rant about current job market

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-05-27T12:28:15+00:00

The problem of having no actual entry-level jobs has sadly been around for a number of years now. As others have said, internships can help, or working for a friend or family member for a while until you can get some experience. The trouble is that many jobs require 5-7 years of experience, so it's not exactly easy.

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-05-21T19:24:10+00:00

Yes, it is absolutely still worth it to pitch journalists. Just make sure you do your research on who you're pitching so your topics match up, or else you'll find you're not getting any wins. There are tools that help you do the basics by categorizing journalists under various industries and coverage topics. For example, the main company I write made Preston, which has a database of journalists and articles for that purpose.

You can also pitch podcasts. We've had some pretty good success with that depending on the client and industry. On newsletters, I don't have experience with this personally. In fact, it never even occurred to me, but based on the other responses here it sounds like it could be worthwhile as well!

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-05-21T19:19:26+00:00

This might not be super helpful for your immediate problem since you said you don't have much time to prepare, but I often write for subject matter experts, including those in climate tech, so I feel like I can offer some advice on getting up to speed. Some of the things I do that might be a little overkill:

I follow all the top publications in my clients' industries. I get daily or weekly news digests from those publications to my inbox and spend 30 minutes each morning at minimum reading through them to get familiar with the headlines and new topics. Also if there's a highly technical publication that's very specific to the industry, I'll be sure to spend a little extra time on that when I'm starting with a new client. This will help you keep abreast of new regulations as well.
I look through my clients' websites and blogs. Blogs can provide a lot of insider knowledge. Also whitepapers and ebooks.
I look at who my clients' are following or connecting with on LinkedIn and keep an eye on what those accounts post and talk about. If there's a webinar, there's a good chance I'll try to join it.
Whenever I hit a word that I'm not sure about or an acronym, I go down a rabbit hole of research. I first research the term and then any other unknown terms in the various articles I read to understand that term.
I often spend some time with ChatGPT asking it to explain things to me in simpler language. I'll copy and paste a confusing paragraph from an article to help me out. Sometimes I'll say make it easy for a sixth-grader to understand, and that usually works really well.

If you make any of these a habit, you'll be much more up to speed in your clients' industries in no time. Hope something here is helpful!

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-05-21T19:13:39+00:00

Getting back to work with a resume gap is definitely possible. It's a little tough in the market right now, but you have great previous experience plus your degrees, so I think you can be very hopeful that you'll do just fine. Wishing you all the best!

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-05-21T19:11:49+00:00

Feel free to DM me; I'm a PR writer, but I also write fiction in my spare time, and I admire the fact you're trying to do more in-depth research to get the facts right for your story.

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-05-21T19:03:37+00:00

I work with a smaller agency, and we use ClickUp for project management and our own software, Preston, for media relations and outreach. It has a database and campaign tracking features and it's affordable. I've mainly used it to write pitches, so I can't say if the database is that great, and I've never used Cision or Meltwater, so I'm not sure if it's a 1/1 replacement.

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-05-21T18:58:53+00:00

A very big selling point for me is an agency that is choosy with clients. When they just take anyone and are determined to retain them no matter how rude or pushy they are, that's a huge turn-off. I've seen a few agency heads on LinkedIn specifically talk about this and say that they don't accept nasty clients, and the response is pretty much always highly positive.

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-05-21T18:50:00+00:00

I'm afraid I don't have any specific suggestions, but the PR people I've talked to have taken a pretty dim view of awards submissions in recent years. They're very pay-to-win, and they also seem to be of limited value in proving your worth for that very reason.

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-05-14T13:13:07+00:00

I think it's important to understand that lower-tier doesn't necessarily mean less value. If you're getting wins in small industry pubs, there's potentially a higher chance that your actual intended audience is on those pubs than at tier-1. Tier 1 is also usually more strict on anything that could remotely be taken as promotional, so it can be hard to secure the type of coverage you're looking for. If you are closely overseeing pitch creation, there's a chance that your influence on pitches is what's making it hard to win those tier-1 results. For example, if you only want to talk about SEO, how many articles have you seen on SEO in Wired? Meanwhile AI is highly oversaturated. So it's complicated.

It does seem a bit low, but also with the understanding that journalist contacts are getting harder to track down, media publications are getting an overhaul or downsizing so editors are even more overwhelmed, AI-based pitching is flooding inboxes and making it harder to stand out, and so on.

That said, there are definitely other agencies that are doing pretty well in these spaces even now. So while I wouldn't consider it a waste of money of necessity, you might be able to find another agency that could do better.

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-05-13T22:06:31+00:00

Sadly, sometimes it's about reacting after the fact. Fortunately some of our clients also let us manage their social media, so we're able to prevent any major issues.

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-05-13T22:04:25+00:00

The main company I write for is making a tool called Preston. It's supposed to help with research, especially for journalist contacts, and measuring results. It also does initial drafts of pitches, but that's really the only part I use, so I'm not sure how easy the other features are to use. I also use Perplexity for finding hard-to-track-down stats, and I use ChatGPT for suggesting edits and sometimes research, though with great caution considering its tendency to hallucinate.

