The PVR Interview Toolkit: Part 2 – Five Top Tips

We’re looking at first interviews again. In the last post we talked about the Three W’s to help you prepare what you’re going to say and how to answer key questions. Here we have five additional top tips to add the icing on your Three W’s cake …as it were…


1. The Bigger Picture
Hopefully you’ll have a grasp of the overall campaign picture (strategy) involved in your work – not just the tactical execution. Saying that, it’s one of the areas people frequently fall down on, and thus a way of standing out as a top candidate. If you don’t have a grasp of the strategy – this can be one of your prime reasons for moving – to gain more involvement in strategy. For account directors and above, this is most important. Check out our earlier post on How To Get To Account Director. For more junior candidates, a grasp of this will really impress, as its shows you understand the real value of the tactical work that you focus on


2. Embody Your CV
Hopefully your CV is looking great – it’s the reason they wanted to meet you – so do it justice. Know your way round your CV blindfolded, so when questioned on any section you can reel of a coherent answer straight away and what you say matches what you’ve written down, including results and achievements


3. Dress For Success
In our creative PR industry, it’s generally only corporate and financial agencies that require you to wear a full on suit these days, and the people you meet in any technology or consumer agency are likely to be dressed casually. In fact, a full suit can sometimes make you look a bit too corporate, as the interviewers will be trying to imagine you fitting in. But there’s a right way to do casual and that means smart-casual. Smart jeans (or trousers) with a smart shirt with a trendy/ smart jacket often works well as a combo for both boys and girls, while these links on College Fashion and Pretty Savvy have some good tips aimed more at ladies and also talk about PR interviews. If in doubt, it’s always best to err on the side of conservative/ smart and the fallback is a traditional suit – no one should really hold being smart against you. If you dress very casually at work – take a change of clothes or simply start dressing a bit smarter generally


4. Strike A Rapport
That’s right. You’ll be working cheek-by-jowel with these people so they’ll want to feel they can work with you. Maybe find a small talking point before of after the interview, use open body language, sound keen to learn more about them (the end of interview questions can help with this) and a healthy sense of humour is always good (leave the clown outfit and stand up routine at home though)


5. Any Questions?
Yes you have. Asking questions shows you have a keen interest in finding out everything you can so that you make this move work. Whether is about some of the campaigns or the team culture, its good to have at least a couple of questions. Chances are, if you’ve done your research, you’ll have a couple of questions


Finally, Plan Your Journey
Look at maps, look at Google Street View, check train times. Make sure you know where to go. Try to get there a bit early in case of train delays, then sit in a coffee shop until a maximum of ten minutes or a minimum of five minutes beforehand. Its really is all about where you’re going and how to get there!

The PVR Interview Toolkit: Part 1 – The Three W’s

We thought it was about time we put up some more interview advice, so we’re going to run a mini-series of posts on preparing for PR consultancy interviews. These will cover as much as possible from initial preparation at first stage, through to advise with interview skills and on to tips for handling presentations and final stage meetings, so keep checking back for more. While these tips use consultancy as the model, the tips can also easily be applied to an in-house situation.


In this first piece, we look at preparing for the first stage, having secured the new employer’s interest (and for CV tips to help you do that – have a look back at our previous posts).


The first interview with a potential new employer is generally some form of informal chat. This is the all-important first impression that you make in person. It’s therefore mostly about your persona and will determine if you get a second interview, which is usually (but not always) more competency based. So how to prepare?


The Three Golden Questions.

In any interview, you are likely to be asked a combination of the Three W’s – What? Why? Where? – and more than likely to have them asked twice – first in relation to the employer, and second in relation to your experience. Preparing for these should underpin all of your first stage preparation. Like all good PR, something that on the surface looks like a semi-casual chat actually has a lot of groundwork supporting it.


Regarding the employer:

• What – do you know about us?
  This is where your background research comes in. You need to have read the recruiter’s notes thoroughly, had a good look around the agency website and have a good understanding of the clients and the work that the agency is doing for them. Research into recent press releases and PR Week articles will help with this. You should also have a grasp of the agency size and ideally, some information about the person or people interviewing you.



