Hiring a PR person from an agency into an in-house team fails more often than it should, and the cause is usually a mismatch in the process itself: agencies hire for output and in-house teams hire for judgement, yet most in-house hiring managers still run an agency-style interview. If you're a recruiter or talent acquisition lead filling a communications team role, the single most useful change you can make is to stop testing the candidate on what they've produced and start testing what they'd refuse to do.
What agencies actually screen for
An agency hires for capacity, and they're blunt about it. Can this person run three accounts, write a release at speed, and keep a client calm at 6pm on a Friday? The interview is built around volume and polish. Coverage books, hit rates, the campaign that landed a front page. A lot of it is showmanship, and it works because the job is partly showmanship.
But it also means an agency CV is, by design, a highlights reel. Everything on it was either client-approved or client-ignored.
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What in-house teams are really buying
On the in-house side, the person is buying into one organisation's politics, one set of executives, one slow-moving legal review. The brief is rarely "get us coverage". It's "tell the finance director no without losing the finance director". That's a different skill, and it doesn't appear in a coverage book.
The earlier piece on hiring PR professionals through the agency to in-house transition covers the career mechanics. My point here is narrower: the hidden evaluation criteria sit in how a candidate handles internal friction, and most interview panels never probe it.
The questions that tell you something
Ask what they did when a senior person wanted a statement they thought was wrong. Ask who they'd go to in legal, and how early. Ask about a campaign that died inside the client and what they learned from it. Agency candidates who've only ever faced a client contact, never a client's internal committee, will struggle, and that's useful to know before the offer.
And ask about measurement. Agency people tend to answer in coverage. In-house teams are increasingly judged on business outcomes, reputation tracking, stakeholder sentiment, sometimes sales enquiries, and a candidate who can't talk about that without reaching for share of voice is telling you something.
The objection worth taking seriously
The strongest counter-argument is that agency people are simply the best-trained communicators around, and that adjusting the process is overthinking it. Hire the sharpest operator and they'll adapt. I'd concede the first half. Agency talent is often excellent, and I wouldn't discount it.
But adaptation isn't automatic, and the cost of waiting to find out is high. A communications team is small. One misjudged hire shows up in the next crisis, not in a probation review. The answer isn't to distrust agency candidates, it's to test the thing they've never been asked to do, so the adaptation question is settled at interview rather than in month four.
Where this is heading
Pay and seniority bands are blurring the line, with in-house roles at larger organisations now competing hard for experienced agency directors. If you're building a pipeline, a PR recruitment platform that lets candidates show how they think on video can surface judgement far earlier than a CV does, and the guide to platforms for hiring marketing and PR talent in 2026 compares the options.
The hiring managers who get this right over the next year will be the ones who write the scorecard before the job advert, not after.
What would your panel ask if they weren't allowed to mention coverage at all?
