent" I mean something specific. People with commercial judgement, learning velocity, and the ability to improve your organisation after 6-12 months. With that definition, here's what my experience and a lot of research consistently show.

1. Autonomy matters, but not the way you think. The single most-cited positive at high-rated agencies (4.0+ stars on employer review platforms) is autonomy in managing accounts. But agencies that hand blanket autonomy to everyone, including underperformers, alienate their best people. Progressive autonomy - more freedom as you prove yourself - is what retains commercially-minded people. Blanket autonomy repels them.
2. Senior accessibility is a genuine advantage. Boutique agencies where seniors are accessible create faster learning velocity. Nowhere to hide, more visibility, a steeper development curve. It's one of the few structural advantages a $1-5M agency has over a bigger shop. But founders undermine it constantly.

As David C. Baker, an agency consultant, puts it: "There's no Magna Carta equivalent where the king must follow his own rules in an agency." Translation: employees are fine with founders being close and informal, but only if the founder holds themselves to the same standard. The moment the founder breaks the rules they enforce on others, that closeness turns into resentment. People don't mind access. They mind hypocrisy.

And here's what does NOT attract high-quality talent: perks, culture language, employer branding. 92% of agency professionals say staying informed is essential, but only 47% feel their company invests in their development (Myers Report 2025). 68% believe their companies talk more about upskilling than actually funding it.

A game: no pay, no perks, no branding

You're not allowed to use pay, perks, or branding. Now figure out what else makes great people want to work with you. Two things.

The founder's published point of view. Commercially-minded people are looking for environments where they'll get smarter faster. A founder who publishes original thinking creates a pull that no job ad can replicate.

Proximity to real decisions. High-quality talent is drawn to environments where they can see the consequences of their thinking play out. At a $1-5M agency, a mid-level hire can influence commercial outcomes within weeks, not quarters, if you let them. In a 500-person agency they're three layers removed from any decision that matters. In-house, they're executing someone else's strategy. At a small agency with the right operating setup, they're learning by doing, at speed, with real stakes.

The three levers that actually solve this

I've spent a lot of time researching this and landed on three levers for agencies in the £1-5M range. Two are probably obvious. The third will annoy anyone who's invested in building a formal L&D programme.

1. Community-based hiring. Senior, commercially-minded talent is leaving agencies for fractional and consulting work at an accelerating rate (60K to 120K practitioners in two years in the US alone). These people form loose networks - Slack groups, peer collectives, referral circles. Your founder content, your positioning, your client relationships, your alumni network become a unified talent system that produces 2-5 high-quality candidates a year without a single job ad.
2. Hyper-intentional recruitment. Commercially-minded people don't apply to job ads. They get recruited. The founder, not an HR person, personally reaches out, explains why this specific person caught their attention, and describes what they'd work on. The other half of intentional recruitment is saying no to the majority of candidates. Just as positioning means saying no to wrong-fit clients, intentional recruitment means rejecting people who have the skills but lack the commercial instinct. A lot of $1-5M agencies are so desperate to fill seats that they lower the bar. Each lowered-bar hire costs you 6-8 months and damages the team around them.
3. Development through operating design. At £1-5M you have 11-35 people. You can't build an L&D function or structured training curricula that compete with a $10-20M agency or an in-house brand team. If you try, you'll produce something mediocre and your best people will see through it. So stop trying. Build development into how the agency operates instead.

That last one breaks down three ways. Development through exposure: give new hires a live client diagnostic in week one, open the books so people learn commercial thinking by default, use progressive autonomy that forces decisions above their pay grade. Development through proximity: at 11-35 people, everyone is one or two seats from the founder, so formalise that access with short monthly retrospectives and shared decision logs. Development through variety: rotate people across accounts, involve delivery people in new business, give mid-level people exposure to strategic conversations.

This is my long-winded way of saying the people you want exist. They're just choosing to go somewhere else, because the agency gives them no reason to stay, no reason to join, and no reason to care. Fix how you recruit, who you recruit through, and how your agency develops people by default, and you won't need to compete for talent.