Kris Holland
Founder
Karina Mann
Account Lead
Alexandra Offer
Account Lead
Mollie O' Sullivan
Senior Account Lead
Kitto Consulting
Marketing
Amity Watts
Client Services Director
Ryan Yates
Creative Manager
Why agency life will make your marketing career

Why agency life will make your marketing career

Almost everything I know about marketing, I learned in an agency. Everything else was context.

I'm the most "seasoned" member of the Kitto team by a few years, so I've seen marketing from both sides of the fence. Here's why I'd tell anyone building a marketing career to spend serious time agency-side.

In short: agency life gives you more variety, faster feedback and broader skills than most in-house roles, especially early in your career. You work across multiple clients, channels and disciplines at once, and that range is what employers notice on your CV.

Agency or in-house: which is better for your marketing career?

I spent my entire twenties in a marketing agency in a different sector. Everything agencies are famous for was true: fast-paced, agile, high-performance and completely addictive. I loved it, and I was convinced it was the only way to work.

Back then, I'd look over the fence at in-house marketers and think: not for me.

When life changed (I had children), I moved in-house for a few years. I worked for brilliant leaders, learned how recruitment businesses make their money and got a crash course in sales, resilience and business development. I was part of some top teams and had a good laugh along the way.

That chapter taught me the business. Agency life taught me the craft. The variety, the pace and the depth of marketing knowledge all came from agency work, and I haven't found them anywhere else.

What do you actually learn at a marketing agency?

At Kitto, no two days look the same. Our work spans strategy and execution, digital and in-person, creative and commercial.

In any given week, the team might be working across social strategy, event management, copywriting, design, video production, reporting and new business pitches, with our specialist partners on paid and web. Recently that meant filming a 200 person industry event party in central London... during the World Cup semi-final... whilst the team at the office launched a client rebrand the very same day.

There is no "colouring in" here. Everything connects to something.

The skills you build:

  • Project management: running multiple briefs, deadlines and stakeholders at once
  • Commercial thinking: understanding how marketing drives a client's growth
  • Creative range: working across copy, design, video and social, not just one lane
  • Client confidence: presenting ideas, handling feedback and owning outcomes
  • Pace and prioritisation: knowing what matters today and what can wait

Is it a lot? Yes! Anyone on my team will tell you that. But let's talk about comfort zones for a moment.

You don't learn anything sitting inside yours. The moments that change you are the ones where you think your way through something uncomfortable and come out the other side. Agency life gives you those moments regularly. That's not a warning. It's the point.

Why agency experience stands out on your CV

My CV is longer than it probably should be at this point. But do you know which section always gets the most attention in interviews? The agency chapter, every time.

Agencies only succeed with speed, consistency and process. That teaches you to manage any project, at work or outside it. The time management, the organisation and the ability to hold several briefs in your head without dropping any of them: those skills follow you everywhere.

What's it like working at a recruitment marketing agency?

If you're a people person, agency life is brilliant. On most days I speak to over twenty people across a similar number of tasks. The collaboration is constant, and it gives me energy.

At Kitto, that means working alongside designers, copywriters, social execs, operators, videographers, editors and animators who are excellent at what they do. Your creativity gets stretched every day just by being around them.

My own team, client services, own day-to-day delivery and the client experience end to end. Watching them get promoted, hit their goals and grow into the marketers they want to be is one of my favourite parts of this job. In the last few months three have been promoted, which I think speaks for itself.

Why build your career in recruitment marketing?

Recruitment is a fascinating place to build a marketing career. It's intensely competitive, commercially driven and accountable in a way that keeps you sharp. The people you work with and for are high achievers, and often inspiring characters.

If you want to learn fast, gain broad experience and work somewhere that treats marketing as a commercial function rather than a nice-to-have, this is it.

Join the team

We're growing fast, and we're hiring people who want to grow with us: curious, a bit restless and happy to be stretched.

See our open roles or send your CV to careers@kitto.uk with a line on the piece of work you're proudest of, and how it relates to my love for the game. We'd love to hear from you.

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About the author

Amity is our Client Services Director at Kitto, she leads the commercial side of the business and the team that owns client delivery end to end. She has 20 years of marketing in the bag: over a decade agency-side, running brand campaigns for national retailers, followed by in-house marketing leadership at a range of leading and scaling recruitment businesses.

Things I often get asked (FAQ, if you will)

Is agency or in-house better for a marketing career? Agency roles usually give you broader experience faster, because you work across several clients, channels and disciplines at once. In-house roles go deeper into one business. Many marketers do both, and agency experience early on tends to make the in-house move easier.

What skills do you learn at a marketing agency? Project management, prioritisation, commercial thinking, client communication and creative range across copy, design, video and social.

