Christmas: Use It, Don't Lose It.

Everyone looks forward to the Christmas break, with dreams of over doing it on Christmas food and dozing off in the living room. But in this last blog post before Christmas, we look at the ways in which the Christmas break can be both a good time to job hunt, as well as valuable opportunity to brush up your CV and online profile.

Traditionally, Christmas has been the period when things slow down. Companies take their foot off the gas, and job seeking is put off until the New Year. But the last couple of years have been different. In fact, for PVR, this time last year was our busiest period. The main reason for this is that many companies who had been keeping agencies in a holding pattern before signing off on new business had budgets cleared before Christmas, and suddenly agencies needed to hire staff. This was true for a handful last year, while this year other factors, such as the recovery of the economy in Q3, should make this situation more widespread. Indeed, we're already receiving new briefs each week for brand new roles in agencies - unusual for this time before last year.

So this is in fact a golden opportunity for searching. And not only that, the week long break should also provide ample time to update your CV, compile a great portfolio of work, and make sure your online profiles are up-to-date.

It can also be a good time to prepare for interviews. If you've interviewed people before - this should be fairly easy. Sit down with your CV, and pretend it belongs to someone else that you are going to interview. Then make a list of all the possible questions you would ask if you saw your CV. Then, back in your own shoes, make sure you have pithy answers for all of these. If there are questions that could be answered simply by tweaking the CV - then make sure you change those details. If you've not interviewed anyone before, you can do the same exercise, but also take a look at our previous blog post on the key interview questions.

So for Christmas, some forward planning is best. Plan what days you'll work on your CV and online accounts. As when the Christmas cheer starts to take over, working on your next job will be the last thing on your mind. So have an activity plan for the holiday and stick to it. This will get you off to a flying start in January, and hopefully land you a fresh job for the New Year. This is one of the best times to do those things you wish you had time for - don't lose out.

Interviews: How Long Should You Wait?

This is a frequent question I discuss with my other half, mostly regarding queues for the checkout and waiting for buses. But I was intrigued recently to read a blogpost on the black coffee blog on behalf of marketing job board OnlyMarketingJobs. It suggests that candidates should be made to waitin reception for extended periods before an interview in order to filter for determination and enthusiasm. So rather than posting the usual idea that it's up to candidates to decide how long to wait (which it is of course), I'm turning it around and asking clients how long they are prepared to keep them waiting and how this affects their recruitment process.

Why You Should SEO Your LinkedIn Profile

If you've been anywhere near these blog posts over the past few months, you'll know how valuable LinkedIn is as a recruitment tool. Indeed, as the number of Talent Acquisition Managers rise, there is a trend for them to use smaller headhunting and recruitment agencies that form closer bonds with their clients and work on a more exclusive basis. These smaller agencies (like PVR), instead of spending valuable capital on expensive bespoke databases that have to be constantly maintained an updated (a full time job in itself) - can use LinkedIn as their main database. LinkedIn self-updates and provides functionality over and above any recruitment database.  But it relies on you, as a potential jobseeker, to keep it up-to-date.

At PVR, we still have a database, but it's a fluid and straightforward process unlike the hulking, creaking old style bespoke databases that many of the larger recruitment firms still use. The problem with those old style databases is that their data is nearly always out of date, especially in fast moving environment like PR, where the average job tenure remains around the 2 year mark. In an effort to reduce manpower in their maintenance, they now often come with CV scanners that automatically pick out words from a CV. With some companies, you even have to upload the data online yourself, direct in to the database, to register with the firm. Of course, this fully relies on the CV to have all the right key words in it. These automatic systems will use these key words to produce a shortlist for a given role and will auto-email the people on it. Ever signed up with a large recruitment firm or job board and received lots of calls and emails regarding totally irrelevant jobs? That's why smaller firms like us don't use them, and rely more on personal engagement.

LinkedIn, by comparison, is more personal, reliable and up-to-date.

Therefore, ask yourself - have you used all the key words that describes your skills and what you do - the clients you work on and what sectors you cover?  Have you added skills to your profile?  Have you used the alternative ways to class your work? (An example might be buzz monitoring, social analysis and insights - all of which can mean the same thing). Even if you aren't looking for a job right now - I'm sure you'd rather be more visible to searches?  Remember than LinkedIn can be used to search, identify and contact skills matches for just 1st degree connections, as well as 2nd and 3rd degree potential contacts.

