It’s a strange time to be in digital advertising. If you spend five minutes on LinkedIn, you’ll see two things side by side: a heartbreaking “open to work” post from a brilliant VP who just got caught in a 10% reduction in force, and a “we’re hiring!” announcement from a rival firm looking for a very specific type of specialist.

The math doesn’t seem to add up. How can we have thousands of talented, seasoned professionals sitting on the sidelines for months while “Careers” pages remain active?

The reality is that “Adtech Experience” isn’t a monolith anymore. For a decade, the industry prioritized generalists who could navigate the wild west of third party cookies. Now, the goalposts haven’t just moved; they’ve been replaced.

Companies are aggressively hiring for Retail Media Networks, CTV Attribution, and Privacy-First Engineering. If your resume is built on the old ways of open exchange bidding, recruiters might be unfairly labeling you as a “legacy” player. The industry is rebuilding its engine while the car is moving at 80 mph, and they’re looking for mechanics who specifically know the new electric parts.

While everyone is terrified of AI taking their desk, that’s not what’s causing the immediate pain. The real culprit is the redistribution of labor.

When a team of ten becomes a team of seven, the work rarely disappears. Instead, those three remaining workloads are sliced up and handed to the “survivors.” This creates a vicious cycle. The remaining team is too burned out to be innovative, and the people who were let go are left wondering why their expertise which was vital six months ago is suddenly being treated as a luxury.

Adtech has always been a “boom and bust” ecosystem. We over hire during the gold rushes and overcorrect the moment the market gets “choppy.”

We haven’t figured out how to do it better because the industry still prioritizes short term quarterly “efficiency” over long term human capital stability. It’s easier to show a board “reduced overhead” on a spreadsheet than it is to calculate the “cost of burnout” or the massive loss of institutional knowledge.

Where do we go from here?

If you’re currently in the “open to work” camp, know that it’s not a reflection of your talent. The “hiring” is real, but the criteria have become hyper specific and, frankly, a bit myopic.

For those still inside, the move is to advocate for sustainable velocity. If we keep pretending that seven people can do the work of ten indefinitely, we’re just waiting for the next wave of burnout induced turnover. The industry is evolving, yes. But we need to make sure we don’t break the people who built it in the first place.