PR professionals are gaining more seats at the boardroom table than ever before. The shift in PR's role from tactical to strategic has resulted in a proliferation of executive level positions that didn't exist five years ago. Today's top communications experts aren't just keeping pace with change, they're leading it. PR NEWS spoke with Hugh McCandless, head of Marshall Consultants' New York office, about how job-seekers can stay competitive in this happy but pressurized marketplace.
PRN: Obviously, high-tech is a field that's attracting top talent. Where else are the most competitive jobs arising?
Investor relations is a hot functional area, particularly because of the emphasis on stock options. If you're the I/R person for a small company that's losing money at the moment, but you think there's a huge upside in terms of what the stock could be worth, you have a decision to make. It's a way that a small company can attract big time talent to participate in an upside kind of gamble. There are people who are looking for that kind of opportunity. It depends on what you're doing at what time. I suppose somebody with kids who are ready to go off to college is not going to want to give up the base salary for a chance of making a lot of money on stock options.
Another hot functional area is internal communications. This used to be mentioning people's birthdays and the birth of new babies, but it's really moved over to where management is sharing more sophisticated information with employees. And it has the benefit of a nice new title: change management communication. Some of the PR agencies are beginning to develop specialties in [this area] and compensation is increasing because employers are looking for change management experience-somebody who has been through a merger, or a major downsizing, or a change in strategic direction. Someone who can answer the question, "How do you communicate all of that to employees and earn their faith that management is moving in the right direction and doing it intelligently?"
PRN: How has the explosion in e-communication changed the playing field for job hunters?
I'd say eight out of ten internal communications assignments are now putting a greater emphasis on electronic communications. Ten years ago, the big change was that people were constantly looking for desktop publishing skills. Now a lot of internal communications assignments are stressing intranet and the use of satellite technology.
PRN: What are some of the biggest mistakes job candidates make?
A lot of candidates think they are PR generalists when they are specialists and should regard themselves as that. I am seldom contacted by a client who says, "Get me a corporate generalist who's done a little of this, a little of that." A lot of people love to put in a resume everything they've ever done. If they've written one speech, they declare that they are speechwriters. That typically works against their best interests. An omnibus resume usually is not focused enough to be very persuasive to a perspective employer.
PRN: Who sends you the best resumes?
Granted, I'm offering the perspective of a recruiter, but I think it's always more interesting to read resumes that come from PR agencies. They tend to be short and sweet and full of character. Corporate resumes tend to be all over the lot and usually too wordy.
PRN: How important is industry accreditation?
I think I've had it stated as a requirement or preference perhaps three times in my 12 years in recruiting. It may be more important in the corporate sector. The problem with accreditation (and I myself have the APR) is that I don't think there's a good standard. Obviously you've got to pass the written exam. But I think the number of people taking the exam should be more limited to people who can actually prove that they've done things-not just people who are good at passing exams. When I sat on the accreditation board, it seemed like we were getting strictly employee communications people and product publicists as candidates. And you think, well these people really don't have that much in common, and yet they're going to have the same accreditation. So you wonder, what it really means.
PRN: Are you seeing a lot of job movement between agency side and the corporate side?
That does happen, but typically corporate people prefer to hire corporate people, and agency people want agency experience. However, in hot areas where people on the corporate side have a fair amount of external communications (meaning media relations) experience, there is more cross over to the agencies.
Many of the older perceived differences between the quality of working in a corporation and the so-called lack of quality of working in a PR agency have now vanished. It used to be thought that corporations offered more secure, better-paying jobs, but I think those differences have mostly evaporated. Nobody is secure and the salary differences aren't much anymore.
This is partly because a larger share of the PR budget is moving toward PR agencies. The same corporation that, in years past, might have used one outside agency, is now typically using a different PR agency for each different product. If you take a pharmaceutical company, the client acts as a brand manager. There are a lot more transactional relationships, as opposed to paying a continuing retainer to one agency.