You have interviewed three candidates for a communications role. All three were articulate, personable, and quick on their feet. Each told a clean story about their experience and left a strong impression. And now you face the problem unique to hiring in this field: you have very little reliable sense of which one can actually do the job.
This is the central difficulty in PR recruitment. Self-presentation is not a side skill for a communications professional. It is the job. The ability to tell a compelling story, read a room, and make a strong impression under pressure is exactly what you are hiring for, which means the people you interview are, by trade, very good at interviews. The candidate who presents best is not always the one who delivers, and a polished interview tells you less than it appears to.
The answer is not to distrust good communicators. It is to build an assessment that looks beneath the polish at the things that actually predict performance: real writing ability, sound judgment, genuine relationships, and fit for the environment they will work in. Here is how to do that.
A portfolio is a starting point, not proof. Published work is often the product of a team, an editor, or a client's heavy input, and a strong folder of clippings does not confirm that the person in front of you produced the thinking behind it. In agency environments, especially, good work carries many fingerprints.
The most reliable test is a short, supervised writing task set during the hiring process. Give the candidate a realistic brief, a press release on a tricky announcement, a holding statement for a developing issue, or a tightening of a rambling executive message, and a sensible time limit. What they produce under those conditions tells you more about their actual capability than any portfolio. You are looking for clarity under constraint, sound structure, and the judgment to know what to leave out, not polish alone.
Years of experience and an impressive client list describe where someone has been. They do not confirm how that person thinks, and thinking is what you are buying in a communications hire.
Replace general experience questions with specific scenarios. Ask how the candidate would handle a flawed brief from a senior stakeholder, an awkward media query an hour before deadline, or the first confusing hours of a reputational issue when the facts are not yet clear. Then listen for reasoning rather than vocabulary. A strong candidate will walk you through how they weigh competing pressures, where they would push back, and what they would do first. A weaker one will reach for buzzwords and confident generalities. The gap between those two responses is the gap between someone who performs and someone who presents.
"Strong media relationships" and "a track record of coverage" are among the easiest claims to make and the hardest to check, which is exactly why they should be checked. A candidate's account of their own results is a starting point, not confirmation.
Ask for specifics. Which outlets, which journalists, which campaigns, and what the measurable outcome was. Then verify it through references you contact independently, rather than relying on the names a candidate offers most readily. Confirmation from someone who managed or commissioned the work is what turns a claim into evidence. This is slow, and it is worth it, because the cost of discovering a hire's results was overstated only after they have started, and is far higher than the cost of checking first.
A communications professional who thrived in one setting can struggle in another, and that is a question of fit, not ability. Agency life runs on pace, breadth, and juggling many clients at once. In-house work runs on depth, internal relationships, and the long game of one organisation's reputation. The skills overlap, but they are not identical, and a candidate's history in one does not guarantee success in the other.
Be honest with yourself about the environment you are hiring into, and assess it directly. Ask about the working conditions where the candidate did their best work, and where they struggled. Someone energised by constant context-switching may wilt in a slower in-house role, and someone who does their best deep, considered work may find agency pace draining. Matching the person to the environment is part of assessing capability, not separate from it.
Most general recruitment agencies can run a process and fill a seat. Fewer can tell the difference between a communications professional who interviews brilliantly and one who delivers, because doing so requires understanding the work itself. This is the real value a specialist brings to PR recruitment: an assessment built around substance rather than presentation.
A recruiter who understands communications will set the writing task that exposes real ability, ask scenario questions that reveal judgment, and verify relationships and results properly rather than taking them at face value. That is the same quality-over-volume approach that protects you from a costly mis-hire in any field, applied to a sector where the usual signals are unusually unreliable.
Sector understanding matters more than location, but both help. Strong communications candidates tend to cluster in the major business hubs, so a recruiter with national reach can draw on a wider pool than a single-city search would reach. Recruitment Legends recruits across South Africa, including Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban, and Cape Town, which means the right candidate is not limited to the city where your office happens to sit.