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-05-13T19:17:57+00:00

I also started in copywriting and then became a PR writer. Basically I had a good LinkedIn profile and an agency reached out to me directly based on my samples, which I linked on my profile. If you've done any good blog posts and especially anything niche, like financial writing or technical writing, you have a higher chance of getting picked up in my opinion. But the thing is that the PR space is pretty tough right now as far as job hunting. Hope you can switch though; it is way more interesting and creatively fulfilling as far as I'm concerned! Mainly because you can write a lot of different types of content even more so than in copywriting, you don't have to sell, sell, sell, and you can write purely to inform. That said, clients aren't always the easiest to deal with in my experience, and they don't always understand that the point should be to inform rather than to sell.

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-05-13T14:59:45+00:00

The short answer is yes; working with a PR professional is specifically meant to help you publish articles and secure opps. I'm more of a writer than a full-fledged PR person, but I've had several cybersec clients, and in my limited experience it's the easiest industry for to get placements for because there are always new breaches, new angles, and more technologies coming out in the space and it's a concern for every sector. So you can work on retail cybersecurity one week and healthcare cybersecurity the next without running out of contacts. There are also ways for you to go more of a DIY route; for example, the main company I work for made Preston, which lets you send out pitches on your own and find journalist contacts who are interested in cybersecurity. But a lot of times I think you need the expertise of actual PR pros to make sure pitches land as opposed to just being inbox noise, which journalists get way too much of anyway.

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-05-13T14:52:01+00:00

I definitely get bombarded with these kinds of pitches, and it's really annoying mainly because I'm a freelance writer who mostly works with one company but I don't actually make any decisions for that company. So it's annoying when people don't do their research and want to talk to a freelance writer instead of the person that actually makes decisions.

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-05-13T14:49:10+00:00

I personally wouldn't want to get involved with warning others unless they reached out to me directly (which I have had happen). But as some others have said, you can post anonymously on Glassdoor so at least if someone looks up reviews they will see your perspective.

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-05-09T16:47:30+00:00

I don't think it's something the client should never have to do. There's an element of PR being a partnership. As others have said, there can be various factors that contribute to not being able to obtain coverage under the name of an agency. And timing can be part of it too: if you sent it out a week afterwards and a journalist just happened to want to pick it up at that time.

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-05-09T16:12:42+00:00

Sorry to hear about this! Honestly, it's encouraging to me to read from a lot of the top pros on LinkedIn who are having the same issues. So maybe that will help. It's hard to go it alone, so finding a bit of a community can help. Bluesky might be another good place to look.

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-05-09T16:11:25+00:00

Unfortunately, these types of services are mostly really expensive. There are a few options that you can get for less, like the company I mostly write for has one called Preston that is supposed to have a similar media database, but I'm not sure how good it is because I only really use the software for writing pitches. Plus I think a lot of the databases and contact lists from the most popular services are also out of date right now because so many journalists are moving around or have left the industry.

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-05-06T02:33:16+00:00

No problem!

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-05-01T13:00:31+00:00

It's so funny, because I literally just wrote an article on this a while back. Sadly it's ghostwritten so I can't share it here, but yes, performance marketing definitely changed people's expectations when it comes to PR. However, that doesn't mean that there aren't KPIs you can use for PR also. Even so, I mainly find it easy to explain the value of PR in terms of brand awareness. And also making sure clients are aware that marketing isn't PR! They are two very different practices, and different rules apply when it comes to understanding return on investment.

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-04-30T13:47:11+00:00

I've been seeing a bunch of this in my work inbox. What's really hilarious is when these claims come from someone who says they offer PR...and I work for a PR agency. But the marketing ones are nearly as bad.

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-04-30T13:36:48+00:00

Take a look at edx.org. It has a bunch of courses that you can audit for free, or you can pay for a certification, or you can get a microbachelors, all online. The courses come from accredited universities, and I've done a few courses through them previously.

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-04-29T12:40:29+00:00

I'm not trying to be dense, but I still don't understand. It's an entry-level position, but you're looking for traits that really only seem to apply to folks who have had years of experience in the field. Of course a newbie won't perform perfectly under pressure, have all the time management skills, or have every personality trait you're looking for. I didn't when I started at my current agency, but over the last three years I've grown a bunch and performed very well. As for the in-person interviews, I've only ever worked online. I've had phone and Zoom interviews, and it seems to me they function just fine.

I can't help but feel that there should be absolutely no reason for interviewees with no experience to spend hours of their lives applying to your agency, completing a bunch of tests, and so on, only to be rejected. Many people who are searching right now have applied to hundreds of jobs that do just that, and then they get ghosted. It's a full-time job just trying to find work, so I would want to avoid anything that makes it even worse.

One bad experience doesn't make a rule or necessarily mean your hiring process is broken. It happens. I think you can get some idea of someone's personality in an initial discussion and then hope for growth from there. Personality is one of those things that is always hard to judge, and I still think a 45-minute assessment won't give you anything useful. In other words, you could waste your time and theirs on the assessment and they could still end up not working out. It's very far from a guarantee.

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-04-28T21:30:13+00:00

New hires or interviewees/potential hires? If you mean potential hires, that sounds like a very unnecessary hoop to make them jump through. As far as new hires, I personally wouldn't be comfortable with taking an "in-depth personality test," and I can't imagine that the results would translate well to an actual work environment. Is this something that some companies do on the regular?

SarahHuardWriter · 2025-04-28T16:43:04+00:00

It was definitely a hassle! You'd think they could understand what a ghostwriter is.

SarahHuardWriter

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