In the fast-paced, highly competitive market that we now have, having a relevant profile has never been more important.

The PR/ Marketing Consolidation: The Rise of Content

Last week PR week issued a story entitled "Wider remit for PR professionals in a touch job market".  The story is apparently based around what is clearly a release from business analysts Pearlfinders, that suggested two things. Firstly, that the number of senior in-house appointments in Q3 2012 has significantly fallen compared to the same period last year. Secondly, that within that group, the number of communications professionals shifting into CMO or integrated roles has risen by 6% to 8% - giving rise to the headline. So, the market is tough, and roles are becoming more integrated.

Unfortunately, and I have to say this, the figures quoted are laughable. With a tiny and data set of just 57 job moves the sample size is far too small to show any significance. Surely a research firm would know this? Furthermore, 8% of that population would equal 4.56 people. If the increase has been 6%, then last year it was 4.3 people. So if we round those to 5 and 4 people respectively, then 1 more person has taken an integrated role compared to last year. Hardly earth shattering. However, despite the dodgy figures in the article, some respected senior communications figures have shown their appreciation of the suggested trend, including SABMiller Comms Director Catherine May, and  Scott Wilson, UK CEO at Cohn & Wolfe - so we can appreciate that the trend outlined is real.

It was back in October 2010 that I first blogged about the PR/Marketing Consolidation, so it's no surprise that, two years on, this process is still being refined. Digital and Social have required the presentation skills and platform understanding of marketeers, married to the sales, message crafting and network growing abilities of  PR professionals. What this has produced is not some kind of Chief Comms/Marketing Office, but rather the Head of Content - a trend that has been very noticeable within PR consultancies over the last two years or so - including Metia, Bite and Edelman to name just three. Content Strategy is the new "integrated comms" - and a suggest having a look at the blog posts of Margot Merrill at Hot Design Studio who has run an excellent analytical series on the rise of content.

Indeed, it was Bill Gates who coined the phrase 'Content is King' way back in 1996!  A quick read of his article comes across as highly prophetic - which makes the rise of content look like part of a much larger trend, not some kind of market reaction. Indeed, what some people are referring to as web 3.0.

PR People & Recruiters - Why We're All Going Mobile!

As I right this, the future of 4G telecoms in Britain is being launched at the science museum. Not only will this vastly improve the signal in the UK's cities, it will also make it much easier to view TV and video content on smartphones.  Smartphones are in fact becoming our information hub.  In December 2011, eMarketer revealed figures (for the previous year) that suggested that in one day, the average US adult spent 4.5 hours watching TV/video, 2.75 hours using the Internet and 1 hour using the mobile. However, as smart phones have become more ubiquitous (with lower price points and inclusion in price plans), the amount on information that is consumed through them has rocketed. According to digital market intelligence company comScore, the number of European smartphone users accessing news via a mobile browser or app has surged 74% over the past year. The UK has the highest percentage of frequent users, at just under 50%.

Social Media has already seen a sea-change in the way both communications and recruitment are conducted. Mobile is certainly the next challenge. After all, it makes absolute sense that the best time to connect with friends, browse the new releases and check job vacancies is while you are travelling or on a lunch break - and  your smartphone  is the great enabler for this.

Of course, PR as a discipline is slightly further ahead of the game with this than recruitment - with major news sources having gone online some years ago. Most PR agencies now offer some form or social/digital integration and some even offer mobile app development. But what about recruitment?

A recent (November 2011) study by jobseeker market intelligence company, Potentialpark, revealed that almost 20% of job seekers use mobile, while over 50% could imagine doing so in the near future. However, the study found that only 7% of employers had a mobile version of their career site and only 3% had a mobile job app. As 2012/13 will undoubtedly see a large increase in this type of mobile use, addressing the needs of mobile job applicants will become a priority for both recruitment agencies and their clients. The top 5 activities that those surveyed said they would like to do via mobile were:

1. Search jobs (57%)
2. Received job alerts via SMS/email (51%)
3. Track application status (39%)
4. Check calendar with career related events (39%)
5. Read about the recruitment process (39%)

That's going to require a certain degree of investment. Of course, it’s not easy to write out a personal statement or cover letter on a mobile - which may be one of the reasons that 'Apply for jobs' came further down the list of activities, even when ‘Search jobs’ came up top. But as the eMarketer stats revealed, people like to ear mark information on mobile to check out in detail later, when at their PC. And there are always shortcuts - such as prepared, tweakable cover letters uploaded to Skydrive, easily accessed via a mobile.

