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August 31st, 2010 by Steve

The lost boys (and girls) part three: how to land that first PR job

Shame on me. I said I’d write this last Friday. I have a valid excuse, but won’t bore you with it.

So if PR agencies should be more optimistic and assertive in hiring entry-level staff at the moment, are there staff out there who’re worth hiring?

That seems like a stupid question. Surely the backlog of graduates with PR, marketing and journalism qualifications, or other degrees, or no degrees but bags of ambition, is such that competition is rife and agencies can pick from the very cream of the crop?

It’s partly true. Agencies that I know of have certainly got more applicants for entry-level positions than they’ve had for a long time. But if my own experience of the past few years is anything to go by, the vast majority of applications are, in the main, utter shite.

I would say this. I’m a pedant. I am by no means perfect, but equally I can normally spot an incorrectly italicised bulletpoint at 50 paces. Fundamentally, if people care about their jobs and their careers, they will care about the quality of their work, always. Mediocrity is not my friend.

Even so, by more watered-down standards, the quality of approaches made by many entry-level applicants to PR agencies in the midst of a gruelling recession is shocking. Not just what they write, but what they say and how they act. All-too-often, applications are insipid, errors are rife, and both personality and ambition are conspicuous by their absence. Harsh, but in my view true.

There is no magic formula for landing the first job in PR and getting a foot on the career ladder. Equally – and this is intended to be helpful to genuinely keen, intelligent and media-thirsty people out there – there are a few basics that will help your application stand out, so that you’ve impressed from your very first contact:

1. Don’t make spelling errors. This is blindingly obvious. There is a thing called a dictionary. Use it. Prove you can at least both read and type.

2. Communicate your difference. You are applying for a communications job. You aren’t expected to be the world’s best communicator, but equally you need to pinpoint concisely why you should be considered.

3. Don’t bullshit (but if you have to, make it exceedingly good bullshit). If you try to over-egg your achievements and experience, it will be spotted. We spend all day doing this stuff. Equally, pure cheek will at least raise a grin and may get you a foot in the door.

4. Personalise properly. Don’t send blanket emails. Spend the time approaching each firm individually. Call up if you like – few people do this these days, and it may show you have balls.

5. Don’t kiss the agency’s arse. Anything banging on about why you approached this agency because you ‘know’ how great it is will probably be scoffed at. If you do think you’d be suited because of what makes that agency different, say so – but play it straight and ease up on the praise.

6. Don’t focus exclusively on your academic achievements. Yes a PR degree can be useful, but it is no substitute for real-world experience (academia: queue here to take issue with this point). Same goes for other degrees. You will learn harsher lessons about PR in your first months on the job than you ever dreamed of as a student – show that you acknowledge that.

7. Think about the email title. ‘CV for consideration’ won’t make you stand out. ‘Busty blonde seeks PR job’ will, but for the wrong reasons. Be smart and you stand a better chance.

8. If you’ve done work experience with PR firms, explain what you learned and how it improved your skills. Don’t just say you worked somewhere from one date to another. Surviving a few weeks of photocopying and donkey work does not an account executive make.

9. Develop a digital profile and use it to flaunt your wares. Wadds has already imparted wisdom upon this topic. One of the first things a prospective employer is likely to do is Google you. Exploit that, and keep the private life private too.

10. Show your enthusiasm for the job on offer. The three essential ingredients of a good PR are intelligence, real passion for the media and hard work. We can spot the former, while the latter is to be proven down the line and by others’ comments. The middle part is up to you to show the agency when you make the approach and, if you get one, at the interview.

Tomorrow’s concluding part: what to look for in an agency’s approach to training.

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August 26th, 2010 by Steve

The lost boys (and girls) part two: can agencies afford to hire them?

Yesterday I tried to set the scene about the challenges the PR industry and graduates are facing at the moment over entry-level positions – boiling it down to something like agencies need to sort themselves out and the best grads should retain hope.

Most people who make the hiring decisions about entry-level staff at PR agencies have empathy with those who want to get a job at the moment but can’t. Some aren’t hiring because they don’t need the extra staff or can’t justify being over-capacity. Others will say they simply don’t have the time to invest in training entry-level recruits. Then there’s the tendency to get freelance support in rather than make permanent hires. It all comes down to a combination of cost and risk.

