Why most creative hires are filtered, not found.
A founder's take on why brands keep hiring the same people, and what they should be doing instead.
Hiring a creative isn’t a finding problem
I’ve spent the past few weeks talking to brands, agencies and casting directors about how they hire creatives.
Same story, every time.
It’s not that they can’t find anyone. It’s that they can find too many.
Thousands of portfolios across Behance, Instagram, LinkedIn, agency rosters, freelance platforms, recommendation threads, DMs. The supply of creative talent in the UK is endless. Anyone with twenty minutes and a search bar can find a thousand photographers, illustrators or set designers in their city.
So what do most teams actually do when a brief lands?
They hire the same person they hired last time. Or the friend of someone on the team. Or whoever a producer mentions in a meeting. Or the third name on a Google search.
Not because they’re lazy. Because the alternative is overwhelming.
The real cost of hiring this way
This isn’t a small problem. It’s the reason great creatives get missed, the reason briefs feel safe, and the reason hiring decisions keep flowing through the same small handful of names.
A few patterns I’ve seen up close:
A casting director who’s been booking the same five faces for two years, because the alternative is opening Spotlight and trying to narrow 200,000 actors down to a shortlist of five before Friday.
A brand marketing lead with an £8,000 photography budget who hired the photographer her colleague used last year, because she didn’t have time to vet anyone new and didn’t trust the platforms to surface someone good.
A creative director who’s quietly losing pitches because his decks look like everyone else’s, because his illustrator pool is three people he met in 2019.
None of these people have a finding problem. They have a filtering problem. And nobody’s really solving it.
Why platforms aren’t the answer
The instinct, when you’ve got too many options, is to look for a better filter.
Behance has 30 million creatives. Filter by location, by style, by tools used. Still leaves you with hundreds.
LinkedIn is worse, it’ll surface whoever’s most active on LinkedIn, which is NOT the same thing as who’s best at the work.
Instagram is a popularity contest. Algorithm wins, not skill.
Freelance platforms optimise for speed and price, not quality.
The reason none of these solve the filtering problem is that they’re all built to give buyers more options. More is the problem, not the solution.
What buyers actually need
When I ask people what they wish hiring looked like, the answer is always some version of the same thing.
“Someone I trust telling me these three are right for this brief, and here’s why.”
That’s it. That’s the product.
Not a directory. Not a marketplace. Not an algorithm. A person who knows the work, knows the people, and does the filtering.
It’s how hiring used to work in the creative industries before the internet got involved, and it’s how the people at the very top still hire today. The casting directors with strong networks. The art directors with shortlists in their heads. The brand teams with one trusted agency on speed dial.
The rest of the market lost that, and replaced it with platforms.
CAP is built to put it back.
A small ask
If you’re a brand, agency or casting director hiring creatives this quarter, I’d love to know how you currently do it. Not selling anything, just trying to understand the actual workflow.
What’s the brief look like when it lands on your desk? Where do you start? Where do you get stuck?
Drop me a message and let me know. I read every response.
If you’d rather just send a brief and see how CAP works in practice, that works too. Find me on LinkedIn or reply here.
Rob | Founder, CAP