I expect the next 12 months will see a new focus on websites being optimised for mobile, even further integration with social media and an even great expansion of QR code use and bespoke app development. I also think that careers pages will see an increased use of video content and smart forms optimised for mobile. And these are still early days, so it’s likely that there are brain boxes out there who are nearly ready to launch new innovative tools that will make mobile adoption easier.

Recruitment Gamification

Humans love games. Many people would already describe the hiring process as a 'recruitment game' - after all it seems to have rules (such as how to compose a cover note or behave in an interview) and various players (candidates, recruiters, hiring managers) and conforms to the classic engagement-reward structure of games. So as computer games are increasingly invading our everyday lives (Google Doodle games, Mobile games, Farmville, online poker, prize draw games, military training games, MMORPG etc etc), it seems like a natural progression to bring games into recruitment. Many would shudder at the thought, but like all these innovations, when done well, it can be highly effective and catch on very quickly.

Gartner defines 'Gamification' as "the broad trend of applying game mechanics to non-game environments to motivate people and change behaviour" (such as recruitment, training and health/ wellbeing). Furthermore, Gartner predicts that "over 70 % of Global 2000 organisations will have at least one gamified application by 2014".

So what's the attraction?

There seems to be a double-whammy at play in the recruitment field that has led to gamification's recent successes. Firstly, a lack of workforce engagement. A recent survey by Gallup, shows that 71 percent of American workers are “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” in their work. Secondly, job boards no longer work, or as Adecco said in 2010, after slashing their job board spending, "candidates that come via paid job boards are often unqualified, raising costs [as we] have to wade through irrelevant resumes". Indeed, those that are qualified are often put off by the apparent 'black hole' that jobsites, and even recruitment and company job portal websites, often represent. It could also be argued that when people finish work, they are more likely to want to relax with a game than fill out a long winded job application that could lead nowhere. The advantages of games is that they can be designed to target a particular audience, engage the attention of participants so that they see the process through, and they tap into our deep seated competition, accomplishment and addiction complexes. It also give the participant autonomy in the recruitment process and provides fast and clear feedback.

A great example of gamification success comes from Danish digital agency, Uncle Grey. After trying all the avenues they could think of, including traditional job adverts and even street level direct approaches (!), they used their own audience mapping skills to identify the profiles of their target audience. This produced the insight that the people with the development skills they were targeting tended to play a lot of games in their spare time, with Team Fortress 2 being the most frequently mentioned game. This led to a sponsored version of the online multiplayer game Team Fortress 2 that included in-game recruitment posters and Uncle Grey representatives playing the game that potential applicants were interacting with. The result was 50 applications in the first week and a successful hire on a small budget.

That's all very well in the digital arena, you might think, but what about companies outside the digital and online worlds?

Perhaps the best example here is Reveal by L'Oreal. Originally designed as a way attract male graduates to work at L'Oreal (and increase its workforce diversity), the game has transformed the brand. The game gives you a virtual idea of what it's like to work at L'Oreal, try out typical corporate challenges across departments from finance to marketing, and receive feedback on performance. The game has also built on classic psychometric tests to assess aptitude. This means it can be tweaked or even re-built as desired to reflect new thinking in psychometrics. And as participants say, its can be a voyage of self discovery for the applicants too. While the game incurred several hundreds of thousands in dollars to originally build, it has now been online for 2 years and has been a hugely worthwhile investment - with L'Oreal making over 100 hires each year. The ability to roll it out across multiple countries will allow it to save valuable time and cost in the long term, while making more effective hires. Furthermore, it has allowed hiring managers to look past the usual resume mistakes and instead focus on testing desirable skills in real time.

Looks like Game Over for job advertising.

The Olympic Road Race - Talent Management On Wheels

Like many people it would seem, I'm in a bit of a post-Olympics come down at the moment. Though I'm eagerly looking forward to the Paralympics, in which the UK is tipped as having one of the best teams its ever had. Still, in the interim it’s a good time to ponder lessons that can be drawn from these sporting endeavours. One highlight for me was the Olympic Road Race. Being a keen cyclist, this was always high on my must-see list and I did manage to make my way to Richmond park to see the riders come through.