And rightly so. Now is certainly not the time for any PR agency, however well it may be doing, to throw caution to the wind and hire way ahead of need.

But my main point here is that skilled people are the absolute bedrock of a PR agency’s success, and a two-year hiatus in the intake of entry-level personnel combined with lack of proper training for the future will not only damage graduates’ career prospects but the PR industry.

Yes of course the focus at the moment must be on delivering great client work, attracting clients and producing the best financial results possible in the circumstances, but without a commercially mature and systematic approach to developing people, things will eventually start to unravel. Note that I said approach, not necessarily investment.

Can agencies afford to hire people? Well, only they will know. But in the recent boom years many took on ‘hot’ graduates without even thinking about what use they could be put to. Competition to hire them was fierce. Now there are things like hiring freezes and freelance-only mandates, which may actually cost agencies more in lost business opportunities or higher costs.

Some agencies are continuing to operate graduate recruitment schemes and have simply scaled back on the volume in the past couple of years. Good on them. But many seem to have mothballed everything.

Even if an agency cannot financially justify taking on any extra staff at the moment, here are the things I think all should be thinking about in this area, rather than burying their heads in the sand:

1. Make entry-level recruitment a commercial priority now.
If you can’t recruit at entry-level, have a plan for doing so. Build a pipeline of people you may want to hire in the future and those who – without making false promises – you may be able to hire should circumstances suddenly change. Make this something that everyone in the company is committed to and understands. It will mean you have a broader pick of talent should you need to, the ability to hire quickly and directly, and there is enormous benefit in your current staff understanding that you are being responsible about entry-level positions so that they’re being challenged to develop rather than stagnate.

2. Upgrade the approach to entry-level training.
So many PR firms pay lip service to training. Or talk about how much they spend on it, or how much of an individual’s time is ring-fenced for it. Training is not a line item in a budget or a headline statistic – it must be systemic, part of the fabric of the business. People must want to learn, people must want to teach them and everyone must understand what the purpose of it is. The raft of informal training initiatives run by the CIPR and PRCA shows that individuals have appetites to learn even in a recession – in many cases, recession pressures make it more of a priority.

Agencies need clear, comprehensive and realistic training programmes for all staff but with specific tracks for entry-level people. In my view, the scope should include the broadest reach of conventional and digital PR, and open their eyes to how PR’s ‘editorial world’ may develop in the future. Training must move from an afterthought to being the client delivery and client development backbone of the business. Budget for external support will inevitable be thin or non-existent, but existing staff can teach them a lot of it providing adequate time is set aside. There are mountains of time squandered each month at most PR firms through not charging clients properly for work undertaken, inaccurate time reporting and constant griping about colleagues not being able to complete tasks properly (normally because they haven’t been taught properly…). So it should be straightforward and wholly commercially feasible to commit regular time to training, for everyone’s benefit

3. Be clear with potential recruits about what you’re seeking.
Graduates get the run-around from PR firms far too often. PR needs the best talent coming in to take entry-level jobs. PR will increasingly have to compete with other areas of the marketing for talent, particularly as digitisation means PR is having to redefine what it is and how it generates value. So agencies needs to explain and market their entry-level training and development ethos clearly. They must show how working with them is different. They must be clear about what to expect from their careers in the initial months and and years. They should, ideally, be open about salary scales. Most of all though, be clear about what clients you’d like them to work for and what they’ll be doing. Too often, potentially brilliant graduates wither on the vine or move jobs too soon simply because they were oversold on the excitement of the work or the opportunities they’d be given. Equally, recruits need to be honest about what they’re good at, bad at and ideally seeking rather than trying to talk their way through the hiring process just to land a job, no matter how scarce those are

Tomorrow, what the (potentially) lost generation of PR applicants should be doing to land the right job. Not just the interview, but the lock, stock and barrel.

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August 25th, 2010 by Steve

The lost boys (and girls): part one

“Gizzajob”.

Yosser Hughes’ lament in Boys From The Black Stuff became a popular hallmark of job seeking in the 1980s. In the 2010s, in PR, the clarion cry might be “Gizzachance, any chance”.

