Publicis Groupe: growing creative talent instead of buying it

Every agency competes for the same juniors

Romania's advertising market has a structural talent problem: a small pool of trained junior creatives and media planners, and every agency chasing them at once. Traditional recruiting — post a role, wait, screen CVs — surfaces the same handful of candidates everyone else is already calling.

Publicis wanted to stop competing for finished talent and start forming it— building a pipeline of people who learn the craft with Publicis, on Publicis's terms, before a role ever opens. The obstacle was operational: running a multi-week educational program with hundreds of applicants, real courses, mentor scoring, and an internship funnel is a logistics problem that spreadsheets and email cannot hold.

A formation-to-internship pipeline, not a job ad

The School of Big Ideas is a branded program site and platform in one, built on Jobful. Candidates apply, take the GAMA aptitude test, and work through real advertising courses taught by Publicis's own people. The strongest advance to mentor-scored workshops, then to a three-month internship — with the Media and Creative tracks running in parallel on the same platform, and every edition's data in one place.

• quiz
  GAMA aptitude testEvery applicant starts with a structured assessment, not a CV screen.
• school
  Real courses, taught by Publicis creativesCandidates learn the craft from the people they'd work with — and experience the culture months before applying.
• workspace_premium
  Mentor-scored workshopsThe strongest learners advance on merit, scored by the mentors who run them.
• hub
  Two modules, one platformMedia and Creative run simultaneously, with all program data centralized — a PR module is in preparation.

A pipeline that fills itself — and holds

Instead of one cold job ad drawing a handful of applicants, each edition of the School of Big Ideas opens to 600+ registrations for roughly 60 places. The program does the qualifying: from ~190 course students down to 57 mentor-scored workshop places, and about 25 interns selected per module.

Beyond the funnel, the program repositioned Publicis as the destination for creative talent in the market — candidates now arrive already knowing the agency, the mentors, and the work.

Formation beats acquisition in a shallow market

When the talent you need is scarce and contested, the winning move isn't to bid harder for finished candidates — it's to grow your own. Publicis turned recruiting into education: a warm, engaged pipeline that qualifies itself, builds genuine skills, and converts the best into interns and lasting hires. The platform made it operationally possible to run at scale, edition after edition.