Hiring trends in PR in the AI age
Reports regarding the demise of the public relations industry are greatly exaggerated. The advent of AI and decline in newsroom resources have commentators rushing to declare PR will be increasingly irrelevant but its short sighted. Around the world the industry continues to grow and remains in greater demand than ever with more than 150,000 people employed across the UK and Ireland alone.
That said, the nature of the industry is changing. The transition from the digital age to the AI era has, and will require, an evolution of skills, approaches and strategies so if you’re looking towards your next career move in the industry or looking to enter it, what are the agencies of the future looking for.
For decades, PR hiring rewarded a familiar skillset: strong media contacts to sell to, sharp press releases to make the journalists job easy, and an instinct for what might land through photography or an interesting angle. Those skills still matter, but on their own they are no longer enough.
What are PR agencies hiring for?
Agencies and in-house teams are now prioritising people who can operate across three overlapping disciplines:
What does the data show: Do you have the ability to work comfortably with data? What does it show, how can it be interpreted and does it demonstrate tangibility?
Intelligence-led communications: Can you demonstrate an understanding as to how narratives form, what it might mean and what risks and opportunities they might present?
Impact-focused delivery: Do you have enough information to demonstrate commercial, brand or customer focused outcomes that align with organisational goals, not just column inches
In practical terms, this means PR professionals are increasingly expected to work with technology to interpret why coverage happened, what it changed, and what should happen next, not simply report that it occurred.
Of course, AI is a key driver of these skill requirements. While it has not replaced editorial judgement, it has opened up a new way in which companies, governments and organisations can understand how effective their PR strategies are and highlights how rare true narrative understanding actually is.
The most valuable PR practitioners today are those who can read media the way journalists do: spotting framing, recognising subtext, understanding political, cultural and sector-specific context, and anticipating how a story will evolve once it enters the public domain. Combined with the ability to do large scale and detailed analysis through AI, these same practitioners are now required to bolster their real-world knowledge, pattern recognition, and experience to leverage these new capabilities.
In addition, while agencies have traditionally hired for what might be called ‘editorial nous’ and the ability to write well, now the expectation has shifted to hiring those with the methodology of an editor, the ability to brief with authority and who can conduct themselves credibility as a trusted counsellor.
Shifting Metrics
One of the quieter but most consequential shifts for PR hiring is the move away from vague vanity metrics. “Hits”, translated as pure volume, carry little weight without evidence of message penetration or strategic relevance. Advertising Value Equivalency, the long-standing attempt to translate PR into notional ad spend, has been effectively obsolete for years, undermined by the collapse of print readership and unreliable digital reach estimates powered by large SEO analytics websites. As scrutiny on communications budgets intensifies, senior stakeholders are increasingly sceptical of guestimated figures drawn from weak data sources, and are demanding measurement that credibly demonstrates impact, not activity.
Modern PR roles now demand fluency in meaningful measurement: message penetration, narrative share, geographic spread, sentiment shifts, spokesperson visibility, and comparative performance against competitors or previous campaigns. Crucially, this data must be translated into detailed actionable insight, not dumped into generic ‘link’ reports.
The skill evolving agencies now value the most is not data collection, but interpretation.
Selling credibility, not coverage
Another important hiring trend amongst all is this: agencies are no longer looking for people who can ‘sell coverage’. They are looking for people who can sell the credibility of their approach. What worked in the digital age as a selling point is now increasingly obsolete and executive teams are catching on.
Clients are shifting their requirements to advisers who can explain ‘why’ a strategy makes sense, ‘how’ success will be evaluated, and ‘what’ they should do when the data points lead somewhere uncomfortable. That requires confidence, analytical thinking, and the ability to communicate insight clearly to non-PR audiences.
In the AI age, PR is not becoming less relevant, it is just becoming more accountable, which presents an opportunity. The practitioners who thrive will be those who embrace intelligence, evidence and narrative craft in equal measure.
Early Days
It should be remembered that we are still in the early days of this new industry revolution enabled by AI. Nobody knows entirely how the industry evolves but it certainly will come with a change in day to day approaches. Greater use of automation, intelligence-led campaigning, augmented workflows, AI assisted editing, large scale analytics, the potential is huge. In the coming decade, the question won’t be whether you use AI in PR, it will be whether you understand what it’s telling you and can you act on it quickly.