Why agency talent moves on – and where they go?

The agency-to-client pathway is one of the most well-established career trajectories in the communications and marketing field. Talented professionals join an agency, gain compressed experience across multiple sectors and challenge types, and then move to the client side – to a marketing director role at a consumer brand, a communications manager position at a corporation, or an in-house content lead at a growing company.

This movement is not a failure of the agency. It is the natural outcome of doing the job well. Professionals leave not because they are unhappy, but because they have reached the point where the client side offers what the agency, by its nature, cannot: ownership, strategic depth in one sector, and the chance to see a long-term vision through.

The agency that understands this pattern can work with it rather than against it. Building career development conversations around the client-side aspiration, creating client-embedded roles, and designing retention strategies around the 18-to-24-month window where the decision gets made are all more effective than competing on salary alone.

The hiring implication

For agencies recruiting communications and marketing professionals, the challenge is not finding talent that will stay forever. It is finding talent at the right stage of their journey, and creating an environment where the two to three years they do stay are productive for both sides.

This requires a different kind of recruitment conversation. One that starts not with the job description, but with where a candidate is in their career arc, what skills they are actively trying to build, and whether the agency can genuinely offer that. A candidate who joins knowing what the next two years will give them is far more motivated, more committed, and more likely to deliver than one who was sold a role that turns out to be something different.

  CLIENT SNAPSHOT | Communications Agency, Ontario

A mid-size communications agency came to us after losing three account leads in fourteen months. Each had been with the firm for between one and two years. Each had left for a client-side role. The agency had been hiring reactively, replacing like-for-like as quickly as possible. We ran a Hiring Diagnostic before any new search began. What it uncovered: the agency was consistently attracting mid-career professionals who were already at the client-ready stage of their development. The roles were not giving them new challenges; they were giving them confirmation of skills they already had. We reframed the search toward candidates who were one stage earlier in their journey, with strong potential and specific skill gaps the agency environment was genuinely equipped to fill. The placements lasted significantly longer, and the agency began positioning itself actively as a development environment rather than a stepping stone. 

 

The Non-Profit Hiring Challenge: Doing More With Less

What the data says

Canada’s non-profit sector employs over 2.4 million people and is one of the largest employers in the country. It is also one of the most chronically under-resourced in terms of human capital investment.

The non-profit sector’s turnover rate sits at approximately 19%, compared to 12% in other sectors.

High turnover in the charitable sector jumped from 27% to 39% between 2023 and 2024, according to the Charity Insights Canada Project.

60% of nonprofit leaders say attracting and retaining skilled people will be one of their toughest challenges in 2026.

Nearly 7 in 10 nonprofit employees reported in 2025 that they would be looking for a new job that year.

59% of nonprofits reported significantly more difficulty filling staff positions in 2024 than in prior years.

The root cause, as Imagine Canada’s People First report and research from the Munk School of Global Affairs consistently document, is chronic underfunding. Non-profits compete for talent in the same labour market as corporations and government, but with structurally lower salaries, limited benefits, and smaller teams. The result is a workforce that is deeply committed to mission but routinely overextended.

The job description problem

One of the most distinctive features of non-profit hiring is the job description itself. Because teams are small and budgets are tight, the typical non-profit role description combines responsibilities that in a larger organisation would be split across two or three separate position.  

A Communications Manager role at a non-profit might encompass media relations, social media management, grant writing support, event coordination, donor communications, internal newsletters, and website updates. An operations manager might be simultaneously responsible for HR administration, facilities management, volunteer coordination, and financial reporting support.

This is not dysfunction. It is the operational reality of organisations where mission comes before margin. But it creates a very specific hiring challenge: the candidate who can genuinely fulfil this kind of role is not the specialist who is excellent at one thing. It is the integrative professional who has breadth of experience, comfort with ambiguity, and the ability to shift between strategic and operational work in the same day.

Finding that kind of person requires a different screening process. A standard competency-based interview designed for a specialist role will screen out exactly the candidates a non-profit need most. The assessment needs to test adaptability, initiative under resource constraints, and the ability to hold multiple workstreams without losing quality on any of them.

The retention challenge

Non-profits that do attract the right talent face a secondary challenge: keeping them. The research is clear on what drives departures. Pay remains the primary factor, but it is closely followed by lack of career development opportunities. Over 40% of voluntary turnover in non-profits is attributed to insufficient opportunity for upward mobility or growth, according to Non-profit HR’s workforce surveys.

The organisations that retain talent most effectively are those that compensate for salary limitations with visible investment in people’s growth. Structured mentorship, access to external professional development, genuine involvement in strategic decisions, and clear pathways to expanded responsibility are all more within reach for non-profits than salary increases, and they matter more to the kind of mission-driven professionals who self-select into the sector in the first place.

 

The Manager-to-Leader Transition: The Promotion That Nobody Plans For

What the data says

One of the most common and least well-managed talent challenges in Canadian organisations is the transition from a strong individual contributor or manager into a leadership role. It happens in agencies, in non-profits, and in HR functions across every sector.

Research from Non-profit HR documents that over 40% of voluntary turnover in the sector is linked to lack of growth opportunity, yet professional development spending in non-profits remains flat even as operational complexity increases.

Long-serving executive directors across Canada are retiring, and the leaders replacing them often arrive with strong program or technical expertise but limited experience managing boards, overseeing financial operations, or leading through organisational change.

Studies estimate that replacing a senior leader can cost 50 to 200% of their annual salary, depending on the role.

The pattern is consistent across sectors. A high-performing communications manager gets promoted to Director. A skilled HR advisor steps into the Head of HR role. An operations coordinator becomes the Operations Manager. In each case, the organisation is promoting someone based on what they have demonstrated at one level of work. But the skills that made them excellent at that level are not the same skills they need at the next one.

