Back to Basics

Summer is on the horizon, and there’s a whole raft of great work underway at Performance Comms. But with our clients hungry to push the needle, one of the greatest challenges facing a dynamic, growing agency is recruitment. How do you find the talent that will deliver the award-winning projects of the future?

I think it’s easy to forget there are those who are just starting out, and even more who haven’t yet chosen their path – so how can we make sure we’re attracting the best minds? Well, one way is by inspiring school leavers to consider a future in PR, and much more than that, to foster an industry that’s accessible to everyone.

Youth charity IntoUniversity is working hard to provide local learning centres where young people are inspired to achieve. Their ‘Careers in Focus’ course is just one of many initiatives that looks to educate children from a wide range of backgrounds about their options – be it further education, training or vocational qualifications. So, Account Director Adam Tanous and I spent the afternoon volunteering at one of their centres in Wood Green, North London to see if we had what it takes to inspire a generation.

On the face of it, PR and sponsorship seems like just the kind of career that would appeal to young people – it’s creative, there’s scope to work into your passions and it’s a young industry, obsessed with the potential for new media.

But what is awaiting Generation Alpha, is a world concerned with self-published information and user-generated content – where the rules of engagement will be rewritten in favour of the individual. It will be the most exciting and challenging period that the industry has faced, and with it will come an even greater onus on the next generation to be compelling communicators.

This is not a career for the feint-hearted. So, it’s just as well, that at IntoUniversity centres they start them young – with afterschool workshops and mentorship programmes available to children from seven years of age. The next wave of executives have never known a world without Facebook so being ‘social’ is first nature to them, and they understand the power of networking.

Growing up on a diet of instant access content, they’ve witnessed the overnight success of dotcom millionaires; they’ve rejected traditional channels and sought out their own role models across YouTube and Instagram; and they live in a world where they have access to knowledge at the touch of a button.

So, if the industry and the agency is to survive, we need to rethink how we communicate with an increasingly disenfranchised youth. Building a model that delivers results for our clients, so they can reach a notoriously difficult demographic, and one that ticks the boxes for young people themselves.

So did we inspire them? We’d like to think so… but we learnt just as much from spending time with them.

If we want to attract the real talent of tomorrow, the question can no longer be how to weed out achievers from a pile of applicants; it’s on us to convince talented, entrepreneurial Alphas that the industry has enough to offer them.

Lindsey & Adam