Team GB's race plan, in the Men's race, was to assert control from start to finish with a high tempo that would wear down the competition. They would then deliver a fresh-legged Mark Cavendish (the fastest sprinter on the road circuit) in the final 2km or so to blow away the competition and claim gold. It was high stakes (gold or nothing), and ultimately it didn't work as the team failed to change their plan during the race when it became clear a different approach was needed (i.e. insertion of GB riders into the breakaway group). Still, it was one of the most heroic team efforts ever seen. Unaided by any other team, Team GB cycled at the front of the main pack for 5 hours and didn't give up until their bodies started shutting down (who expected to see Wiggo dropped to the back at the end of the race, a spent force). I was full of pride at the display of palpable determination, even though we didn't win any medals.

Taking this back to the ‘real’ world,  I couldn’t help but think what this means for team effectiveness and talent in general. In terms of talent, Cavendish was considered the greatest asset in this case - the skills that were needed to make the plan work.  But equally, the plan itself would only work given certain conditions (that there would be a sprint finish). With all the team resources being used up to make that happen, there was no spare capacity to manage an alternative situation in case  things started going a bit pear shaped (for example, sending two riders out into the breakaway group, in case they couldn't be reeled back in). This demonstrates to the importance of your talent acquisition strategy and is a good example of how contingency planning should be a prerequisite for talent acquisition. Of course, hiring or nurturing the right skills for your growth plan is number one, but how will you cope if the market changes?  What other skills does your team have, and should you also hire for breadth rather than specificity? What will be the major challenges and how quickly will you adapt when they force a change of course?

The other point is that team-think isn't always the best approach. Team GB was both an example of how a superbly functioning team can perform at its peak, and equally why a rigid team approach isn't always best to achieve an ultimate goal. If you took Team GB out of the road race and viewed their effort as an individual time trial, it would have been a gold medal winning team effort. But the circumstances of the race were such that this was misplaced. As many of the team were gold medal contenders in their own right, perhaps a more individual approach would have worked better (as it did for the gold and silver medallists). Cycling etiquette aside, the team could have formed sub-groups, or simply used individual tactics to position themselves better for a medal opportunity. As Susan Cain, author of “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” points out in the NY Times -  in the workplace there will always be those who work best when given a bit of time and space, rather than forced into group-think activities. They ultimately make a bigger contribution to the team's drive forward. Part of the challenge of people management is to understand that approaches need to be fluid. Too many businesses say 'this is the way we will work, let's get everyone to work this way'. The more adaptive and impact-resistant approach is to say 'this is the way we're working right now'. Surely the original meaning of flexible working? The Women's race, by contrast a more individual affair, produced a silver medal for Team GB, a whisker away from gold. Well done Armitstead!

Vision & Values - The Lesson Of Ikea

I've recently been reading The Ikea Edge, Anders Dahlvig's excellent account of his time at Ikea, rise to CEO, and what he learnt about management. I was inspired to read the book after listening to him on the BBC's Today programme with Simon Jack, as Dahlvig's outlook on corporate responsibility (CR) was in stark contrast to the stories of the day centred on Bob Diamond's resignation and the recent debates on CR vs shareholder value.

This has coincided with my PR clients looking to attract staff in what has become a very highly competitive market and ways to set themselves apart from the competition.

Dahlvig has some important points to make regarding attracting  the best talent, and they are fully interwoven with his vision of corporate responsibility, so I don't want to remove what he says from that context. However, his most insightful passages appear under 'The Structure of Company Culture'.

Dahlvig says that companies that create their own company culture have a competitive edge in the labour market by:

1. Creating belonging and fellowship - which in turn creates security, strength, efficiency and success

2. Brining employees together - this guides behaviour and responsibility

3. Inspires allegiance - work contributes to life, rather than simply pays for it.

In essence, "Most people want more from their lives than to just earn their keep.

...a larger meaning in work and life...is something many people look for". Organisations that achieve this will be more competitive in the labour market, so they can recruit, motivate and retain the best people. He points out that despite frequent offers of salary rises, staff tend to stay loyal to Ikea. This resonates with an example that was brought up recently at a symposium I attended on talent acquisition - that of Zappos Shoes.  Zappo's CEO (Tony Hsieh) focuses on 'delivering happiness'. Again, despite the potential to earn more money elsewhere, staff stay put and consistently score highly on satisfaction metrics. "You'd much rather support a company that inspires you than one that doesn't" says Hsieh.

