Since I talk a lot about finding jobs, I thought that a a Q&A with someone who does the actual screenings and meetings that help get you in the door would benefit a lot of folks.
So I asked my friend and former colleague, Brian Batchelder, to answer some questions that give you the recruiter’s perspective – the person sitting across the desk from you when you are wondering “what is this person thinking?”. His very good answers are below. And not that I need this disclaimer, but this is WTF to the FTC (sounds like rap, doesn’t it?): I was a Senior Vice President as Fleishman-Hillard. And here’s Brian’s disclaimer: “The following is my personal opinion and does not necessarily represent the views of my employer or its clients.“
Brian Batchelder is an in-house senior recruiter for Fleishman-Hillard based out of Washington D.C. He recruits for a wide array of PR and digital positions across the U.S. and overseas. He has a personal blog focused on networking and job search tactics: www.brianbatchelder.com. You can also follow his inner monologue on Boston & Syracuse sports, career advice and FH job opportunities on Twitter: http://twitter.com/b_batchelder.
I have said for a long time, “you can’t teach someone to be smart.” When you are looking for talent for Fleishman-Hillard, how much of a role does experience vs. interview presence – just “smarts” make?
You need both. At the levels I typically recruit for (mid and senior level) you need relevant experience and have to be a culture fit. If you’re smart, but have never led the types of campaigns we’re seeking, that won’t be enough.
We’re in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. What would you say to job seekers who are looking to enter the agency side of public relations?
The PR Agency world is ultra-competitive, even in a good economy. When you look at the largest firms, you’re talking 2,000-3,000 people. That is tiny compared with other industries. So, you really need to do your research, talk to lots of PR Agency folks and determine what your unique, specific value proposition is. Think of agencies like a football team. There are lots of specialized roles. What niche skill can you do better than anyone else? And how will it help client X?.
Can your remember a candidate or two whom you interview and thought “this is a slam dunk.” Why? What circumstances or characteristics did this individual possess that she him/her apart?
This happens a few times per year with informational interviews [EDITOR'S NOTE: THIS POINT ABOUT INFORMATIONAL INTERVIEW IS REALLY IMPORTANT]. These folks basically have checked off all the boxes: relevant experience, great research, great questions, take notes, dress professionally, send a timely, well-crafted thank you note and their personality is a culture fit. They also show a strong interest in joining FH. They don’t “tell me” they want to work at FH, they “show me.”
I have written a few posts about honesty within agencies during the recruiting process. After all, agencies are a profit-driven business. Some agencies promise a lot of “work-life balance” and deliver all nighters? What are your thoughts about this?
The agency world is unique, and as a recruiter I almost always try to recruit people with agency experience so there will be no culture shock. You’re right, it’s a fast-paced environment driven by clients. You need to be flexible.
Digital is the fastest growing component of most of the top agencies. What advice would you give to a mid-level job seeker looking to latch on to an account manager role in digital (I am specifically leaving out the technical ones, because those are more obvious).
Well, my take is there are two types of folks: pure digital and hybrids. If we are going to hire someone into a purely digital role, that person must demonstrate real deep knowledge and practical application of many digital channels: social media, SEO/SEM, e-mail marketing, etc. You really can’t fake it. However, a traditional PR person or journalist can really ramp up their digital skills and become a valuable hybrid (offline and online communicator). People should check out Gary Vaynerchuk’s book “Crush It!” for a tutorial on how to get digital savvy.
Final question: Let’s say that candidates at the following levels want to work at FH. to “Get their foot in the door,” what advice would you give to:
Undergrads: Do as many PR Agency internships as possible, including one at Fleishman-Hillard. Ramp up your digital knowledge and skills.
Recent graduates: Ditto above.
People with less than two years’ experience: Do a lot of research on our firm. Who are clients are. What programs we lead for them. Have informational chats with our practitioners. Ask a lot of questions. Find out what specialized skills you need. If you don’t have them, go out and acquire them. Ultimately, it’s about defining your value proposition. What skill or niche experience could really provide value to one (or more) of our clients?
Mid-level people with five years’ experience: Ditto above.
Thanks, Brian. And readers. Do your homework on Fleishman-Hillard. Find out if they have an office near you. And note the part above about informational interview.
Hey Georgetown (and public relations) peeps. Thanks to Robert French, I discovered a new tool for Twitter at the best possible time for a lot of folks.
It’s a Twitter search and I am pulling in an .rss feed for the term “public relations.” It’s on the right-hand column on my blog, so visit early and often.
