Public Relations Isn’t Sales

While I enjoy being a consultant and it has been very fulfilling, allowing me to grow in so many positive ways, I’ve recently started a job hunt to re-enter the workforce full-time. As part of the search, I signed up for job sites (such as Monster.com, Career Builders, TheLadders, etc.). Good idea, right? Well I thought so until my in-box was cluttered with job alerts. There’s nothing more exciting when searching — other than getting an interview call — than seeing there maybe great jobs to apply for. Not in this case. The alerts are filled with sales, sales, and sales. Oh yeah, Avon Lady and receptionist positions, too. I’m not turning my nose up, but I’m an accredited public relations professional and am very proud of it. PR is my passion. Perhaps I’m daft and haven’t set up my search criteria properly (so anyone please feel free to contact me if you think that’s the case), but what the heck? Public relations is an established profession. I looked the definition of my profession up to make sure it hasn’t changed. It hasn’t. I liked Wikipedia’s explanation: public relations is the practice of managing the communication between an organization and its publics. It goes on to say: Public relations gains an organization or individual exposure to their audiences using topics of public interest and news items that do not direct payment. Hum, that doesn’t sound like sales to me, so why is my in-box cluttered with sales jobs? I think people don’t understand the role of public relations in the free flow of information in our society. As a wise PR person once said: “communicators don’t communicate.” meaning we’re great at communicating for our organizations and clients, but not ourselves. Yep that’s right, PR professionals don’t do a good job educating other fields and the public in general about what we do and the importance of it to society. We have the skills so let’s start using them to advance the profession.