The team is the agency

If people are the product, then hiring and keeping them isn't HR admin. It's the core of the business.

Hire interested, not just interesting

Justine Nienaber's hiring bar starts with a coffee, not a CV: "Anybody with a cell phone can do social media — that's how competitive the landscape is. The difference is actively researching stuff, being interested in things, learning from competitors and non-competitors." She wants range — "hippies and hip-hop heads and people with actual weekends" — because "that's how you get content that resonates, how you write better copy." She knows her own bias well enough to manage it: she isn't allowed in first interviews, because she'd hire everyone.

The deeper lesson comes from her mentoring story. She once scolded a junior for lateness — until she learnt the woman was waking at 4am for taxis that don't run. "There's only so much I can know. It's super important to know your people's real lives — their upbringing, how they get around, what makes them tick."

Hire early enough to support them

James MacDonald names the growth trap: wait until you're drowning to hire, and you can't support the person you bring aboard. "Bring someone on early enough that you can sustain their cost and have time to support them to grow. Otherwise you're setting them up to fail — and if they fail, your business fails." His matching expectation-check keeps it fair: "They aren't me. I can't expect them to put in the blood, sweat and tears I do — it's not their business."

Culture is retention

If you can't win on salary — and most small agencies can't — you win on the place people skip into. Justine: "I want people to like the work and like the people they work with. The rest can be taught." Or, from the AI guide's Darren Morris, only half in jest: bring your pets to work. Happy, comfortable creative people do the work that wins "real performance-driven awards, not vanity awards."

Try this week: rewrite your standard interview to start with interests and context, not experience. Calculate your true next-hire trigger — including the support hours — before you're drowning. And ask each team member one question this month you don't know the answer to about their life outside work.

Hiring interested people means meeting them first. On the long game: building a marketing network in South Africa.

Sourced from recorded, on-the-record interviews on the South African Digital Marketing Podcast. Every practitioner quoted above is named in the text.