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PR is an extremely stressful profession with very long hours and to be successful you have to throw a great deal of energy into both internal and external relationships. It truly is a ‘people’ profession, in the true sense of the word. It’s not like Human Resources (HR), or Accountancy, or even Marketing where, if you are having a bad day, you can just sink your head in an excel document and ignore the world. In a PR job, you have to be at the top of your game, or pretty close to it most of the time. But is this the reality of life, and does this requirement of PR partly explain the huge levels of drop out from the sector? Unfortunately, the reality is that if your job requires you to be constantly sociable, outgoing and charming, if you are having an episode, or are experiencing problems at home, or are just tired because your baby has kept you up all night, it is bound to affect your character and therefore will have an impact on your ability to do your job. So what is the solution? Well that’s pretty tricky and needless to say different approaches are appropriate for each situation. Currently PR agencies are positioning themselves as understandable, ethical employers. This can be witnessed in the race for The Times’ and The Financial Times’ Best Places to Work rankings. Whether this is done to attempt to get a step ahead in the recruitment battle, or as a benchmarking exercise to measure how well they are treating their staff is debatable. That said, gimmick or not, a race to treat staff well cannot really do much harm and should therefore be applauded. Of course, it does remain questionable how beneficial a free monthly massage will be if you are having a breakdown! Currently the approach of PR agencies and large corporations is to position themselves as “the best place to work”, and be ethical in how they deal with each incident. Fair enough. But in the end, it comes down to an individual’s career of choice. A PR job is a challenging career, enjoyable at times and not without its rewards, but it has long hours and challenging targets. So, while all things are possible, if an individual has the correct personal skills and decides PR is the job for them, with sufficient employer understanding and personal sacrifice, there is nothing to prevent people having a successful career. Media Recruitment provides specialist recruitment services to the Public Relations industry. Find a wide range of PR Jobs in our website, but mainly PR freelancing in London
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