As PR jobs decline, talent gets pickier about next move
No thanks: Reasons for turning down a job include values mismatch or lack of WFH (Midjourney)
Communications professionals are increasingly rejecting roles over “mismatched values”, even as Australia’s jobs market continues to shrink, according to recruiters.
Recruiters specialising in the public relations and communications industry say they are seeing a marked shift in candidate expectations, with value alignment, flexibility and client choice playing a far greater role in decision-making.
This is despite a marked contraction in the jobs market for communications and public relations roles, with Seek index data showing job ads in the sector at around half their level of three years ago.
Speaking to Mumbrella, Lucinda Attrill, founder of recruitment firm Salt and Shein, said broadly she had also noted “a clear shift” in PR candidate preferences in the last five years.
Salt & Shein’s Lucinda Attrill
“Now, at almost every level, candidates want to know exactly which clients they’ll be working on,” she said. “And it only takes one client where there’s a mismatch in values, whether that’s around alignment or corporate social responsibility, for them to walk away. It’s much more polarising than it used to be.”
Attrill’s comments come as new Seek data, shared with Mumbrella, shows a broader decline in PR and communications job ads over the past six years, with demand peaking after the Covid-19 pandemic.
More recent data shows job advertisements have fallen 11% quarter-on-quarter and 14% year-on-year.
While Attrill does not see selectivity in a job seeker as inherently bad, she said it should be earned.
“At senior levels, people have earned the right to prioritise social impact or sustainability. But for those with less than 10 years’ experience, it should be a ‘nice to have’ rather than a must.”
A graph provided by Seek that shows relative job ad supply in marketing and comms. Note the Y axis is an index, not absolute numbers (Seek)
Meanwhile, Dean Connelly, founder and recruitment director of Latte Recruitment, said the hiring challenge extends to junior roles, albeit driven by entirely different factors.
“Interestingly, even at the account executive level, roles are hard to fill,” he told Mumbrella.
“We’ve had roles open for three months where candidates rejected the role, not the agency. Reasons included: five days in-office requirements, salary expectations, and being close to promotion already [at their current job].”
However, for Connelly, the data points to a more complex shift in the talent market, with the firm recording a decline in talent pool size for account coordinators, the first step on the PR ladder (down 20% in Melbourne and 12% in Sydney).
But, at the same time, he said recruitment of junior PR practitioners was also softening.
“What we’re cautious about saying, but what we’re looking into, is whether AI is contributing to the shrinkage at junior level, or whether it’s more about efficiencies being created so agencies don’t need as many junior staff,” he said.
Dean Connelly, of Latte Recruitment
“I was speaking with a PR agency last week and … they’ve set up an AI agent that, instead of juniors scanning the news, now automatically tracks coverage for specific clients and surfaces relevant headlines, for example, the latest news in telecoms or food, which can then be used for potential news hijacks.”
For Connelly, the concern is that over time the industry could face a talent dry-up — not just from fewer juniors entering the pipeline, but from a lack of junior staff developing the right foundational skills.
He said the key issue is the impact on critical thinking among junior talent entering the industry, particularly with the rise of AI.
“The AI can produce the results and the research, but someone still needs to sit and train them to go: right, here’s the critical lens to look through, and here’s how you apply it to the business challenge,” he said.
“What I worry about is whether we’re still investing enough time in developing that layer of critical thinking at the junior level.”
“We’ve got to be really careful if we want a cohort to move through to account manager level and beyond,” he said. “We need to make sure we’re actually spending the time developing that critical thinking.”
And nothing at all to do with the fact that the PR jobs on offer are offering salaries that no-one can survive on, unless they still live with their parents.