Calling excellent PR professionals

We have lived with a skill shortage for as long as I can remember in technology PR. This was certainly true in the late ‘90s and although there were more candidates on the market in ’01 and ’02 it has always been a struggle to hire the really great people – the people we (and our competitors) are after. Recently the market seems as tight as ever and one top recruiter told us that they have handled only 10 technology candidates in the past twelve months – while having almost thirty live vacancies in tech PR on their books.

In terms of where the real shortage lies, it's predominantly for people with four to six years experience – account managers and account directors, the people who weren’t being recruited in 2001 – 2003 when many agencies stopped recruiting all together. The pressure to compromise on quality is huge, but is something Hotwire isn’t prepared to do; unfortunately some agencies have had to go that way.

There are two bits of bright news – first, as Hotwire gets better known, we are getting a gratifying flow of direct applications. We love these. Using a recruitment agency involves a hefty fee, so we always look first at applicants who contact us direct. It shows as well that they are entrepreneurial. We have recently taken on an amazing Australian Senior Account Executive who was enterprising enough to contact us directly from Sydney and two calls and some references later we made her an offer.

The other bit of good news is the ongoing success of our graduate programme. This year we had 600 applications for positions with Hotwire, and after a stringent filtering process we made 10 offers to graduates who we think are truly phenomenal.

My guess is that we aren’t the only agency taking on loads of graduates and over the next two years the skill shortage will ease and some semblance of a normal market will return. For the moment, it’s a candidate’s market and the whole industry is fighting over a small pool of the best ones.