The Talent Business Promotes Will Knox to Managing Director, Creative & Design

Since joining The Talent Business in 2009, Will Knox has partnered the world’s leading creative businesses, helping them to identify and secure transformational senior creative talent. Following a recent promotion to managing director, he now heads up The Talent Business’ European Creative & Design practice out of the Group’s London office. He talks to Patrick Burgoyne about creative leadership and what he’s learnt in his 14 years at the leading headhunter.

Patrick> You’ve come up through the ranks at The Talent Business, what is it about the company which means people want to stay for so long?

Will> In our leadership team, we've pretty much all been here over a decade, so there’s a lot of trust and support, and we're able to be honest with each other. 

I think the other big factor is that we don’t work on commission. It gives you the opportunity to be more objective and to build long-term relationships with people who trust you as a confidant because it removes some of the transactional nature of recruitment.

I was a musician before I started in the recruitment business. I briefly worked at another company before The Talent Business but this is a very, very different place. It has a very different approach to people. 

I originally started talking to The Talent Business in 2009, but it took a year before the right opportunity presented itself. Tanya Livesey, who’s now our global managing director for Creative and Design, called me every single month for that year to check in on me and see how I was doing. She said, “when we're ready, we'll bring you in”. A year later, she called me up, and I’ve been here ever since. 

Patrick> What are the big changes you’re seeing in the creative industry right now?

Will> The big, big thing is diversity. A huge part of what we do is to help businesses diversify. That’s difficult at a senior level in the creative industry because there is a finite group of extremely talented, diverse leaders within this market. For 60% of the creative leadership roles we've worked on in the last few years, our clients have been looking for quite similar ‘unicorn’ profiles. It’s a challenge.

But I think what we are seeing is an understanding of the wider change that needs to happen.

Diversification has to happen at the entry level, and it really had to happen 10 years ago to allow those people to be ready now. 

The industry is at a point where it understands it needs to change in terms of allowing female leaders to grow, and not leave the industry at a key point in their career. We are a much more flexible industry now and that's got to be a positive thing. 

I'm a new dad, and my wife runs a record label. We now both work in industries that are more forgiving, more understanding, more trusting. There's been a shift to accommodate everybody a bit better, but specifically, to allow females to grow into genuine leadership roles.

When it comes to finding talent from underrepresented backgrounds, or from working class backgrounds, it’s all well and good finding them, but then it's about building a structure that allows them to grow and providing jobs that pay them enough to join and then stay. Agencies have to make sure that this next generation of talent understands that there are opportunities for them within great businesses. And then there's a pathway to great leadership. 

And so on the one hand, we're helping them fix the problem now. On the other hand, we need to help them fix the problem for the next 10 years which is what we try to do through Cream, our global platform for emerging talent.

Patrick> In terms of creative leadership, what qualities do leaders need in order to thrive today?

Will> In agencies the output has always been the big idea. If you are a big ideas person, but you only want to do print ads, you’re probably not going to get a big leadership role. If you're a big ideas person who did print 20 years ago, but understands where that idea could live now, or you embrace new technologies, or you use your department properly and learn from them, you're going to be fine. It doesn't matter what your book looked like 10 years ago, or even now, to some extent – it’s a mindset thing. There are certain roles where you need to be a specialist, obviously, and certain agencies will dictate what that person needs to be. But if it’s a full-service agency, and they do everything, you don't need to be a specialist in all those things. But you do need to understand how to build teams to facilitate that kind of work, how to build cultures to facilitate that kind of work, how to sell it, how to win it, how to speak the language. And that's a mindset thing, that's about being able to move with the times. It's not necessarily about being a TikTok specialist at the age of 55.