PR bosses: PR recruitment agencies and poorly trained uni graduates are a problem
L:R Edelman’s Michelle Hutton, PPR’s Michael Pooley, Moderator Tim Burrowes, The Hallway’s Louise Pogmore, Klick’s Kim McKay.
A group of Australia’s leading public relations agencies bosses say they are unhappy with the quality of candidates being found by PR recruitment companies and also the level of training in public relations offered by university courses.
Speaking at Comms Conn conference in Sydney the panel, consisting of CEO of Edelman Michelle Hutton, PPR general manager of Sydney Michael Pooley, Head of PR at The Hallway Louise Pogmore and founder of Klick Communications Kim McKay, told the audience they were generally dissatisfied with many public relations recruitment firms.
Asked how good the major public relations recruitment agencies were, Hutton replied: “not that good.”
I’m a journo and yesterday I get an email from a PR chap asking me who I would like to speak to at a conference.
I’ve not been told who is speaking at the event, so I call him and explain it is hard to say who I want to chat to without knowing who is on offer.
I can’t help you, he says, this is just my second week. So I’m transferred to a superior who says he doesn’t know who the speakers are either.
This is not an atypical interaction. So yeah … PR has a skills problem. Recruiters may not be all of it: senior PR folks need to stop hanging their n00bs out to dry.
This headline is appallingly written.
The PR industry ONLY hires pretty little 20-somethings with a short skirt and a three month TAFE certificate. What the hell do they expect?
Wayne that is a ridiculous comment. Lots of new PR folk are clever, older than 20, men and graduates.
Sorry for being old fashioned but what if you recruited somebody with an outstanding undergraduate degree in Arts, who had read widely in their degree and had a very high level of literacy and research skills. Then you can train them. Forget vocational PR degrees at university. I had a client years ago, a self made billionaire in the insurance industry. He had employed a young guy with first class honours in Latin and Greek on the basis that he could teach him the skills required to rise all the way to CEO. There are still universities out there which teach people not how to write a press release but how to think.
harry – definitely one of the best responses I’ve EVER read on Mumbrella. Thank you!
Wayne, that’s so wrong. PR job advertisements almost exclusively seek applicants with university degrees, usually specifying a degree in communications.
I find your comment offensive, and not very well thought out at all.
Unfortunately there a very few content/data science/coding/marketing/pr degrees out there. Agencies have to find smart people, start them at the bottom then train them. This used to be the way (in all businesses) – started in the mail room/reception and worked hard to climb the ladder.
If Uni education is no longer adding value please remove it being a mandatory from job descriptions. I’m sure grads would love to start work younger with less debt.
@ Alex – completely agree. Rightly or wrongly Australian universities need to find lots of fee paying suckers to take up their courses (I’m guessing due to a decrease in government funding.) Over the past few years they’ve managed to use clever marketing so that we all now feel we have to have multiple degrees, a post grad and an MBA. I was suckered into an Open Uni course recently that taught me nothing other than to how to waste six months and a few $1000s. For most industries, nothing beats skill and on the job training. I’ve worked in journalism for many years, these grads come to you waiving their multiple media/psychology /politics degrees at you and for most parts are ‘effing useless and unemployable.
An interesting article. I am the MD of a firm that offers an alternative to the traditional recruitment agency so companies don’t have to use recruiters (http://inhouserecruitmentgroup.com). I have been in the recruitment industry for over 30 yrs in all sorts of recruitment so I hope you don’t mind me saying my bit.
I am all for bashing the recruitment industry, and a lot of the industry deserves to be bashed as they are stuck and have forgotten how to think. Too many “recruiters” have a post and pray attitude. They post a job on a job-board then pray that someone ideal will apply. And for that, they get $15,000+ fee. That is not recruitment!
As much as the recruitment industry needs a wake up call, the blame doesn’t always rest solely with the “recruiter”. From he recruiters perspective, it is really hard to find that ideal person if you [the client] do not really know what you are looking for, or you are being unrealistic.
The PR industry has changed over the past 5 – 10 yrs so the expectation of finding someone with a blend of the “old” & “new” skills, who fits the salary band and wants to work for you, with this degree from this school, who looks a certain way, is a very difficult task. It is vital today that you set your standards in sand, and not in concrete. As Michelle Hutton suggested, you have to be flexible and look for people that you can make fit, maybe over time, rather straight out of the box.
One point I will say is, you guys are experts in Public Relations & Communications. Use your skills and knowledge. The recruitment market is no different to any other market. Candidates want to know who you are, what you stand for, and how you are going to help them progress in their career. Gone are the days of having them chase you, you have to chase them and if you aren’t, I will guarantee someone else is.
