Senior Caster
Role Purpose
The Senior Caster serves as the strategic talent orchestrator and craft curator for senior creative and content capabilities across global business units. Moving beyond administrative scheduling or generic resource allocation, this role pairs a nuanced appreciation of creative craft—aesthetic tone, visual identity, conceptual storytelling, and generative AI prompting maturity—with rigorous commercial capacity management.
Operating at the intersection of business demand and creative ambition, the Senior Caster ensures the right creative minds are deployed on the right briefs at the right moment, maximizing billable utilization, minimizing bench time, and safeguarding team well-being across a ~77-person roster.
Key Responsibilities
Strategic Creative Casting & Craft Matching
Curate Talent by Craft: Partner with Executive Creative Directors (ECDs), Group Creative Directors (GCDs), and Creative Leads to interpret project briefs, matching talent based on portfolio aesthetic, brand affinity, storytelling style, and technical craft specializations.
AI & Hybrid Workflow Placement: Evaluate creative team members on their familiarity with AI-assisted creative workflows (e.g., prompt crafting, Midjourney, Firefly, ChatGPT/Claude copy augmentation) to match talent effectively with next-generation production pipelines.
Brief Triage & Scoping Alignment: Act as a critical filter during brief intake, validating that scope, deliverables, and timelines align realistically with available creative bandwidth before committing holds.
Capacity Planning, Bench Optimization & Well-being
Bench Minimization: Proactively identify upcoming roll-offs and unallocated talent 2–3 weeks in advance; partner with business development, account teams, and client leads to secure billable placements before talent lands on the bench.
Workload Balancing & Burnout Prevention: Monitor continuous run-rates and overtime trends across high-pressure retainer accounts. Strategically rotate creative talent between demanding pitch cycles and steady-state work to prevent creative fatigue and attrition.
Discipline Capacity Forecasting: Run bi-weekly forward-looking capacity models across all four sub-disciplines (Art, Copy, Creative Direction, Proofreading) to spot structural shortages or surpluses before they impact delivery.
Contingent Talent & Center of Excellence (CoE) Integration
Early Shortage Signal: Trigger contingent talent requests well before internal bandwidth caps are breached, defining precise craft specifications rather than generic roles.
Freelance & Vendor Partnering: Collaborate closely with Talent Sourcing, Talent Acquisition, and Procurement to brief, vet, and onboard specialized freelance talent and CoE resources.
Commercial Contingent Management: Balance freelance spend against full-time employee (FTE) capacity to protect project margins and prevent unnecessary third-party spend when internal capacity is available.
Operational SLAs & System Data Health
24-Hour Allocation SLA: Maintain single-source-of-truth accuracy in Sanskrit (ERP/Resource Management tool) by ensuring all holds, confirmed bookings, extensions, and reallocations are fully updated within 24 hours of brief agreement.
Roster Hygiene: Audit allocation statuses weekly to close ghost bookings, resolve unconfirmed soft holds, and synchronize project start/end dates with client Statements of Work (SOWs).
Commercial Analytics & Leadership Reporting
Weekly Utilization Reviews: Produce and lead weekly utilization health syncs with Creative Discipline Leads, highlighting actual vs. target billability, bench percentages, and risk areas.
Executive Visibility: Partner with Operations Leadership to surface trends in skill deficits, recurring freelance dependency, and hiring trigger recommendations backed by historical allocation data.
Candidate Profile & Qualifications
Experience & Background: 5–8+ years of progressive experience in Creative Resource Management, Creative Operations, Traffic Management, or Creative Production within a high-growth creative agency, digital production studio, or enterprise in-house agency.
Proven track record managing creative rosters of 60–100+ specialists across multi-disciplinary creative fields (Art Direction, Copywriting, Design, Creative Direction, Post Production, Animation, Produccion, Strategy, Account).
Strong working knowledge of contemporary digital advertising workflows, social/content production, brand campaigns, and localization pipelines.
Craft Literacy & Modern Tools: Creative Fluency: Ability to evaluate portfolios, understand creative decks, and speak the language of creative directors, distinguishing between conceptual, design, and production capabilities.
Familiarity with AI Creative Workflows: Working understanding of how generative AI tools fit into creative concepting, storyboarding, and copywriting to assess creative team member readiness.
Systems Proficiency: Hands-on mastery of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and project management systems.
Soft Skills & Leadership
Diplomatic Negotiation: Exceptional communication skills with the confidence to push back on unrealistic deadlines, negotiate allocations with senior creative leadership, and defuse resource conflicts.
High EQ & Empathy: Innate talent for building trust with creatives while maintaining accountability to commercial goals.
Language Proficiency: Full professional bilingual proficiency in English and Spanish (written and verbal), with experience supporting regional and global account teams.
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