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Covid Comms Career Changes
With a predicted rise in demand for public affairs, policy and regulation related skills — how will you expand your opportunities?
BY SAM BURNE JAMES
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If you work in internal comms or corporate affairs, you may have just been through some of the busiest months of your life. If you’re in travel PR, you may be coming off furlough, and surveying a bleak jobs outlook, with vacancies down across all sectors, and marcomms hit particularly hard (see below). But it’s not all doom and gloom.
“Throughout the pandemic, three sectors have fared really well on both agency and in-house sides – corporate, tech, and in particular, healthcare, which was already a notoriously candidateshort market,” says Louisa Wetton, an associate director at recruiter Reuben Sinclair. Other recruiters add internal comms to that list and, with Brexit just around the corner, predict rising demand for public affairs, policy and regulationrelated skills.
Lockdown’s unusual circumstances mean specific soft skills are now more highly-prized.
“People want resilience, reliability and conscientiousness, individuals able to work from home without supervision, so there’s more focus on that in the selection process,” says Lynn Beaumont, Managing Director, The Foundry. Helen Salt, director of Black Cherry Recruitment, adds people management to the list — “to keep more junior staff feeling motivated and calm during these turbulent times” — plus deft stakeholder and client relationship handling, an area requiring extra care now relationships are even more reliant on virtual interaction.
NO MORE WORKFACE
Some things don’t change: there is nothing worse than a half-hearted candidate. “You want people to have energy, you want to feel their energy — agencies don’t really benefit from employing people who suck the life out of the room,” the Lansons CEO and co-founder Tony Langham says. He continues: “The worst thing someone can do in an interview is when you say ‘do you have anything to ask me?’, reply ‘no’. If you’ve got f-all to ask the CEO, you’re clearly not invested.”
Zoe Melarkey, director of communications at online estate agent Purplebricks, adds: “If the interviewee can make it not exactly fun but at least enjoyable, that’s a plus,” she says, adding: “It used to be that you had to have a ‘work face’ but I don’t think you have to any more — bring your personality, leave them with that sense of who are you.”
Melarkey also urges people who might start looking for jobs to ensure they have clear case studies close to mind. “I was once told that when you’re going into an interview, you should imagine that you’re leaving a series of gifts on the table for the hiring manager — they’ll interview five or six people in the day, and you want them to remember you and think; ‘oh, they’re the one who did this’.”
New candidates may initially find that energy and those gifts harder to communicate via Zoom — but recruiters say they should soon get used to remote interviewing. Virtual recruitment also offers the benefit of interviews being quicker to arrange, translating into quicker hiring processes overall.
But the remote (or otherwise) status of work could also cause tension, Beaumont warns. In July, one City-based client was “getting quite hot under the collar” about the idea that staff and jobseekers might not yet feel comfortable to return to the office, she recalls. She advises employers to remain “accommodating and flexible” around working location to avoid deterring talent — and to avoid assuming that because there are likely to be more candidates on the market, that they don’t need to work as hard to sell their roles.
SIDE STEP SUCCESS
That said, there is no doubt that we are in a buyer’s market. With anecdotal evidence suggesting that more senior practitioners have been particular victims of redundancies thus far, these individuals may now worry that they will have to apply for jobs below what they previously did, only to be rejected as over-qualified. Gavin Ellwood, director of Ellwood Atfield, says he would have stern words for any hiring manager rejecting one of his candidates on those grounds.
“I would suggest that they go on unconscious bias training and think about ways in which they think about someone’s motivation for taking on a job,” he says.
“There are all sorts of issues with diversity — and ageism can be a factor. It’s increasingly old-fashioned to think that people are only ever interested in more responsibility and more money.”
The Foundry’s Beaumont agrees that the industry has begun to grow out of that sort of thinking, saying: “What was hitherto seen as a sideways move is now considered a good move.”
The job market is likely to be competitive across the board, says DeeDee Doke, the editor of trade magazine Recruiter, who warns that candidates may find it “particularly difficult to get the attention of recruiters right now”.
Candidates who appear to be taking a scatter-gun approach and “just trying for anything and everything” will feel like a waste of time to recruiters — Doke advises candidates demonstrate to recruiters why they are keen on particular roles which they have seen listed on the recruiter’s website. They should also “really push for a Zoom or Microsoft Teams meeting with a recruiter… recruiters who don’t meet their candidates, that’s not a good sign”, she says. This meeting is a good opportunity to check that the recruiter genuinely knows their stuff, and for the candidate to get their enthusiasm and passion across.
As Influence goes to press, the spectre of further redundancies looms, with the Government’s furlough scheme due to end in March.
Some recruiters feel companies are holding back from advertising until postfurlough redundancies bite, believing this will give them more choice of candidates.
It remains to be seen how bad the redundancies will be for PR. Salt is cautiously optimistic: “In the 2007-9 recession, we were coming out of a very financially buoyant time, so companies were carrying a lot of weight that they shed dramatically and quickly. So far, the pandemic has seen less redundancies – obviously the furlough scheme has helped, but I also get the feeling companies are leaner now.”
Another hope is that PR’s value has shone bright during challenging times. “Organisational leaders are sitting around the board table wondering what they are going to say and how to say it. The value of communications has been really seen and felt by businesses,” comments Ellwood.
Whether that translates into fewer redundancies than other sectors, and a proper uptick in recruitment activity, remains to be seen.
