Design your marketing team for moments, not permanency

I'm going to be blunt.

The way most businesses hire for marketing hasn't been fit for purpose for years.

Permanent roles. Backfilling when someone leaves. Expecting the same handful of people to deliver every campaign, every channel, every specialist demand.

That used to work when the world was predictable. When channels weren't so dizzyingly complex, when business planning cycles were linear, when you could almost always find what you needed in the job market.

We don’t live in that world anymore.

In the UK right now, hiring intentions have cooled, while flexible and short-term resourcing is being used in ways that traditional models never anticipated.

Hiring isn’t dead — but it is subdued

The latest UK labour market trends from REC show that the appetite to hire permanent staff is low and has been for months. Indicators around permanent placements and vacancies have fallen to levels not seen since before the pandemic, as employers hold off on long-term commitments amid cost pressures and uncertainty. This isn’t just marketing either, it’s across the economy.

At the same time, employers are increasingly filling gaps with contract, interim or flexible roles. Advertised contract jobs in the UK are up year-on-year even as permanent job postings drop.

The balance of hiring intent is shifting, not retreating.

Why this matters for marketing teams

The mistake most leaders make in this environment is to treat this shift as a personnel problem.

It isn’t. It’s a delivery model problem.

You can move a budget line from “headcount” to “project spend,” and that does reduce fixed cost on paper. But if, after you do that, your team still works the same way, with the same expectations, same backlogs, same approach to BAU versus spike work, then nothing changes. You’ve just taken a fixed cost and made it less visible.

That’s not flexibility. That’s fragility with better accounting.

This is where the phrase from my recent video matters:

Design for moments, not permanency.

What designing for moments really means

In a team designed for permanence, everyone has a job description, and work is expected to fit the seats on the org chart.

In a team designed for moments, you do two things differently:

1. The permanent team owns BAU and decision rights
   

Your core, employed marketers should still run the day-to-day:

• Setting strategy

• Managing stakeholders

• Holding quality and brand integrity

• Prioritising what happens when

They are the constancy in your machine. Nothing here changes, and it shouldn’t.

2. Flexible capability handles surge and specialist work

Here’s where it changes:

Specialist work, the campaigns and capabilities that aren’t constant, gets accessed when needed, not shoe-horned into permanent roles or dumped on the in-house team as yet another task.

You bring in:

• Specialist campaign operators

• Technical performers

• Deep expertise that wouldn’t make sense as a permanent hire

• Short bursts of capacity that otherwise would be done slowly, poorly, or not at all

That’s designing for moments. Matching capability to the rhythm of demand, not the rhythm of a 12-month headcount plan.

The UK labour backdrop makes this even more sensible

Permanent hiring is weak. Employers are cautious. Temporary placements and contract hires are making up more of the activity in the jobs market.

At the same time, broader workplace trends show that employees, especially skilled professionals, want flexibility and value work where they can control it. They see the appeal in shorter engagements that let them make more money or own multiple projects.

This isn’t just about saving money by avoiding National Insurance and pension costs (though that’s real). It’s about accessing scarce skills on demand without turning every decision into a long-term commitment. The UK market is telling you it can’t deliver fast enough boots-on-the-ground and certainty in full-time roles, so those things have to be managed separately.

What gets in the way and how to avoid it

Most of the resistance to this model isn’t financial. It’s psychological.

Leaders still have a habit of thinking:

• “If we pay for capability, it should be permanent.”

• “Someone needs to own this role.”

• “We can’t send signals that we don’t value stability.”

Those instincts are understandable. But they’re headcount thinking, not delivery thinking.

A better question is:

“What work do we have right now, and what skills are required for that work?”

Then match capability to that moment.

That frees your permanent team from being stretched too thin, and it lets you protect quality and speed without inflationary headcount.

A note of caution (and how to avoid common pitfalls)

Flexible and contract resourcing isn’t a silver bullet. Used badly, it can feel ad-hoc, chaotic, or transactional. To avoid that:

• Have clear delivery priorities set by the permanent team

• Treat external talent as part of the delivery ecosystem, not a “temp”

• Build simple onboarding and integration processes

• Measure quality and outcomes consistently

When done well, your internal team stays sane, delivery improves, and the organisation feels both agile and in control.

So what now?

You don’t have to invent a completely new operating model overnight.

Start with this:

1. Separate capability from permanence Recognise that permanent jobs and temporary expertise serve different purposes.

2. Define work by moments, not roles

   Ask: “What needs to get done next? What skills do we need for that?”

3. Use flexible resourcing deliberately

   Not as patchwork, but as a design choice for how marketing actually gets delivered.

4. Keep the core team focused on strategy and continuity

   That’s their job. That’s their value.

All of this points towards a fundamental shift in how we think about marketing teams. It’s not about abandoning the permanent team, but it is about designing for the real cadence of work. The peaks, troughs, and everything in between.

In a world where hiring freezes are our reality and uncertainty is constant, that distinction isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s how high-performing marketing teams win.