Why the transition fails

Managing and leading are not the same activity done at different scales. Managing is primarily about executing within a defined scope, delivering against set objectives, and coordinating people toward known outcomes. Leading is about setting direction under uncertainty, making decisions with incomplete information, and creating the conditions in which other people can do their best work.

Most organisations promote into leadership without investing in that transition. The new leader is expected to figure it out through experience. Some do. Many do not, at significant cost to the team, the organisation, and themselves.

In non-profits, the challenge is particularly acute. The post-pandemic period accelerated leadership transitions across the sector. Long-serving executive directors who built organisations over decades are retiring. Their successors often have deep program knowledge but have not yet developed the board management, financial oversight, or change leadership skills that the executive director role requires. Without structured support, the cost of the learning curve falls on the organisation and the people in it.

The solution is not to wait for people to develop these skills through trial and error. It is to build structured transition support into the hiring or promotion process itself, combining targeted coaching, clear role definition, and honest assessment of where the gaps are before the person steps into the seat.

 

The Multiplier Talents Approach: Every Search Is Its Own Case

The three scenarios above have one thing in common: none of them could have been solved with a standard recruitment process.

The agency needed a different candidate profile, not a faster search. The non-profit needed a different job brief and a different screening methodology. The professional services firm needed a diagnostic, not a hire.

This is what advisory-led recruitment means in practice. Not a methodology that gets applied uniformly to every engagement, but a structured process for understanding what is actually going on before any sourcing begins.

The Hiring Diagnostic

Every Multiplier Talents engagement starts with a Hiring Diagnostic. It is a structured conversation about the role, the team, the organisation, and what has happened before. It typically surfaces one or more of the following:

• The role as currently defined does not match what the organisation actually needs
• A previous search failed because of how interviews were run, not because of the candidate pool
• The retention challenge is structural, and the next hire will face the same conditions unless something changes
• The right candidate exists in a part of the talent market the organisation has not been looking at
• The organisation is ready to fill the role immediately, but a Hiring Diagnostic is not actually the starting point

That last point matters. The Diagnostic is not a hoop to jump through. If an organisation comes to us with a clearly defined role, a strong brief, and a recent track record of good hiring decisions, we say so and move directly to search. The advisory step exists because most organisations benefit from it, not because it is required in every case.

The case-by-case principle

What we do not is apply a single screening framework across different sector contexts. The qualities that make a strong agency communications hire are not the same qualities that make a strong non-profit communications hire, even when the job titles look identical. The career stage that matters for one search is irrelevant for another. The interview process that works for a specialist role is actively counterproductive for an integrative role.

This means that each search is designed from the role brief out, not from a template in. The shortlist criteria, the sourcing approach, the interview structure, and the reference check methodology are all built for the specific situation.

Our network is not a database. It is built from years of working in and alongside non-profit, communications, HR, operations, and manufacturing environments in Ontario. When we source for a role, we are drawing on relationships and sector knowledge, not keyword matches.

A word on retention

Recruitment and retention are not separate problems. A placement that does not last is not a successful placement, regardless of how smoothly the search went.

The post-placement guarantee we offer reflects that belief. But more importantly, the Hiring Diagnostic itself is the first retention tool. A role that is clearly defined, a candidate who is honestly assessed against what the role actually requires, and an organisation that understands what it is asking someone to step into: these are the conditions that make retention possible. We try to create them before the offer letter goes out.

 

The Bottom Line

Talent acquisition and retention are not problems with universal solutions. The agency losing communications talent to the client side, the non-profit unable to attract the integrative professional their job description requires, and the HR team promoting managers before they are ready for leadership: each of these needs a different response.

What they share is this: the answer is almost never a faster search or a broader candidate pool. It is a clearer understanding of what the organisation needs, an honest assessment of whether the conditions exist for a good hire to succeed, and a recruitment process designed around that specific situation rather than a generic template.

That is what we try to bring to every engagement at Multiplier Talents. Not the fastest route to a shortlist. The most considered route to a placement that works.

 

Sources and Research References

All statistics cited in this article draw from the following sources:

• Campaign US / Campaign Live: Agency Performance Review 2025: Talent Trends at North American Agencies (April 2025)
• Trust Agency: Marketing Agency Employee Turnover Statistics (January 2026)
• Charity Insights Canada Project (CICP): Understanding the HR Crisis Facing Charities (July 2025)
• Mission Edge: Talent, Burnout, and Retention: The Defining Challenge of the Nonprofit Workforce (March 2026)
• Imagine Canada: People First: A Portrait of Canada’s Nonprofit Workforce (April 2025)
• ViTreo Group: Non-profit Leadership Development in Canada (April 2025)
• CNPC: Nonprofit Leadership Development Guide (July 2026)
• Robert Half Canada / HCAmag.ca: 1 in 3 Canadian Workers Plan to Leave Their Job in Early 2026 (December 2025)
• Groom and Associates: 2025 Employee Retention Benchmarks by Industry Canada (November 2025)
• Talent Canada: Canadian Hiring Outlook Dampens in First Half of 2026 (January 2026)
• Altrum: Top 6 HR Challenges in Canada for 2026 (February 2026)
• Non-profit HR: Workforce Retention Surveys 2024 and 2025

 

 

About Multiplier Talents

Multiplier Talents is the advisory-led recruitment practice of Multiplier Consultancy. We work with non-profit organisations, growth-phase companies, and manufacturing firms across Ontario, recruiting for HR, operations, communications, and managerial leadership roles. Every engagement starts with a Hiring Diagnostic. Book yours at multiplier-consultancy.com.