Recruitment agencies are forever churning out salary surveys. Ostensibly to provide a benchmark, they clearly serve the recruiters' interests to try and increase salaries. But have these contributed to your PR agency’s hiring strategy? Let’s take a step back for a moment and consider this. How many of your staff could articulate the vision of your agency? Moreover, do you have a vision for the culture and values of your team, above and beyond generating profits? Maybe, rather than a salary survey, a culture audit would be more beneficial. 

Recruitment Strategies: The Rediscovery Of Talent

You'd have to have been living in a cave recently not to have noticed the boom in the 'Talent' market over the last 12 months. And by Talent, I'm referring to the business of talent acquisition and management.  Not a new idea by any means, but with the pressures of recession forcing businesses to try to achieve the seemingly contradictory goals of saving money on recruitment, and attracting and retaining the best candidates, the talent industry has had a renewed focus.

If you Google a definition of Talent, you will quickly see a huge array of definitions that date way back to the 1990s. In many minds, the idea of talent is closely linked to elitism. The best performing staff are given faster promotions and better salaries. Of course, nobody is arguing that high performers should not be rewarded. But rather than create a multi-stream, dog-eat-dog competitive work environment, businesses are looking at how talent can be used to nurture the greater good of the team - and bring everyone up with them.

Since 2004/05 it seems, the idea of talent has become more crystallised.  Essentially, talent is two things - capability and potential. Many people will think of Talent as their key performers - those people essential for the business to deliver its objectives. But the challenge is to define what makes them the beating heart of the organisation use that information to train others. The idea is that staff can be developed into high performers (i.e talent management). But looking more broadly, talent is also the assessment of the abilities of the team, how this fits with future objectives and if the two tally. Moving into new areas could mean taking on new talent, or developing existing talent in a new direction.  Moreover, companies have to ensure that the workforce feels utilised. New Talent can always be found and nurtured in the existing team - easily the most cost effective way of adding new capabilities into the organisation. And what really matters to the business is the time it takes to fill the capability gap - whether from new or existing staff. As Vineet Nayar, HCL's ex-CEO might say, "Employees first, customers second".

However, this in itself provides a new challenge. The easiest way to assess a recruitment strategy is to look at time and cost. But if you start looking at it from a 'quality of recruitment' perspective, the measurement becomes much harder. In 2011, in a now widely available study for Qualcomm [opens pdf], the Institute of Corporate Productivity revealed that while only 12% of companies said they had talent management metrics in place, 70% acknowledged that they should measure talent to such an extent. In their study, lower market performers were more likely to measure tactical recruiting metrics, whereas higher performers were more likely to measure quality.

In the same way that social media has forced PR to be more measurable, the fact that social media and digital tools are starting to make it easier to measure such things as staff satisfaction - with greater participation -   is another way they are changing the heart of business and it's bringing HR back into the strategic limelight. HR has always been a support function by definition, but talent acquisition and management is a strategy for success. 

10 Top Tips To Get Headhunted On LinkedIn

More than ever, people are being recruited on LinkedIn. But some people have a more “headhunter friendly” profile than others, and some are more accessible than others. Not everyone has taken the time to really look at the potential of LinkedIn to get them noticed. And its not just about recruitment – it’s also about business networking. The more that potential new clients can see about your skills set , the more they will buy into you.

