Another question I’m asked very frequently by consultancy candidates is whether I would recommend a move in-house. Like most things, the answer to this depends on a variety of factors, primary of which include where you want to be in five years (both in terms of experience and financial rewards), your current levels of experience and most importantly, the kind of working style that works for you and motivates you.
Some of the possible benefits of an in-house move include:
- Widening your experience
- Gaining an in-depth understanding of issues for a single ‘client’
- Greater skills exposure (feeding in to, say, marketing and internal communications)
- Understanding a business from the inside
- Moving away from pure media coverage orientated targets to large scale projects run over a series of months and different measures of ROI
- Working on the strategy development with marketing people and seeing how these initiatives can work across countries and across disciplines
- Possible extensive company benefits package
But of course, these benefits may not apply to every role, and some of them are available in consultancy positions also.
Some of the potential cons include:
- It can be political (the job becomes more about personal liaison, smoothing egos and internal customers/ audiences)
- You can be taken away from media relations and core writing, in effect doing less ‘PR’, as many see it
- You can be waiting a while for promotion, especially in a small team, where this will depend on the person above you moving also
- Salaries and titles vary a great deal. It’s quite common for people to take a small salary drop when going in-house, at least as common as a salary rise
- You can be dragged into non-PR tasks that you may not have envisaged – often a result of a restructure
- You can find yourself overloaded in a small company, or just another minion in a large company, fighting for budget in either case
- Complex reporting structures
Again these issues vary widely by company and role type, and you can also come across these issues in consultancy.
Factors to help you decide:
- How far do I want to go in agency?
- Am I still doing PR? Or am I now mostly running the agency?
- Do I need to broaden the experience on my CV?
- Do I want to progress quickly and get a salary hike, or is the job quality more important?
- How strategic do I want to be?
Once you have decided your answers to these, you must approach new opportunities with these in mind, both in-house and consultancy. A move in-house is not a cure-all.
Many consultancy PRs look to in-house once they reach account director as this level is often seen as the cross-roads. Staying in consultancy after AD level leads to greater consultancy management, while a move in-house can often mean that you continue ‘doing PR’. But again, this is not always the case. Some in-house roles will require a real media relations driver, some more of a top-line strategist good at managing groups of people, and some a mix of the two. So it’s fair to say that no experience will be wasted, whatever you decide. It may put a slant on your CV though, so it’s worth considering how your experience can be presented in a variety of different ways – but this is one of the things a decent recruiter will do for you.
The other thing that ‘in-house’ is not is ‘easier’. This is a common misconception at junior level. You may even end up working more hours than you did before, depending on the company you choose.
What recruiters will tell you:
Most run-of-the-mill recruiters will try to advise you against a move in-house. There are some simple reasons for this.
- Generally, it depends on the roles they have on at the time, they’ll advise you either way accordingly. Naturally, most retained clients are consultancy rather than in-house. In-house roles have to be continually hunted down. So, its easier for the recruiter to place you into another consultancy role
- It therefore follows that many of the same recruiters have less experience of in-house roles. They don’t understand the in-house culture and environment (it is harder to grasp sometimes) – especially with complex companies
Overall, in-house roles can be immensely challenging and rewarding. Generally, what I advise candidates to do is stay in consultancy up to AD level. You’ll get faster pay-rises and climb the ladder more quickly, gaining more confidence quickly, than the equivalent in-house route. Once established at AD level, then you have to decide if running a consultancy is what you want, or if you’d rather be managing PR campaigns in a company. But then, if that dream role in-house comes up before you get to AD, you might want to jump at the chance beforehand, and remember that competition for in-house roles at AD level is therefore very fierce.
