This is for recruiters, talent acquisition leads and hiring managers who've been handed a PR manager vacancy and a brief that says little more than "get us coverage". By the end you'll be able to write a sharper brief, test the right skills, ask interview questions that expose weak candidates, and choose between an in-house and an agency background. My argument is simple: hire for judgement under pressure, not for a Rolodex of journalists. Contacts go stale within a couple of job moves. Judgement doesn't.
Most in-house PR hiring in the UK still rewards the wrong thing. Shortlists get built around who's got the glossiest coverage book and the most impressive-sounding titles. A coverage book tells you what happened. It tells you nothing about whether the candidate caused it, or what they did when a story turned on them at 6pm on a Friday.
Step 1: Decide what the role is actually for
Before you write a word of the advert, pick the job. A PR manager hired to land consumer product stories is a different person from one hired to protect a regulated business from a bad week. Most briefs try to get both and end up with a vague hybrid that no strong candidate recognises.
Write down the three situations this person will face most often. Launch week. A hostile journalist enquiry. A senior exec who wants to say something unwise. You'll know it's worked when two colleagues read the list independently and describe the same hire.
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Step 2: Choose between in-house and agency backgrounds
Agency people have usually handled more variety, faster. They've juggled clients, pitched cold, and survived account directors with strong opinions. What they often haven't done is sit inside one organisation long enough to live with the consequences of their own advice.
In-house candidates know internal politics, legal sign-off and how to get a CEO's quote approved before the news cycle moves on. But some have gone years without pitching a journalist who didn't already know them. In-house PR hiring in the UK often swings too far toward polish, so if your team is small and needs someone who'll actually build media relationships, don't assume a brand name on the CV means that muscle has been used recently.
There's a real objection here, and it's fair: agency experience is easier to verify, because the clients are named and the campaigns are public. In-house work is murkier. That's true. It's also why you have to test harder, not default to the safer-looking CV. The next step does that.
Step 3: Test the skills that matter
Set a short written exercise. Give the candidate a realistic scenario (an anonymised version of something your business has dealt with) and ask for a one-page response: who they'd brief, what they'd say, what they'd refuse to say. Forty-five minutes, no more.
What you're looking for is prioritisation. Strong candidates tell you what they'd leave out. Weak ones produce a ten-point plan where everything is equally urgent.
Also test writing directly. Ask for a press release headline and opening paragraph on something dull. PR managers who can't write plainly under mild pressure won't improve when the pressure is real.
Step 4: Ask PR manager interview questions that expose the gaps
The questions that work are the ones that need specifics. Ask: "Tell me about a pitch that failed. What did the journalist actually say?" Candidates who've done the work remember the exact reply. Those who haven't speak in generalities.
Ask how they'd build a media list for a sector they've never covered. You want to hear about reading recent bylines, not buying a database and sending to everyone in it. Ask what they'd do if the CEO insisted on commenting during a live incident against their advice. There's no neat answer, which is the point.
For more question ideas, there's a useful companion in PR job interview questions: 10 to ask before you accept, written from the candidate's side. Reading it tells you what good candidates are already asking you.
You'll know this step has worked when you can tell your top two candidates apart on judgement, not just on charm.
Step 5: Spot the red flags early
The loudest red flag is a candidate who talks only about outputs: number of placements, coverage volume, impressions. Nobody in the room should be impressed by impressions without a story about what changed afterwards. (I've watched this go wrong on more briefs than I can count.)
Watch for vague ownership. "We secured" appears in every PR CV, but ask what they personally wrote, pitched or negotiated. Watch for anyone who can't name a time they got something wrong. And treat with suspicion anyone who promises specific national coverage, because no honest practitioner can guarantee it.
Crisis experience deserves its own check. Plenty of candidates claim it. Ask what the first hour looked like and who they called first. If they say "the journalists", you've learned something.
Step 6: Check references and pay fairly
Reference checks in PR are weak when you only speak to the person they list. Ask for a former client or a journalist they've worked with, and ask one question: would you take their call again?
On pay, in-house PR manager salaries in the UK vary widely by sector and city, and London agency pay and regional in-house pay can sit a long way apart. Be clear on the range early. Your best candidates have options, and they'll quietly drop out of a process that gets coy about money. If you need somewhere to advertise, OHUB's PR recruitment platform is built for video-first applications, which helps you hear how someone actually communicates before the first interview.
If a step goes wrong
If your shortlist is all agency people and the role is genuinely in-house, go back to Step 1 and look at whether the brief was too generic. If the written exercise produces nothing useful across the whole field, the scenario was probably too abstract, so rewrite it using a real incident. And if every candidate sounds the same in interview, change the questions before you change the candidates.
Sometimes the right answer is to wait. A wrong PR hire costs you months of lost credibility with journalists, and that's much harder to rebuild than a vacancy is to fill. For the wider picture on where to source candidates, see the best platforms to hire marketing and PR talent in 2026.
The CIPD publishes sound general guidance on structured interviewing, and it applies here as much as anywhere.