Getting your first job in PR is, probably, more difficult at the moment than it has ever been. Ever. This is the first of a short series of posts looking at what this means for young people trying to start a career in the industry, those of us already working in PR jobs and PR agencies looking to develop and attract the right skills – skills for battling through the recession and better commercial fortunes in the future.

First, let’s get the legal bit out of the way. The title mentions boys and girls, but by that I mean all females and males of an employable age, in possession of the appropriate paperwork in order to be eligible participants in the payroll. Phew.

So the ‘lost generation’ factor has been much-publicised by the conventional media in the UK. The spectre was raised as the recession really began to bite in 2009. As this summer’s exam results season got into full swing, reports followed about the social, professional and personal implications of a generation of school and college leavers who’ve been unable to find work for two years. There have been reports this year that prospects are improving for graduates, yet for many the employment outlook remains bleak. With GCSE results just announced this week, the question was whose prospects were bleakest – given the paucity of jobs available, would grads get the albeit low-level jobs in favour of those who left education at A Level or the GCSE stage?

The long-term impact on young people unable to start any sort of meaningful career is fairly obvious.

In PR, the picture roughly seems to mirror that of the overall labour market, although there is the added challenge of a industry with a major modernisation challenge, meaning the skills required are changing and will continue to change.

PR Week features editor Cathy Wallace wrote this piece on how difficult it was to get a job in PR last August. I asked her how the situation has changed in the year since then. Was it any easier now to get a job in PR?

She said: “I think it’s harder. I have heard horror stories from graduates who have been working unpaid for up to two years, without managing to secure a graduate position. There is a problem of supply and demand. Universities are churning out young, fresh, eager PR graduates faster than the industry can gobble them up. Unfortunately as many agencies have tightened belts, entry-level recruitment has been one of the first sacrifices made. This short-sighted approach means in five years time, agencies will be bemoaning the lack of senior account execs and managers, not realising this is a direct consequence of shutting their doors to graduates!”

Personally I agree that there has long been a disconnect between the PR industry and PR course leaders – academia does not always understand some of the commercial realities. I would’ve asked a tutor for a view on that but they’re on holiday, so that’ll have to wait for a future post. I also agree that, as ever, too many agencies seem to have a short-sighted approach to attracting talent at the moment, and it will come back to bite them.

I also asked Cathy for her view on how well PR agencies train new recruits, particularly graduates. How does PR compare with other sectors? In her view it’s mixed, and it hinges on management nous: “Depends on the agency. An agency with a well-structured approach to training, development and progression, managed by a professional who is as skilled as management as they are at PR, if not more skilled at management, will offer a graduate an unrivalled development path. Done properly, the training offered in PR agencies is absolutely second to none.

“But a graduate joining an agency run individual who has set up on their own because they are good at PR, without any management training or experience, can often find themselves flung in at the deep end and given far too much responsibility with little to no training or investment. Unfortunately despite the trend for agencies to cut graduate recruitment in tough times, some go the other way and snap up graduates because they are often eager, desperate to prove themselves and willing to work unpaid or for a pittance.”

The slave labour point is one I’ve made before. It seems to be getting better, with several agencies stating they will not take people on unpaid and unfair experience schemes. Speed is one of them. Even so, graduates are desperate for work so will often jump at the opportunity.

I’ll be doing a few more posts on this topic looking at what agencies need to do with entry-level recruitment, how graduates can improve their chances of landing a first PR job and what skills will be needed for the future. They’re all my own views, of course, but echo comments many in the business have made to me in recent months.

