The Pond has added a new digital recruitment lead to its leadership team – Hayden Baker.
Baker is a natural-born recruiter with a knack of finding the best digital people in a market short of digital stars.
He has spent eight years working for Hays Recruitment in Melbourne and Auckland, placing digital talent into specialised digital and tech roles.
Baker says his experience means he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to growing and driving a digital team and departments.
“I really believe in the power of quality senior digital staff – they are now the key element to the success of any business looking to transform itself, grow, or perform at a higher level. The Pond is the logical partner to ensure a company makes a ‘good recruit’ for its mission-critical hires, as evidenced by the 4.2-year average tenure of the people we have placed in fulltime roles over the last ten years”.
With digital now so central to everything and demand for digital talent is growing exponentially, Baker’s appointment is perfect timing.
The Pond founder and director Leighton Howl says it “established itself as a recruiter for creative and design talent in 2008, but now digital recruitment accounts for more than 50 percent of our business with the other half split between creative and marketing.”
Baker will be supported by new talent agent Bella Wilson, who has been with The Pond for six months but prior to that worked for digital recruitment agency, Razzbri.
“We’ve always done digital – we placed our first Front-End Dev nine years ago at agency FCB – but the addition of Hayden to our leadership team shows that we are taking the offering to the next level,” Howl says.
“Digital has exploded with new professions every year while areas like advertising, media, design, and account management have plateaued and, in some cases, have started to go backwards. This trend shows no sign of slowing down, so we’ve brought Hayden on board to give our corporate and agency clients better access to the critical digital talent they need.”
The Pond director Will Gregory and his team continues to drive marketing, sales, and media recruitment while Howl heads up the creative and design talent side.
With a team of 10 and two new hires on the way, things are growing slowly but steadily across the board.
The Pond says it “represents and recruits the best transformational talent” in New Zealand but what does this mean?
Howl says this means that The Pond attracts and places the most talented people in following three key employment sectors: creative and design, digital and tech, and marketing and sales.
“Our goal is to continue to own these ‘big three’ key employment sectors and grow the company to around 18 staff in the next 24 months,” Howl says.
“Our strategy is to focus on the new ‘transformation talent’ recruitment space that we have helped to create. This change mirrors our agency and corporate clients’ changing employment landscape, as well as the overall market”.
