It's tough to get your hands on useful data about the public relations market to help with agency planning.

Industry rankings lag the market by at least 12 months, and while the government releases quarterly data on professional services, it doesn’t break out the public relations sector.

As a result, agency founders and managers are left scratching their heads, relying on their own experiences and snippets of information. Business confidence is a constant talking point in industry WhatsApp groups I’m part of, and is at the top of the agenda whenever at meet-ups.

At the start of the year, we thought hard about solving this problem and landed on job ads as the best publicly available leading indicator of economic performance. Jobs in PR is our experiment to see if we can improve economic modelling in the industry.

Our hunch is that when the market is growing, agencies hire staff ahead of demand. This follows that when the market is contracting, hiring slows.

Since March, we’ve been scraping job listings from the UK top 50 agency websites each month.

Cautious optimism for the remainder of the year

After six months of flat results, PR job vacancies at the leading agencies shot up by nearly 20% in September, reaching 120 openings. That figure’s dipped a bit since, down to 110 this month.

The industry’s focus is on recruiting entry-level roles, with around 60 of the 110 jobs being junior positions. Mid-level recruitment has stayed steady, but senior roles have shrunk.

It looks like agencies are either growing their teams or gearing up for future expansion by bringing in new talent.

The new government has brought some optimism, but there's clearly still a lot of anxiety among agency leaders, especially about the Autumn budget and the likelihood of higher taxes and stricter employment laws.

Even though the UK economy is growing at its fastest rate in almost three years, a survey by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) in June showed that one in three organisations plans to either freeze (21%) or reduce (14%) recruitment over the next six months.

Want to get involved?

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Agencies outside the UK top 50 can submit job listings too, and we track them separately from the main dataset. Use this link to submit an ad.

A big thanks to PRmoment for letting us share our findings each month and to Hard Numbers for supporting us as our data partner.