• Why – do you want to work here?
  You must have prepared an answer to this, its fundamental. Think about what the new employer can offer you in terms of career progression and expanding your experience. Think about your recruiter briefing and the way the company was presented to you. Maybe it’s a bigger agency with larger international clients and a well designed training and development programme. Maybe it’s a smaller agency that offers a closely knit team and very tangible connection to accounts where your input shows direct results. Have a good think about an answer that presents you in the best light and shows that this role will help you progress in important ways.



• Where – do you see yourself in five years?
  Yes, that old chestnut. It’s a question that really asks if you have some kind of a plan, or at least a grasp of where you are heading. You might want to talk about heading up a team and passing on what you have learnt to others, or you might want to talk about progressing to a ‘global’ level role and gaining a reputation for providing sound senior counsel.

Clearly, the above questions are simply assessing that you have reasoned out why you want to move jobs and why this employer is the best option for you – that your understand why you are there in front of them and it’s a positive decision on your part. Any uncertainty will come through immediately.


Regarding your experience:

• What – have you been working on?


• Why – did you do it in that way?


• Where – did you gain coverage, hold events etc?

As you can see, the Three W’s can be applied to pretty much everything. ‘Where’ is sometimes changed to ‘How’, but the principles are the same. Be prepared to talk through your clients and campaigns. Think about them as mini case studies and run through the initial planning, activities and outcomes. Try to make them a relevant as possible to the new job on offer. Try to get the balance of describing them fully, while making sure not to ramble on. Think about how you’d media train a senior executive from one of your clients for interviews and then apply that to yourself. Also, remember to describe what you have contributed, not just ‘we’ – as in your team. This is also a good time to introduce some work examples if you’ve brought them along. It may sound old fashioned, but generally three to six pieces of your very best work will support your case and shows some preparation.


Preparation is everything. Candidates that leave it to the last moment or think they can wing it at the interview rarely do well. Your ability to appear calm, collected and well researched shows that you are serious about this job opportunity. No gum chewing, swearing or playing with mobiles allowed. This is your sales pitch – you are the product they are buying into.


Our next post will be five top tips tips to ensure your full preparation, so keep ‘em peeled…

The Revolution Will Be Tweeted

‘The Revolution will not be televised’ sang Gil Scott-Heron in 1970. With recent events, it appeared that he couldn’t have been more wrong, as we watched the waves of protests and uprisings across the Arab world played out on screens. But a closer analysis of the Facebook Revolutions shows the greater importance of social media, and there are valuable lessons in these global events for brand communications.


Of course, I don’t profess to know the mind of Gil Scott-Heron, but it’s likely he held a similar view to 1970’s CBS Newsman Edward Murrow, who (paraphrasing Marx) described TV as ‘the opiate of the people’. Scott-Heron’s lyrics suggest a view of TV as a means by which governments and powerful corporations could subjugate the people, and in particular whites could control blacks. For him, The Revolution would subvert the media and would not be reduced to a TV spectacle. Everyone would be involved together - you wouldn't be able to stay home at watch it on TV.


Today’s technology has become so personalised and user-friendly that literally everyone can use a camera phone and upload content to YouTube, or post instant messages on Twitter. Rather than a tool for subjugation, new media has become the great enabler. States may still control the TV that’s broadcast in their country, and they can even shut down the internet to a certain degree, but in doing so they often damage themselves and their economies. Moreover, Twitter and Youtube have proven to be virtually uncontrollable. Even if the direct routes are shut down, footage and messages seem to find ways round it - there are even several workarounds for China’s Great Firewall. This is the truly globalised, interconnected world, where citizen journalists make the news, and anyone can comment on it, rather than simply watching a particular broadcaster’s angle. Governments have taken this on board, with Beijing’s police recently opening China’s first ever police PR department complete with microblogging and online video. But states can’t control social media scrutiny, they can only be part of the conversation, in some senses just another brand in the market place, rather than owning the market place. People will either buy in to its products, or not – time will tell.


Facebook didn’t produce the revolution in Tunisia – it’s not something that Facebook can claim ownership of. But it was an essential tool that enabled (unwittingly) the instant communication required to allow it to happen. Ben Ali’s subsequent TV appearances where he took the traditional approach of glossing over what was happening stood in starkest contrast to events in the Arab Street and reinforced his disengagement.


How does this relate to PR?


