Tips On Hiring Employees With A Background In The Media Industry

Traditional media is shrinking, which means there are qualified employees with communications and media experience trying to expand their skill sets and use their existing skills within new contexts. 

For instance, someone with a background in traditional media has plenty of experience that could be leveraged well in other media fields such as public relations or marketing. 

Here’s what you should keep in mind when hiring these individuals, and how a media consulting agency can help you with your recruitment efforts.

1. Focus on niche job boards

Individuals with years of working in the media world are hard to come by, especially if you’re only placing ads on Glassdoor and other popular sites. To find the perfect candidate, don’t shy away from expanding your search to social media or sites where media workers host their blogs. Who knows, maybe that employee is lurking on Medium, waiting for an offer. 

Furthermore, expand your search to niche boards such as:

• JournalismJobs
• Mediabistro
• Journalism Crossing
  
  

2. Present yourself as a better option

Although print media is shrinking, journalists have plenty of opportunities. Take corporate newsrooms as an example. These organizations will allow a journalist to create top-tier work in the context of a safe, corporate job.

For a media professional, this may seem like a golden opportunity, meaning smaller media companies may struggle with attracting talent. 

Since the odds are stacked against you, to have a fighting chance in attracting top-tier candidates, you need to provide an appropriate amount of compensation (with exciting benefits) and highlight what you’re offering in the job description.

3. Test their skills

As a staffing agency with expert knowledge in media consulting, we can attest that the samples provided by the candidate are not a true representation of their skills. Think of it this way - experienced journalists often have proofreaders and editors, and their work may have undergone heavy edits before being publicized. 

Now, let’s say you wanted to hire a copywriter who needs to write about 14 blogs per week, a journalist who took a week to deliver an article may not be able to handle the workload. This is why you should assign them to write and edit a test article that has a similar deadline to what they would have to handle on the job.

Alternatively, you can ask the candidate to only supply their first draft copies, which will help you get an idea of their true skill.

4. Conduct more attuned interviews

Many companies manage to track down a seemingly perfect candidate, only to drop the ball during the interview process. The best thing you can do in this instance is to eliminate the standard, boring interview questions and shift them toward a meaningful conversation. 

As media consultants, we learned there are certain questions that by far yield the best results when interviewing media professionals. Ask them:

• About their opinion of your company and if they have any ideas on how you can improve. This way, you’ll know if they took enough time to research your organization properly.
• About their most stressful experience when facing a tight deadline. This will give you a better picture of whether they're capable of handling a fast-paced work environment. 
• If they can differentiate between articles from two different sources. This provides you with an insight into their knowledge of the industry and overall familiarity with current affairs

Media professionals are people too, and apart from judging their skills, you also need to see if they’re a cultural and personal fit for your organization. These next questions may come in handy:

• Ask them to describe the responsibilities in their previous role and inquire about their previous team. 
• Ask them what they think about their former coworkers and what do their coworkers say about them. When combined with additional information, this will give you a good idea of how they will integrate into the team and if they are team players. 

Lastly, there are also questions you should avoid asking at any cost. Some of them include topics like nationality, race, marital status, religious background, disability, family situation, sexual orientation, and so on. 

In some situations, you may be tempted to touch on these subjects, yet, it’s a bad idea. For instance, don’t ask the candidate what country they are from, ask them instead whether they are allowed to work in the country legally. If you want your candidate to travel for their job duties, ask them directly if they’re available instead of inquiring about their family situation.

Pro tip:

If you’re a marketing agency or a PR firm, when interviewing candidates with journalistic experience, you need to ascertain whether they can change their mindset. Some journalists have a deeply-ingrained belief that newsgathering should never mix with another communication field. They see journalism as a tool of serving the general public that should only conform to truth and nothing else. 

In case the candidate seems like they check all the boxes but firmly possess this belief, it doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of changing. Simply try to explain that they’ll still get to be creative and write compelling stories, only that they need to stay mindful of the larger commercial goals. 

How Media Consulting Can Help

Hiring a media specialist may be daunting for you if you never had experience hiring someone from this background. First, top talent is hard to track down, and due to sheer number of opportunities, these individuals may simply go for a safe choice in a corporate setting. 

Fortunately, you don’t need to recruit alone as you can leverage a media consultant for staffing. A staffing agency can take control of the entire hiring process, from tracking down candidates to conducting initial interviews, screening CVs, etc. 

This is not only cheaper, but a media consultant may also have an established pool of ready-to-work talent that you can receive at a moment’s notice.

Here at Griffin Global, we’re always happy to help a company struggling to fill an open position. We are an internationally recognized media consulting firm and have three decades of staffing experience, aiding many organizations find top talent on a permanent or semi-permanent basis. 

If you want us to do the same for you, send us a message through our contact form or call (855) 747-4334 to get started.