I have never been a Robert Scoble fan, and this one sealed the deal. I’m pissed. Big time.
In recent comments that he made on Blog Talk Radio that I discovered on “For Immediate Release,” Mr. Scoble went on to make a series of increasingly stupid comments, among them:
“PR is dead. The way that PR is practiced is just..lame.”
“Most of PR has ’sucked.’ If you think it’s not, just be a blogger for a little while. And watched the thousands of stupid-ass pitches flow through your screen.”
“Anybody who pitches you on email is stupid. The chance that I am going to listen to anyone who pitches me email on frikkin’ email is one percent.”
[Someone] showed me a block of wood…that was better than the stupid-ass pitches I get in email.”
People who stand up for the PR industry, they just don’t get it.”
Public relations is:
lame
sucks
stupid-ass
OK. You get my point. Listen to the audio and you will hear someone who, to me, sounds a) wildly inarticulate, b) whines like a Hollywood celebrity who didn’t get the right kind of mayo on his chicken salad, and c) has no problem using profanity to, in a blanket fashion, insult the livelihood of thousands and thousands of public relations practitioners. Are there people who “don’t get it?” Sure. Do people make pitches that are of base and inappropriate? Absolutely. Are there public relations practitioners who pitch via email? Sure – IF IT IS THE ONLY MEDIUM AVAILABLE TO THEM.
Mr. Scoble needs to realize that he is complaining about the very celebrity that he himself created. You cannot have it both ways.
If you become an A-Lister and make a good living (while many of very good public relations people in this country are being laid off, by the way) it is beyond self-absorption to complain about “stupid-ass pitches” that you receive because of the very notoriety that you sought, built and benefit from. You even mentioned that you get pitches from people who are panicked that their companies are going to go out of business – and call them “lame.” There’s some compassion.
And as for your preferred method of “… having someone come over and have dinner with me and tell me that something is cool,” please feel free to do a post letting people know your address and I am sure that you will have no scarcity of folks coming over for dinner. Or hire a social secretary who can make the appointments for you.
Final thought?
Mr. Scoble, stop whining. Maybe you could switch places with a few of those public relations people who “suck” and realize just how hard their jobs are – and how desperately they are clinging to them.
This was a pretty popular post when I first wrote it, so I have tweaked it a bit for my Georgetown students this semester.
So…
We have all been there. You have killer ideas that can save your company money, your competitors are all doing it — and all you need to do is get the ok from your boss to implement a blog (internal or external), a podcast, Twitter, use You Tube, Facebook, hell, even an .rss feed.
And then you get “The Look.”
We’ve all seen it. It’s something between hearing that Santa Claus isn’t real and the look on Dan Quayle’s face when Lloyd Bentsen said “”Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Too often than not, when those above you (or your clients), exhibit that look, you need to think fast or watch your social media dreams go up in flames. So here are a few tips that might help you think fast before “The Look” becomes a “no.”
Knowing and reacting. It’s simple and unquantifiable, but the there is likely already conversation going on about your company/clients, their products, issues, executives and value — it’s already happening. Here’s the simple part: you can choose to be part of it or choose to ignore it. So when someone blogs about you, good or bad, have a monitoring system in place and rules in place for if — or even when — to engage.I have written about monitoring reputation management ad nauseum, but the first step in engaging in the conversation is to know what people are saying about you, and who really matters. It doesn’t have to cost a ton to monitor, and even Twitter search has an .rss output now. No excuses.And here’s a little tip to help simplify it: if you walked out of the building and heard someone trashing our company, wouldn’t you engage that person in conversation to offer your points of view? Would you just let it go? What we’re talking about is no different.
Projecting your point of view. If you are reading this blog, you probably already have a pretty good idea of the arsenal that is available to project your company’s/client’s/executives’ view into cyberspace, so I won’t spent a lot of time on the tools and tactics. Most CEO-types are bottom-line oriented, so if you can make can intelligent case about cost-per-contact (CPC) — talked about brilliantly in Katie Payne’s book “Measuring Public Relationships,” you have a winner. For example, let’s say so implement a Twitter feed. The only cost, really, is your time to set it up and monitor it. If you make $60,000 a year (plus benes and work 2,000 hours a year), that’s going to be about $45 per hour. If you spend an hour a day on Twitter and build up a network of contact of 500 followers, your CPC is going to be about $22.50 ($11,250/500). Compare this to advertising (which you can’t appropriately measure, only guess, earned media or paid media, which again you can’t appropriately measure) and the $22.50 cost per contact is pretty darn good. And this is only measuring the cost per acquiring each contact and does not add in the value of the conversations that are taking place via Twitter throughout the year. And especially in a down economy, CPC is more important than ever.And one final note: I maintain a Twitter account for my day job and can tell you that the vast majority of the major “traditional” news outlets are on it -watching what my employer has to say.