What does a recruitment marketing agency do? It helps recruitment businesses and in-house talent teams attract clients and candidates, through employer brand, social strategy, content, video and campaigns. At Kitto, we work in three ways: as a fully outsourced marketing team, as support or lead for an in-house marketing team, or on a project basis to hit a specific objective.

What is it like to work at Kitto? Fast-paced, varied and collaborative. You'll work alongside designers, copywriters, social execs, videographers and editors on work for recruitment businesses across the UK and beyond. See [meet the team] for more.

 

Related

Launching a recruitment sub-brand: what to do first
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A recruitment sub-brand is a deliberate decision to build a second brand identity inside your business, usually to reach a distinct audience, specialise in a new market, or position against an emerging opportunity. Done well, it extends your reach without diluting what you have built. Done badly, it does the opposite. Right now, sub-brands are having a moment. The AI opportunity is real, and many recruitment businesses are responding by launching something new: a new name, a new look, a new positioning. That can be the right move. But what I keep seeing is brands launching before the strategy exists. The logo comes before the thinking. That is where it starts to unravel. So before you go anywhere near a launch, here is what you actually need to have sorted. Start with the ICP, not the name The first question is not "what do we call it?" It’s "who is this actually for?" Not who you hope it will be for or who sounds impressive in a slide deck. Who it really is. More importantly, how does that audience differ from the ICP of your existing brand? If you are a tech recruiter launching an AI-specific brand, be honest. Are these people genuinely different from the ones already buying from you? Different problems, channels, language, or buying journey? If yes, a sub-brand might make sense. If mostly no, you probably need a new service line or a content pillar, not a whole separate brand, which is expensive in time, money, and attention. There is a communication piece too. If your audience has heard from you under one brand for years, they need an explanation when something new appears. What is this? Why does it exist separately? How does it relate to the business they know? Answer those questions proactively, or they will fill the gaps themselves, rarely in the way you would want. Answer the cannibalisation question honestly This one is uncomfortable, which is probably why most people avoid it. How much loss on the existing brand are you prepared to accept in order to grow the new one? A sub-brand doesn't exist in a vacuum. It competes for everything: your team's time, your content calendar, your budget, your headspace as a leader. Every hour spent building the new thing is an hour not spent protecting what you've already built. Client attention is finite too. If your market is used to seeing you talk about one specialism and you suddenly start talking about something adjacent under a different name, some of them will be confused. Some will think you've lost focus. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. But go in with your eyes open. Decide what you're willing to trade, and for how long. Make it a conscious commercial decision rather than an enthusiastic one. Don't underestimate the internal piece This is the one that gets missed most often, and it can do real damage. When a business launches a shiny new sub-brand, especially one positioned around AI, the consultants on the existing brand notice, and they feel it. There's already an undercurrent in the industry around AI and the fear of being left behind, of being on the wrong side of whatever's coming. Your team will feel that too, whether they say it out loud or not. If the new brand gets all the investment, all the leadership excitement, all the energy in team meetings, and the existing brand quietly starts to feel like the old thing, the legacy thing, you will lose people. Not necessarily to redundancy, but to disengagement. And disengaged consultants are expensive in ways that don't show up on a spreadsheet until it's too late. You need an internal narrative that runs alongside the external one. What's the story for the people on the existing brand? Why does that business still matter? What does success look like for both? Leaders need to articulate that clearly and consistently before launch, not after. Plan for when the market shifts This needs saying, even if it's not what people want to hear right now. AI is genuinely transformative. The opportunity is real. But the way it's being talked about in recruitment right now, the urgency, the gold rush energy, that will shift. Markets recalibrate. The hot thing becomes the normal thing. Some of the businesses that launched fast will have built something with real staying power. Others will have built something that made sense in 2025 and doesn't quite fit a few years from now. The question worth asking before you launch is: if this sub-brand needs to pivot significantly in three years, what's left? Is the core brand still strong? Is it still being invested in? Is the team behind it still motivated? Your main brand is an asset you've spent years building. Client relationships, reputation, specialist knowledge, market presence. Don't hollow it out chasing a trend. Protect it with the same intention you're putting into building the new thing. Think about visual coherence early I have a background in brand and design. I came from retail and FMCG, sectors where brand consistency is genuinely non-negotiable, and when I moved into recruitment I was taken aback by how loosely some businesses were treating it. It's improved, but the principle still applies. If you launch a sub-brand that looks completely disconnected from your parent brand, you create a problem that gets harder to fix the longer you leave it. Two brands with no shared visual language send a confusing signal: are these the same business? Are they competitors? What's the relationship? The solution isn't to make them identical. It's to make them coherent: shared typography, a colour system that lets both sit in the same palette, a visual thread that signals they are related. Picture them together on a pitch document or in the same LinkedIn feed. 