The forces of supply and demand in PR's labour market surprise me. We live in tricky financial times, unemployment is relatively high, lots of PR people have had a couple of years pay freeze but yet – there is a war going on for the best talent in PR. Speak to any large agency in London and they will tell you the same. Finding PR talent takes a lot of time and effort. The recruitment process in PR, it seems to me, is currently a process of risk management. To be fair, this is the same in most sectors but perhaps the more rapidly changing skill requirements of PR mean that PR is in danger of becoming too blinkered in its recruitment. PR is evolving, so new recruits need to have expertise in social media, blogging relations, video production etc. In addition to the core writing and sales (sell in) skills that have long been a feature of PR. For example, if you are currently recruiting for an account director on your consumer team. What would the brief be? You would probably limit yourself to a FMCG experience PR person with a minimum of 5 years’ experience, at least 3 of which needs to be agency side. They must have a track record of successful blogger relations and experience video production. And they need to want live in London. Oh yes and we only want to pay £40K a year. You see my point. You do start to limit yourself a bit. Add to that that they might need to have a passion for technology and that it’s for an absolute bitch of a client and you’ve got a problem. And of course they must love pitching! If you are too specific and risk averse in a PR recruit, it becomes very tough to fill. And consider that the average agency in London has a staff churn rate of 20%. So if you have a 100 people agency, you’ve got to find 20 people a year. That takes some doing. And that’s if you are just standing still, most agencies (in London anyway) are growing. The solution is not obvious. No doubt head hunters, internal talent searchers, Linkedin and dare I say good PR jobs boards like PRmoment Jobs help. But in the end , if you are looking for, OK not a needle, but a maybe a twig in a haystack, and you’ve got to do that twice a month, it aint going to be easy, which means it isn’t going to be cheap. One solution could be for PR firms to acknowledge that PR is moving on from writing needing to be the core skill. This could open up sector specific skills sets to PR. For example, I was speaking to a contact in India recently and their solution was to employ bankers, lawyers and dentists as PR people and then have a centralised bank of ex-journos writing the copy. Quite why a dentist or a lawyer would want to become a PR person I couldn’t quite work out, but I thought it was an interesting model. The other option of course is to acknowledge that the work PR people do is unlikely to be rocket science. Therefore, PR agencies should recruit more on intellect and personal qualities and less on an experience tick box approach. This would mean that if you were recruiting in Technology for example, you wouldn’t need to limit your search to candidates with 3 years technology experience. So it just enables the talent managers to widen the search a little. It seems to me that, writing aside, PR today is about motivation, innovation and confidence. If you’ve got those qualities most of the technical skills can either be learnt, (for example social media applications and media relations) or they can be bought in. (For example, video production experts.)