You can’t always have the ROI you want. I am directly lifting this from a must-listen “For Immediate Release” podcast in which Mark Ragan led a group of social media experts through a fascinating panel in which he pretended to be the “Dumb-Ass CEO,” and Shel Holtz discussed blogging. Mark Ragan challenged: “You better be precise. I’m busy. Why is it that I need to launch this blog, which I don’t even know what it is.” Sound familiar? Shel had a great answer. He said that many companies still invest in things like taking key customers to golf club memberships, greens fees, etc. to build relationships, and we don’t measure that, right? Everyone gets that you are building solid relationships with these people in the golf course, and not one ever challenges that, right? The basis of social media, like blogs, is developing relationships. You can’t always measure everything — and you have to be at peace with that.
Blogging baby steps. A lot of time, you have to take steps that are not 100 percent of what you want to begin with, so there are a couple of things you can do in the meantime. First, talk to your boss about starting an internal blog — something that is apart from that God-awful intranet that you have. Start slowly by talking to your employees – the people who are your brand and company ambassadors, and you might discover that you are ready for prime time — taking it to the “outside world” after all. And a tactic that I have done more often than not, start a test blog. Mock it up, don’t make it public, but if you have just a few moments to capture the time and attention of a senior executives, pictures and clicks are worth a 1,000 arguments. While Mr./Mrs. CEO is clicking through the blog, you can make your case about the fact that businesses are built on relationships — and having a blogging platform is a fantastic way to have a parallel set of relationships with your internal or external audiences.
Beware of the roadblocks. People hate change. Especially people who have been doing it one way for a long time. If you are attempting a “paradigm shift” (100 points for BS bingo, which I won on the “Hobson and Holtz Report: #399), talk to the people who might try to stand in your way. My experience tells me that there are two prospective deal-killers in an organization: IT and legal.When the Internet was for propeller-heads, IT owned it. It was theirs, and we “communicators” simply did not get it. And now we want to OWN IT??? Try a quiet, discreet conversation with someone reasonable (and high up) in IT to get buy-in on a shared project.And legal? I have climbed this mountain so many times I have no fingernails left. But here is my two cents, and it is pretty simple. The right way to go about is is to start the conversation with “How can we do this?” The wrong way is “Can I do this?“ Make the question about what THEY need to do to collaborate and make this a reality and don’t give legal any maneuvering room to kill something. Sure, there will be disclaimers (be smart and cut and paste the disclaimer statement from a competitor and bring it to your meeting), but frame and conversations in terms of HOW it can be accomplished, not IF it can be accomplished.
But it’s not all about me; Tell me about your own experiences when trying to sell in new media in an old-school job. Or if you have not tried it, tell me how you would.
I got a very positive reaction to this experiment last week, so I may make it a weekly tradition. And I hope that Ned does not mind, but I will cull a few job openings in the Washington, DC area (and one “exotic” location) for my students from Ned Ned Lundquist’s “JOTW.
In case you did not see last week’s post, I noted that one of the best — if not THE BEST — resource for communications professionals is Ned Lundquist’s “JOTW” or “Job of the Week.” Here’s more from the Web site version of this excellent, free resource:
Ned Lundquist’s “Job of the Week” free e-mail networking newsletter and website for professional communicators has a cult following of more than 10,000 readers (the 5-digit milestone was reached October 6, 2006). The job leads are just one reason his faithful followers begin their Mondays (and sometimes Tuesdays through Fridays) with a cuppa and JOTW.
So here’s a few that I found that may be of interest to my peeps in the Washington, DC area — with a big thanks to Ned to keeping this up all those years:
My caveat – I know nothing about the jobs, the organizations, the salaries, etc., but encourage you to check them out. The job market is not dead, it’s just really tired.
Happy hunting G’Town grads. You guys are the best!
And not that I need this disclaimer, but this is WTF to the FTC (sounds like rap, doesn’t it?): I was a Senior Vice President as Fleishman-Hillard. And here’s Brian’s disclaimer: “The following is my personal opinion and does not necessarily represent the views of my employer or its clients.“
Hey Georgetown (and public relations) peeps. Thanks to 
your competitors are all doing it — and all you need to do is get the ok from your boss to implement a blog (internal or external), a podcast, Twitter, use You Tube, Facebook, hell, even an .rss feed.