1. Treat your LinkedIn profile like your CV – put a full amount of detail into each role, including clients, activities and highlights. This will give a clearer picture of what you do and also make it look like you’ve taken LinkedIn seriously. Make sure you add relevant dates and don’t make it confusing. Some people simply update their current job title and tweak the detail a little to reflect their new responsibilities – as you would on a CV. But many people add their new job title as a new employment entry, complete with the dates they’ve held each job title. This is also very useful, but make sure you add the details of what your new position entails
2. Write out entries accurately. If you’re an account manager, write out ‘account manager’, not ‘Acc Manager’ – this will put you down the job title search rankings. Forget the comedy as well. You often see financial directors list themselves as ‘chief bean counter’ – eliminating their profile from search results. LinkedIn has worked around this to a degree with tags, but it relies on you using the tags!
3. Treat it like a business tool – not like Facebook. That picture of you looking professional is probably more appealing than the one of you in a nightclub after a few drinks. Even a picture of you with your kids is probably too personal. There’s a reason LinkedIn doesn’t let you add a photo album; Nobody cares
4. Be thorough. Fill out your education, with dates, and your interests, just as you would on your CV. This is good for new business – if your potential new client has a shared interest for example, it can make a nice talking point at the end of a conversation
5. Optimise your profile. There are various different ways to do this, including adding more text, such as an intro paragraph, with key works such as ‘technology PR’ inserted. (Many people bullet point their key skills and sector expertise here, or even clients worked on overall). You can also use tags now to pin against your profile, such as ‘Corporate Communications’, ‘Public Relations’ etc.
6. Recommendations make your profile strong – but try to make them creative, or specific about projects, and a recommendation from a client is stronger than from your line manager (although both are great). There are no negative recommendations after all, so it looks better when it comes from someone who didn’t need to recommend you, unless they really wanted to
7. Don’t hide. Join groups to open up your network to a wider audience and/or share in discussions. These groups often have new business leads and you don’t have to take part in many (or any) conversations. They often have job board as well. It’s a good idea to let people from these groups contact you. Too many people close up their profile, so you have to have an email address simply to contact that person. If you open up direct contact to other people in the same groups instead, it’s much easier for both headhunters and business leads to contact you. In six years of using LinkedIn, I’ve had maybe 4 spam emails (touch wood!) – so this is not an issue (yet). And if you don’t want to connect to someone, you can simply ignore them without a problem. LinkedIn has good safeguards against nuisance – but don’t make them too strict
8. Extras. There are various apps you can add in to your profile, such as Slideshare, that lets you upload a PowerPoint presentations, or Blog Link, that allows you to connect your blog. It’s also a good idea to connect your Twitter feeds and website (personal and/or company). Not only does this provide even more insight into you, it also helps to optimise your profile for Google searches
9. Get connected. The more connections you have, the more you’ll get connected, simples. This also optimises LinkedIn’s suggested connections – and LinkedIn has become very good at doing this over the last couple of years. It’s almost a cardinal sin to describe your social media skills on your profile and yet only have a handful of connections. After 500 connections, LinkedIn stops counting them and just says "500+"
10. Delete duplicates. If you move job and you have to leave your old profile behind, you are quite within your rights to have that profile taken down or made anonymous after you leave. And you should do. This saves confusion, and makes sure you don’t miss out on leads. If you don’t, it can make you look ‘digitally messy’. Remember to rebuild your profile – don’t just start from where you left off

The other advantage of doing LinkedIn well is that you now have a CV template that you can tweak and adapt at any point in your career.

Gloom vs Boom: Who To Trust?

Let’s face it, it’s a pretty confusing time right now, marketwise, with seemingly conflicting reports on the health of the economy.

On the one hand, there have been some very promising predictions recently from PR business leaders such as Hunstworth’s Lord Chadlington (PR Week 6th April 2012) and WPP’s Martin Sorrell (Campaign, 1st March 2012).

Lord Chadlington, whilst acknowledging a sustained slump that led to a restructure in Huntsworth’s agencies, has predicted a strong improvement in profits for 2012 “…both in the first half, and for the year as a whole” and that there were “strong signs the market is improving in quite a big way”. Adding weight to Chadlington’s assessment, Martin Sorrell’s WPP had already, in March, announced an increase in revenues of over 7%, netting a record £10billion revenue – although it should be remembered that WPP does cover several marketing disciplines. Certainly, Chadlington’s comment that there is a ‘volume of business…primarily from clients that had previously been holding off…” is reflected in the market, with a surge of new job briefs in the second quarter this year so far. But still, the candidate feed isn’t keeping pace.

Could this be because, rather than listening to industry bigwigs (who might, as some must be thinking, have a somewhat vested interest in painting a rosy picture), candidates are instead listening to sources such as the BBC and Evening Standard droning on about job cuts and the recession, and watching the voters punishing Cameron and Osborne’s austerity plan at the ballot box? Very possibly. How many PRs read PR week as frequently as they click on BBC News online?

However, this would be the wrong mindset – the market is buoyant, and while some clients have indeed cut budgets, others have increased theirs. During the 2008 recession, it became clear that there was a steady, but sure, turning off of the taps across the board. There were no exceptions. With this double-dip, however, there is a great variety of responses, possibly reflecting different strategies. So really, candidates should be taking advantage of these opportunities and heading where the money is.

I would say that wouldn’t I. So don’t trust me, but instead take some advice from Sir Alan Sugar, and ‘smell what’s selling’.