The lesson for brands is clear – embrace the conversation. Get in amongst your customers, your staff and your stakeholders and engage with them. Some brands are now so far advanced in this approach they are leaving slower competitors far behind. Their staff are using internal social networks and messaging. Their corporate stakeholders and customers receive online magazines and engage with their blogs. Their consumer audiences follow them on Facebook and Twitter and their posts about the products are greeted with comments from company representatives, their questions are referred to customer services.


PR agencies should also take note, if they haven’t already done so. It’s no longer enough for social media to be a bolt-on to traditional PR campaigns. The customers want direct interaction. PRs must themselves become the enablers for their clients to use social media, with clients opening themselves up to scrutiny in the process. There must be a plan for that – something PR people are very good at. Perhaps 2011 will be the great Brand Social Media Spring as well as an Arab Awakening.


Rather than televised, the revolution was tweeted, Facebooked and YouTube’d. Incidentally, the most liked comment on that Youtube clip of Gil Scot Heron is from an Egyptian. Apparently, the song was popular during the protests.

Cover Notes: The Five Golden Rules

So, you’re submitting your CV to a recruiter or a new job. What do you put on the email? While this may sound like a minor consideration, it’s actually one of the most important things to consider when applying for a job. Your cover note is THE first impression, the packaging on the product. Now, there’s a million online guides to creating a good cover note that I’m not going to repeat here. These are worth a read and you should heed their advice. But there are some golden rules I’ll briefly put forward here:


Rule No 1. – Get your CV up to scratch
I can’t emphasise this enough. If your CV doesn’t convey your experience, a well crafted cover note is useless. Spend your time tweaking your CV first. Check out my previous posts on crafting a CV from scratch. The best cover notes are let down by a badly updated or structured CV.


Rule No 2. – Minimal for recruiters
Usually, when you send a CV to a recruiter, you’ll be applying via a website or a job board. The recruiter is unlikely to read your cover note and will instead go straight to opening the CV, making a cover note irrelevant. In fact, in this case, the cover note can be detrimental to your chances. Long cover notes will put the recruiter off. If you have to spend three paragraphs describing your suitability for the role, the chances are that your CV doesn’t do this enough – see Rule No. 1. It also begs the question – should you be applying for this role? However, sometimes a small intro is a nice opener – so keep it brief. Single paragraph, say 200 words (the length of this paragraph, in fact). Think about it as the opening paragraph on a press release. After all, that is what your CV is – the press release that sells the product – i.e. you. When applying to a potential employer - this is a different ball game entirely and depends on the process they have used – which could be an open application where you submit a cover note, or an application form that requires careful formatting. In these cases, check out the available online guides.


Rule No 3. – Do not bulk email
It’s tempting to send your CV on a group email to save time, but it immediately reduces your chances. It tends to look lazy and unplanned. What’s more, it’s obvious that you’ve not tailored your approach or application to each employer/ recruiter or job vacancy, which shows lack of attention to detail. It also suggests you’re signing up with a million recruiters and possibly seeking out the ensuing bun fight between them. Not cool. If you wouldn’t Cc or blind copy a group of journalists on a release, then don’t do the same with recruiters. A new job is worth taking a bit more time over. Address it to the recipient; ‘Dear Joe’ or ‘Hi Joe’, never just ‘Hi’, and most definitely not ‘Dear all, excuse the bulk email’.


Rule No 4. – Spell-check, spell-check, spell-check
Not just with auto spell checker and it’s American spelling. Read it once, read it three times. Get a friend to read it. This is PR – spelling errors will shoot you down. We don’t use a ‘z’ in ‘organised’ in the UK.


Rule No 5. – Make sense
On several occasions, I’ve had a CV with a cover note that says ‘I’m sure I would be a great addition to your company’. This is a common error when you ignore Rule No. 3. I’m not the employer, I’m the recruiter. Another common error is the use of overly complicated language – like someone has deliberately consulted a dictionary to find the most obscure or pretentious way of describing something in order to demonstrate a greater grasp of vocabulary. This is OK to a degree – PR is about the use of language – but make sure the word has the intended meaning and if it complicates the meaning, that’s a PR fail. You’re after a concise message.

Re-Association: The Future of Freud

On New Year’s Eve, Matthew Freud bought back some of the 50.1% stake that he had sold to Publicis Group in 2005. It’s the second time he’s done this type of thing (1994 – from AMV after purchase by Omnicom), and there has been much talk about the different perceived values of the business (Freudian Slippage?) and lack of desired international expansion after his refocus on big global brands as opposed to popular celebrities.


