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How to recruit top talent in PR? - Ben Smith, PRmoment

One issue unites all the PR agencies that I speak to - the difficulty finding and recruiting top PR talent.

Which when you think about it is quite surprising. PR is an attractive career, the work is relatively well paid and not in any way physically difficult. And all the graduate PR career programmes I'm aware of are oversubscribed. So PR, as a sector, is losing people progressively from their early 20s through to their mid-30s.

This makes the recruitment of talented PR people difficult. Like PR, the recruitment sector is undergoing a fair bit of stress at the moment. Recruitment agencies, especially the more generalist ones, are finding it more difficult to add sufficient value to enable them to justify their 20-30 per cent fees.

As a result, if you move out of London, you will find that many recruitment agencies are charging 10 per cent fees or less. This of course is not always good news because it affects the quality of staff that the recruiter can afford.

So, how can PR agencies and in-house teams look to find the best talent? I look at it as a recruitment toolbox. You may not need to do all of these things, but if you employ the majority of these methods, you are more likely to recruit better candidates more quickly.

Here is my PR recruitment toolbox:

1. Build a brand

Comms people spend much of their working lives building a brand, but when it comes to recruiting, they often forget its importance. I see this a lot when different agencies advertise for a PR job in PRmoment jobs. The larger and medium-sized agencies I know seem to get a better response than the small agencies that candidates are unlikely to have heard of (assuming the salary and advert copy is up to scratch).

2. Put the advert on your own website

It's free and will, at the very least, alert any suitable and ambitious internal candidates.

3. Use your social media network

Again, if you are a large brand, or a well-known industry figure, your social network may be larger than an independent. But the point is, it can't hurt. And it's free, and it is instant.

In terms of practicalities, I would send an email to your relevant LinkedIn contacts. Regularly Tweet the vacancy using the hashtag #prjobs and post it on your Facebook page, if that is plugged into your professional network.

How successful is your social network likely to be at filling a PR vacancy? Frankly it seems to depend on your network and the job. I've heard of LinkedIn being successful more often than Twitter, and Twitter being successful more often than Facebook. But bear in mind, we're still in the early stages of recruitment through social media.

4. Appoint a recruitment agency

Yep I'd still do this. If you are recruiting for junior or mid-level positions I'd choose two agencies to work with. We've all had positive and negative experiences with recruitment consultants and my opinion is that it's all about the individual. If you can find someone you can get on with, trust and is motivated, then use them again. The company that they work for is less crucial. They do need to be well motivated though and intelligent enough to be able to hold a sensible conversation (about PR) with, potentially, some pretty senior people.

Just a side note: If it were a senior position I'd appoint a head-hunter on an exclusive basis. It just works better that way. The head-hunter is more motivated and doesn't feel rushed to send you poor candidates. They can do a proper audit of the market and you can build up a rounded picture of the talent available.

5. Use PR specialist PR jobs boards

Candidates who are looking for PR jobs use jobs boards to look at what is available in the market. From a candidate's perspective, jobs boards are a quick and convenient way to search for a PR job.

Where a PR community site like PRmoment.com can also be useful is that the jobs are featured on the editorial site. So by using these types of jobs boards, you are not only putting your company in front of the jobs seekers, but also the wider PR community.

Some jobs boards, including PRmoment jobs are also fully integrated into their own social network. So you may get Tweets, LinkedIn alerts on the publishers Linkedin Group and their Facebook fan page thrown into the bargain.

I would suggest that in the competitive marketplace that is the PR labour market, if you are organised, act quickly and use all of these methods, you would be unlucky not to recruit a decent candidate.

To be clear, I'm also not suggesting using them sequentially. I'd use them all. And I'd have your recruitment plan set up, signed off and ready to go so that when someone resigns you don't spend two weeks (of a potentially four-week notice period) getting your ducks in a row.

Ben Smith is managing director of PRmoment.com

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