The Counter Cultural Fit

PR has seen a change in hiring strategies over the last couple of years. It’s been pretty subtle, but definitely there. Agencies are starting to think outside of the box when hiring. In fact, they are proactively hunting for people who were never in the box in the first place. I’ll elaborate…

Four years ago, a recruitment brief was pretty standard.
"We want an account manager, with media contacts in this area from a similar or larger agency (preferably one of our close competitors)".
Essentially, everyone wanted a carbon copy of their other members of staff – and this is in fact what most people were testing for in interviews and misunderstanding as ‘cultural fit’. After all, the thinking went, candidates like this require less training, may add to the pool of journalist’s contacts and will understand the modus operandi of their new employer from day one.

But there are problems with this approach. In an agency of clones, the work becomes stale and lifeless, creativity suffers and morale drops. Furthermore, if you are looking for someone who comes from a rival agency, where they have created a similar clone culture – what incentive will that target candidate have for coming to you, beyond a hollow and short-term pay rise?
The other issue with this mindset is that it excludes people who are not a perfect match to the description – including anyone working slightly outside the particular sector or sub-sector, anyone from a smaller agency, and certainly anyone from an in-house role.

Perhaps some people realised this four years ago – but the status quo had such a powerful gravitational pull, nobody wanted to take a risk by hiring in a different way. Instead, the market itself changed.

We all know about the rise of digital communication bringing in cross-disciple talent form branding consultancies and marketing/ advertising executives. But above and beyond this, as one of my client MDs pointed out recently, PR has been changing from a purely press relations role into more of a targeted community engagement role, and strategies, instead of ‘get as much media coverage as possible’ have moved into more creative brand-building areas. In today’s fat cat despising, economically challenged times, the traditional salesperson is less trusted, and the printed media itself is in retreat. In addition, the candidates have been more nervous about moving unless there’s a real change to their day to day.

So increasingly, over the last year, we‘ve been asked to keep an eye out for unusual people. People with the right skills of course, but the catch-net is a lot wider. Candidates from in-house are being more readily considered at junior to mid levels and are being given more of a chance to change from one sector to another (with more focus on core PR skills rather than current contacts). There has been a renewed emphasis on personality and on any extra insights and skills candidates might bring, rather than just filling another seat in the office with another clone. Candidates too now expect more variety, rather than the same dry release selling spread over 4 or 5 clients.

This can only be good for an industry that has for some time suffered from a fresh creativity deficit and certain exclusivity at the same time. Real cultural fit, in terms of the way people from unparallel backgrounds come together as a team, is now being more carefully considered and tested for.

2012 So Far…

The UK’s negative news media has been on overdrive the last few months, what with a potential Eurozone collapse, the economy threatening to drop back into recession in a play-out of the double dip we all feared 2 years ago, and if you’ve been picking up the Metro or Daily Mail, any number of deadly killer viruses that apparent lurk among us.

So what of PR?

Well, actually, it seems to be in pretty rude health right now. Clients in all sectors are winning business and looking to make hires at all levels. Many people expect this to be a fairly tough year, but the last couple of years have been relatively ‘tough’, yet still the industry has grown (11% sales growth for the media industry in 2011 in the US as a measure). It seems people have become tired of worrying about the imminent meltdown they read of on a day to day basis and started getting on with business (although it has to be said that PR in particular has benefited from a corporate reputation boom as the foundations of pillars and institutions of early 21st century capitalism have feared the rebelling masses).

There is, however, currently a bit of a talent vacuum. It’s not that talent isn’t out there, just that there is some reluctance on the part of candidates to move. ‘Why?’ is tricky to answer. Agencies are sensing the market and trying hard to cling on to their candidates. We’ve certainly seen a return of the ‘crazy counter offer’ over the last six months for headhunted candidates (with 6 or even 8K pay rises involved). But maybe the candidates, who aren’t running businesses themselves, are more affected by the day to day negative press. Maybe. But really, for anyone prepared to start the job hunt, the number of available positions makes it a buyers’ market. And if you’re worried about ‘recession survival’, would you rather do it in the job you’re bored with, or in a new role with a large salary rise? The health of the market suggests the risk involved are much smaller than the media would have you think.

One thing is for sure though – and that’s the importance of social media in your job hunt. Certainly, for recruiters, advertising is less and less effective – and people increasingly expect to be approached through networks in more of a headhunting approach. As recruiters move increasingly over to these means – it’s equally important to make yourself visible to them. And that’s just the start. You can be sure your future employers will be looking you up too. So over the next few months we’ll be blogging on how social media can work for you in a job hunt.

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