Until then, a few thoughts on what the current situation is for PR’s lost generation:

- Nervy recruitment: many positions tend to be on short-term contracts or on a freelance basis. This is commercially sound for the agencies but means PR is a risky career path for entrants. This is how journalism has been for a long time though. The PR industry needs to think long and hard about whether this type of casual labour is cutting off its nose to spite its face, given client relationships and excellent talent are what will see them through the recession and help them build for the future

- Graduate schemes are in flux: many agencies have simply deprioritised their approach to fast-tracking a graduate intake, but equally are tending to shut the door to others such as those without degrees but with relevant experience, such as in other areas of marketing. Agencies need to work out what it is they’re offering, adapt the schemes they ran when times were better and do more to be fair to the newly-qualified, who seem to be being led a merry dance

- The lost generation is, in the main, not helping itself by making broad-brush applications or not being smart about how to get a foot in the door in a cut-throat market. More on that later

- Agencies are angsty about how to develop new entrants in the current market. Training costs money and time, and they need their more senior people focused on client retention and business development. And as PR modernises, what skills does a new entrant need anyway? The classics of features tracking, media relations, press release writing and the like are now just a relatively small part of the mix. Equally, some graduates are applying for jobs expecting to do nothing but social media meddling all day. Agencies must be clear on what they need

More on this tomorrow. If you do send me a CV in the meantime, do check the spelling, grammar and style consistency, if you’re serious about getting an interview.

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August 23rd, 2010 by Steve

New clause for PR contracts: the relationship break?

When PR agencies and clients decide that their relationships have run the course, there’s normally a grown-up conversation about it being time for them to look elsewhere.

“It’s just not working out”.

“I’ve put so much time in, but I just don’t think you feel the same way about it”.

“I am not getting any younger, I have plans; I need us to take this to the next level and I want to know if you’re with me”.

Not always though. The very public spat in PR Week between Shine and its ex-client SAB Miller seemingly shows how, when things go sour and the wrong things are said, an acrimonious split may be inevitable.

The problem is that PR agency contracts don’t really make provision for a gradual falling out of love, a growing disappointment when promises of virile publicity are not matched with the desired level of performance.

Perhaps, then, it’s time for a new type of clause to be added to contracts to cover such circumstances and prevent the ‘growing apart’ part – a relationship break.

It could read something like this:
XX.X Once the Initial Period has expired, either party may terminate this Agreement (without cause) by giving not less than X months’ written notice to the other. Alternatively, should the parties consider, mutually and severably, that termination is a reasonably likely if they continue to work together due to the PR programme not meeting mutual expectations, both parties reserve the right to exercise a 90-day hibernation period (the ‘Relationship Break’) after which time normal terms and conditions will apply as usual.

Mind you, I suspect it might mean the rise of the ‘sharking’ agency that scavenges for scraps while clients are temporarily unattached.

With thanks to the inspiration and life skills of Speed’s resident expert on such matters.

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August 19th, 2010 by Steve

Multi-tasking with media: a kick in the shins for reputation-building?

Today’s BBC coverage of the Ofcom study into how Britons now consume media features some perhaps obvious but nonetheless stark highlights. On average, we now spend, according to the study, half of our waking lives consuming media. Moreover, a lot of that time is spent consuming multiple types of media at the same time.

So we’re exposed to more media – good for those of us who work to influence reputation. But our eyes and ears are everywhere, meaning we undoubtedly have smaller attention spans and influence may be battering us from all angles – potentially bad for reputation efforts.

Or is it?

Rory Cellan-Jones’ latest blog post talks of the moral panic created by the realistation that we spend so much time staring at gadgets or listening to broadcasts. The ‘too much telly’ decry has long been a feature of applicable social analysis, but the rapid digitisation and socialisation of media makes this a whole different issue. So we’re spending a lot of time consuming information and communicating? Good. We’re on Facebook, Twitter and commenting on blogs while watching TV? Better than just slumped in front of the telly vegetating.

But the moral implications aren’t my point here. With multi-tasking firmly established in our media habits, with so many types of media that we actively engage with daily, and with media changing rapidly, the potential for influence reputation is increasing. It’s just that there are so many more options and planning how content is disseminated is now a far more intricate process. Early communication that created influence – the sermon on the mount, the town crier, Houdini’s publicity stunts that got ink – has been replaced with a fragmented media landscape and real difficulty in working out which publicity will have the greatest impact.

Which means effective PR needs to be a lot more sophisticated, and PRs must invest a lot more thought and expertise in doing things right. Which means this is no place for slackers or airheads.

PR planning must be upgraded to meet the needs of changing media and the public’s rabid appetite for it. We need to go and ask the target audience what media they consume and ask them the right kinds of questions about how how they perceive brands as a result. Equally, asking everyone will mean prohibitive costs, and even then they may not tell us the whole truth.