However, more openly, he has expressed opinions this time around that point to his belief that PR has outshone advertising in its contribution to business;


‘…our peer group has emerged as the strategic advisers of choice in marcoms’


And central to this is the increasing importance of reputation management;


‘ PR – in terms of reputation management, third party endorsement, crisis management – is about as core a function as any company currently has’


Combined with his recently bought stakes in integrated marketing outfit Engine, and advertising/ PR agency M&C Saatchi, plus 30% stake in sports communications agency Pitch, rumors abound that he is building up his own communications empire.


If this is the case, it’s a further sign of the marketing-PR consolidation and those looking to take advantage of it. But perhaps its actually a sign that the current market favors more freely associated smaller agencies than the megaliths of the 20th century.

Developing Talent: A Lesson From the Masters

As business picks up, many businesses and consultancies alike start to try harder to poach the top talent from their rivals. Understandable - when the opportunities arise, they want to have the foresight and brainpower to seize them. But as a recent book by Bill Conaty (ex-Head of HR at General Electric) and Ram Charan (Corporate Leadership Consultant) sets out to demonstrate, the businesses that are best placed to seize the advantage consistently are those that can harness their existing abilities effectively.


The thrust of their book, The Talent Masters: Why Smart Leaders Put People Before Numbers, is concerned with identifying and developing high-
flyers, and the pitfalls and advantages of doing so. But there are also two other very important messages – firstly that those individuals who are outperformed in one area can excel in another, and also the ability of businesses to recover very quickly when team members are lost, e.g to other companies.


Therefore, businesses need to keep the work of their employees as varied as possible. Not only to keep the staff interested, motivated and continually challenged, but also to identify the key strengths of staff members. Also, they should consider methodologies for consistently identifying the talents of each member of their team. This does not mean one-size fits all blanket training schemes, but individualised approaches. We’ve all heard of the PDP (Personal Development Plan), but how often is this shoe-horning an individual into one of a small handful of prescribed training sessions as opposed to a much more tailored and personally consultative approach?


At PVR, we are seeing trends that point towards more engaging employee development programmes. There has certainly been an increase over the last two years of consultancies using psychometric profiling (Insights for example) as an integral part of staff development.


These types of profiles, rather than setting out to identify what a person is like, try to identify why they are like it. Its usefulness lies in its ability to highlight an individual’s work style to that individual. When compared to the modus operandi of their colleagues, it can help staff to understand both themselves and each other, and gives a rough rule-of-thumb guide as to why they might work better with some co-workers than others. The profiles can also point to different training styles required for individuals. They may be able to suggest the best ways of working to overcome difficulties that can arise between personality types, and also where people work best together – and can generate the quickest advantages. In addition, these next-generation profiles take into account that we all have a shifting, complex set of motivations and emotions, and therefore seeks to identify individuality, rather than pigeon-hole.


Many consultancies also claim to have a ‘great’ team atmosphere, ‘collegiate and meritocratic’. But these are standard lines. The consultancies that can back this up with hard data – through employee feedback surveys, or a PRCA audit, really stand out from the crowd when we are briefing candidates on vacancies and clients. It demonstrates not just the ability to back up claims, but the fact these companies have made an effort to try and measure sentiment in their own organisation.


Rob Morris, posting an interesting review of the book on The Employee Engagement Network, highlights the handy 5-point plans Conaty and Charan suggest for both the organisation, and individuals, to put in a framework for talent development:


An organisation should:

• Get all senior leaders centrally engaged in talent recognition and selection


• Hire for demonstrated leadership, not just for credentials


• Learn as much as possible about values and behaviour before hiring


• Be humble enough to hire "outsiders" but ensure cultural assimilation


• Be totally honest about who has greatest leadership potential

Individuals should:

• Make talent development an obsession


• Drill down deep to the specifics of his/her talent and potentiality


• Give frequent, honest, and specific feedback


• Make talent development a core competency with accountability


• Provide intellectual challenges and opportunities for additional growth

Such measures would also raise the game of the industry as a whole, with a greater number of more well-rounded candidates rather than individuals too highly specialised to gain jobs in different PR sectors. Maybe then we can break out of the mindset that pigeon-holes candidates in sector exclusivity, and broaden our scope to look out of the box at ‘PR all-rounders’.