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.