So the opportunity to create greater influence with more media, that people are consuming more of, is there. We just need to gain proper insight and do a lot of hard work to be effective.

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August 18th, 2010 by Steve

Official: words that will make your press release fail

PRs have moaned about overused and useless words in press releases for years. You know, the ones that clients all-too-often insist on having in the press release, even though journalists’ eyes glaze over when they read them.

Now though, after years of sarcasm from the media and a fatalistic attitude from PR agencies, this scourge may have met its match – after a blog by The Economist’s writers published a list of scientifically-examined words that will, in all likelihood, cause it to blacklist a press release. Well, not so much blacklist it as refrain from writing editorial about its contents. Which is the important thing really.

The most overused ‘trying way too hard’ word was, of course, ‘leader’. A leader are you? Not the leader then? Just a leader? As in ‘a loser’? Harsh, but this is how journalists will often react. Particularly when they are utterly sick of such prose.

Should other journalists come out and decry the words that are a big editorial turn-off for them? Let’s hope so. Should PR agencies be braver and counsel clients that these types of blatantly attention-grabbing words can actually be counterproductive? Yes. Should agency PRs who insist on slotting such words into their press releases be re-educated? You know the answer.

Words matter. Let’s not litter our best-effort prospective editorial content with crap ones.

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August 16th, 2010 by Steve

CIPR Social Summer: social networking begins by opening your gob

Here’s a summary of the points I covered at the latest CIPR Social Summer meeting last Thursday. Phil Sheldrake asked me to talk about social networking in the real world. That’s pretty easy I thought, I could just bang on about what I talk about down the pub. But I then realised people have to pay to attend and I wouldn’t want to inflict that on anyone anyway.

So, what is social networking anyway? Social networking is one of those social media things that lots of clever people drone on about, but typically they’re trying to overcomplicate things. Put another way, social networking is really just talking to people. Just like in the real world. But just doing it via means of typing as well as by use of the tongue and voicebox.

If you’re just looking at how you influence reputation through a keyboard, in the absence of all of the other influences that surround us – in particular good old word-of-mouth – you are some way off the mark. Most of us network socially in the real world about the things that matter to us as well as doing so online. And only by understanding how conversations and influence develop both online and offline can we really understand how reputation develops.

Anyway, a copy of the presentation I ran through is here, giving a couple of examples and some food for thought.

Main points I covered:
- People talk: media digitisation means you can harness it and track it in order to influence reputation, but in doing so we have to understand how conversations develop online and offline – and often flit between one and the other

- Don’t get confused by all the bollocks some self-proclaimed social media experts are touting about social networks, they’re typically guffing on to make themselves look clever and charging money for doing so. The power of talk lies in compelling people to act upon it, and changing media gives PRs greater scope for doing that, albeit that planning must be far more sophisticated to what we’ve typically done in the past

- But you must really understand the audience in order to develop the content, and be agile enough to accommodate change. That can mean more in-depth research, more precise segmentation, lots of things. It varies. Overall, online you must know who you’re talking to and why they’re interested, just like in the real world

The social summer series continued this Thursday, when the scouse in the house will be the excellent Ged Carroll.

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August 11th, 2010 by Steve

12 office parties (and Facebook shame)

‘Don’t photocopy your arse at the Christmas party’ is one of those pieces of advice many people get early in their careers.

Don’t arse around on Facebook if your boss is giving evidence at a war crimes tribunal in The Hague is another pearl of wisdom that one London agency learned from this week – before the watching world. Pictures of Premier Model Management’s apparent ‘blood diamond night’ were shown to the court as evidence during the hearing, in which former Liberian premier Charles Taylor faces numerous charges, some relating to the alleged exchange of so-called blood diamonds. The evidence centred on Facebook images and comments from agency staff, who had allegedly thrown an apparent party in the office following Naomi Campbell’s appearance at the hearing last week.

Agency boss Carole White stood ashen-faced as she was presented with the evidence in the ‘dock’ on Monday. And who wouldn’t? She said she didn’t use Facebook herself, but the realisation that many of her staff had seemingly been highly and inappropriately active on it was both swift and clear.