Wayne, as a mid-40 year old professional female PR practioner, I am beyond insulted by your ignorant comment
I am currently studying part-time at Uni and I can tell you that students need a reality check. In subjects like project management and accounting most students make comments like “I’m doing event management or PR so I won’t have any use for these subjects; I’ll be spending my time casting and creative thinking”. It makes me cringe, they have no idea what is required of them.
We have frequently hired graduates from university comms courses. These are the first crop of ‘digital natives’ but we have to teach them how to set up simple tools to manage social media. All they know is Facebook for personal use and maybe a bit of Twitter. On top of that they know zero about SEO and their writing skills are poor. They should be taught writing skills at the school level, by the time they get to uni they already have the bad habits – as is horribly apparent everywhere you look. I’d much rather take on a keen 18 year old who wants to work than a 23 year old who’s been ‘taught to think’ but not to work.
Gosh, what a well balanced panel, good to have the recruiters and tertiary educators point of view to ensure a well balanced… oh wait.
As a former recruiter that dealt in this industry I have to say, that the single biggest barrier to most employers finding the people they seek via recruiters was the energy time and effort taken to brief the recruitment supplier.
There’s nothing better than dissing university courses and graduates is there? Keeps wages down and the recruitment dynamic in place yeah?
@ Emma Rogers. Glad to hear you had a good experience, that’s not the experience for most in this industry. It’s definitely female-skewed (and that’s unarguable) and most are on the shelf by 40. My partner and many of her friends were virtually unemployable (how dare you ask for a $90K salary) by their 35th birthdays. And PR is dying as most media outlets die. Enjoy it in its death-roes, digital and customer experience is fast destroying the last vestiges of PR (although they’ll never admit it.)
I currently tutor at a university in marketing and have PR and Comms students in my class I have near 20 years industry experience and what they are taught academically is so far removed from what they need to know practically it scares me. I would rather employ on attitude than tertiary degree.
Recently graduating with a commerce degree and joining a global recruitment agency, I feel this article is directed at someone like me.
Looking back at my time at Uni I definitely feel that it teaches you some basic tools, however, nothing that couldn’t be taught at high school. I feel that Uni has an emphasis surrounding it, that it guarantee’s you a job in your respective field. Understanding that this isn’t the case, uni doesn’t provide the experience that can be transferred into time on the job, therefore, making it partially a waste of time.
The time I’ve learnt at my recruitment agency has, is and will continue to provide me with a skill set that can’t be learnt in a classroom. This has all occurred within 8 months of my employment, compared to 3 years at Uni. I feel that the buck stops with the universities and there needs to be more practical experiences to provide a higher calibre of graduates with relevant skills to the actual job.
I have never read so much rubbish in a long time-our university graduates about 45 PR and PR/Business Studies students a year, close to 90 per cent go straight into full time employment. Many of the PR agencies also make their first call on us when seeking graduates or even experience practitioners. The new PR is in digital and our students are finding employment as digital analysts. I suspect that half of the people who commented on this story have no real idea what is happening in the market.
People who read books are generally quite good at written communication.
Ask them in the interview: What books have you read recently? What’s your favourite book?
If you don’t read, it’s hard to write.
The solution is simple – employers need to take responsibility for training employees again or help universities develop more relevant course content. Alternatively, agencies could also become an RTO and run their own courses.
There are so many mis-placed comments in response to this article that it continues to reinforce my argument that too many people have absolutely no idea what actually goes on in PR, the people we recruit, where we recruit them from, what they teach you at university, the salaries paid, the work we do, and so the list could go on.
Hey oldies, as a recent graduate and a newbie to the industry, I cannot really agree with what you are all saying here. First of all, if you accuse the media/public relations course for being not practical enough at uni, please be reminded that many of the lecturers working there are people like you folks who have been in the industry for decades (like the ones I had and like some of you above who said that they are currently teaching at some of these institutes). Plus it is not uncommon that many of the universities now have an internship component as part of their degree. So this is your time, as an employer, to train your potential employees about the basics that you want them to know before starting a job. Unfortunately too many of you use them as free labour to clean tables or buy coffees, and you wonder how come they learned nothing at the end of the intern period. As for universities, I never thought of it as a place to learn job skills (I would go to TAFE in that case). As some of you already suggested, in that respect, nothing beats a on-job training. For me, a university is a place where you learn to open your mind, how to be tolerant, how to do research, how to think and most importantly, learn how to learn. And we all need this. So it’s a bit shallow if you only consider it as a factory that produces straight-off employable profit-making machines. And if you really think that a degree is worthless, please remove it from the requirements of your job ads, as it has been wisely suggested above.
In the end, to me what you have is a imaginary of social regression, which seniors of each generation suffer from, thinking that the young are hopeless and worthless. Despite this, surprisingly, the young of each generation get along just as well. Then they become older, and start to have the same vision like their predecessors. So why don’t we wait, to see if the PR industry will be a mess run by amateur degree holders by the time you retire.