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Trillion is the other side of that same story. When QXi added a third specialism, we concepted, designed and launched the brand from scratch, with its own identity, tone of voice and campaign strategy, but a clear place within the wider group. This is the classic sub-brand play, and it's where the ICP and cannibalisation questions matter most. The service-line brand for a different buyer. Then there's amity, the people and talent advisory division we helped launch for TRG (wonder where the name inspo came from 👀). This one exists because the audience is genuinely different: founders and scaling leaders who need fractional People and Talent leadership, diagnostics and coaching rather than recruitment. A different problem, a different buying journey, a different conversation. Exactly the test I set out earlier. The type you're building dictates the questions you need to answer. A group brand lives or dies on coherence. A specialist launch lives or dies on whether the audience is truly distinct. Get the type right first, and the rest of the strategy has somewhere to hang. The bigger point: differentiation is still the real prize Sub-brands aside, I want to say something about recruitment marketing and branding more broadly, because I think the real opportunity lies there. Recruitment branding has genuinely improved over the last several years. I came from big retailers where your brand guidelines are treated like a legal document, and the contrast with what I saw in recruitment was shocking. It's better now. But "better than it was" is a low bar. There are still too many recruitment businesses with a logo, a colour palette and a LinkedIn page, and nothing that ties it together into something the market actually remembers. And when you scroll LinkedIn today, where most of the game is being played for recruitment businesses, there are pages and pages of content that could have come from anywhere. No distinctive voice. Nothing that makes you stop. The test is simple: can your audience say "oh, them, they're the ones that do X"? If they can't finish that sentence, you don't have a brand yet. You have a name. At Kitto, we have the elephant. It's not subtle, and it's not for everyone. That's entirely the point! Differentiation is what we sell, so we'd look pretty rubbish if we didn't practise it ourselves. But you don't need an elephant. You need something; a perspective, an identity with actual character. A voice that sounds like a human being. Something that accumulates into recognition over time. That's as true for a sub-brand as it is for your main one. Actually, it's more important, because a sub-brand doesn't have years of relationship-building behind it. It has to earn attention from scratch. Give it something worth paying attention to. Before you launch If you're sitting on a plan to launch a recruitment sub-brand, my honest advice is to slow down by a couple of weeks before you do. Do the ICP work. Answer the cannibalisation question. Have the internal conversation with your team before the external one. Think about what happens if the market shifts. Make sure someone with a design brain has looked at how the two brands will actually coexist. The businesses that do this well will have built something with real staying power. The ones that skip these steps will be rebranding again in eighteen months, and that's expensive in every sense. Recruitment has always been a marketing job. Businesses that treat it that way, consistently and over time, build something worth having. That's true whether you're launching something new or protecting something you've already invested years in. Want to go deeper? I talked all of this through in more detail with Nitin Sharma on the RecTalk podcast. Watch the full episode: Sub-Brands or Brand Refresh? How Recruitment Businesses Should Really Scale This article is adapted from Amity’s appearance on the RecTools podcast with Nitin Sharma
Amity Watts
Amity Watts
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Webinars that win business: what actually works (and what doesn’t)
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By Amity Watts, Client Services Director Most webinars are fine. They’re well structured, reasonably well attended, and promptly forgotten. The host gets a small spike of visibility, sends a follow-up email to a handful of people, and wonders whether it was really worth the effort. It should not be like that. Kitto often runs webinar series for our clients, as part of their marketing strategies. These are recruitment businesses ranging from 2 to 100 heads. What is interesting when we start work with them, is how many of them have either run webinars that haven’t gone anywhere, or are putting off starting because they assumed they weren’t big enough, resourced enough, or ready enough. Let me tell you why these assumptions are all wrong. Any business can do this. Right now. You don’t need a production team, a big following, or a fancy platform. The simplest starting point is LinkedIn Live, and it’s one of the most useful. When you go live on LinkedIn, your entire network gets a notification before the event and again when you start. That’s built-in reach with zero ad spend. For a recruitment business trying to build visibility and trust with a targeted audience, that’s a significant opportunity that most are leaving on the table. So, start small. A clear topic, a decent camera, a quiet room. That’s your baseline. Format matters. There are three formats worth considering: Solo presenter. You own the room here. Works well for short, punchy sessions where you’re the authority on a subject. Needs a solid structure and a confident delivery. Interview format. Two people, where one leads and one answers. This is the format I’d recommend for anyone who’s new to webinars. It’s more conversational, easier to sustain, and far less nerve-wracking than presenting alone. The dynamic between two people also tends to produce better content. Client as guest. 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