So of course, not being a dick on Facebook when it comes to work matters goes without saying, particularly when your boss is due to take the stand before the world’s media in extremely contentious circumstances.

The point here, really, is that what goes on at the office party must stay at the office party. Alternatively, if it will become public knowledge somehow, it is best to control its dissemination rather than wait to be rumbled.

With this in mind, here are my memories of Speed (and, previously, Rainier) staff Christmas parties since inception:

1998: London, Mezzo as-was, seafood platters galore, no scandal
1999: Boston, the infamous ‘don’t be sick in the van’ trip with Julie Skinner
2000: London, the shameful four-hour walk home by way of Essex
2001: London, barge racing in Uxbridge then wigs and cigars in Camden
2002: Rome, the toga and gruel party with rooftop strategy meeting
2003: Sussex, the dinner of speeches at the spa
2004: London, the drunken gongs and him vs her casino afternoon. And the octopus on the shoulder incident
2005: Seville, Marlin PR’s Sam Grace left hanging on the hotel gate and the scary suburban disco
2006: Florence, the subterranean osteria and the seedy basement club
2007: Krakow, the ‘German stag do’ club and a stupid MD not bringing a coat when it was -10
2008: Catania, the extreme fish restaurant, extreme drinking and Sophie Hodgson drunk on the plane
2009: London, John Brown’s bold conversations with doormen and desperate drinking bids

2010? Barcelona beckons.

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August 11th, 2010 by Steve

A bad snap decision

Monetising content remains a huge challenge for the majority of publishers and content owners. But recent shenanigans at Southampton Football Club hardly offer much hope that the answer has been found.

The club has been hit with a barrage of criticism from the media after deciding to ban photographers from its ground and instead SELL snaps from its own photographic team to the media after the game. All brands need the media in some way, shape or form – football clubs in particular rely on positive publicity and information sharing to maintain the financial support of fans.

So with the new football season about to click into gear and a tumble down the divisions in the past few years, Southampton FC’s decision looks particularly ludicrous.

The move is already backfiring, with some media refusing to carry its official images and one, to its immense credit, planning to use archive images from the 1980s to accompany match reports. Perhaps that piece of daftness, illustrated by the full glory of mullets, bad ‘taches and extremely tight shorts, will help persuade club bosses of the error of their ways. The Sun is even refusing to refer to the club by name.

The point of pictures is to illustrate your stories. Southampton FC may see the content as subject to image rights, but there is a need for basic commercial common sense here. Win or lose, football clubs should be cock-a-hoop (always wanted to type that in a blog post) that someone wants to come in and publicise their games.

Mind you, if PR firms could charge for what they sent to the media, it could be a handy new revenue stream. Anyone want to let Charles Arthur know he’ll need to pay £1 a tweet from now on? (Charles: this is definitely a joke).

With thanks to our own football correspondent for spotting this story.

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August 10th, 2010 by Steve

Kids to work: the verdict

I thought I knew what to expect. The first Speed Take Your Kids to Work Day was a strange experiment intended to allow parents to show their little darlings what where they worked was like, and give colleagues a taste of what we have to put up with on a daily basis.

My expectation was that very little ‘proper’ work would get done. But it has. Largely, most people here seem to have got on with things as normal, pausing to say hello to the kids and pick them up when they are engaged in collision with a pot plant. Personally I thought my productivity would dip well below 50 per cent, but I’ve been able to get a good four or five hours’ work done by 2pm, and still have things to finish this afternoon.

It’s by no means work/life balance, but it hasn’t been the whirlwind of distraction I imagined either.

Read more here about what the kids have been getting up to, what they thought of the experience.

A summary of what my brood have been doing today:

- Saskia, 5: chalkboard drawing, testing toys, cake decorating, web site browsing
- Alfie, 2 (very nearly 3): as above, minus computers, plus getting his fingers stuck in the front door
- Ivan, 1: as above, plus trying to answer phones, trying to break phones, trying to send emails before they’re ready to go

It’s been a really interesting exercise. An annual exercise, hopefully. Providing they do their timesheets.

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