Public Relations Assistant

Before your interview, you’d better have researched the company and found out what types of clients it serves, so you’ll have a good idea of both the specialty areas that the firm handles, as well as the strategies it’s employed for its various clients. To answer this question, you might list some of the firm’s top clients, as well as mentioning any noteworthy campaigns they’ve managed and what you liked about them.

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This question is a bit similar to the last one except it stresses your work habits a lot more. Employers want to know how you would prioritize your tasks depending on what’s breaking. What sources do you look at first? Why are those the most important to check out before anything else? What do you do next depending on what you find in those sources? Give the employer an idea of your work habits and research tactics.

This question evaluates a PR candidate’s mindset and approach to public relations. Because public relations can be broken down further, touching upon such areas as marketing, crisis control, or online community management, this question allows you to see whether a candidate’s perceptions of public relations are in line with your company’s philosophy. A PR pro should be well rounded, but a specialization can help your company move forward in the right direction.

Situational interview questions are becoming more common as interviews move away from procedural and more towards conversational. If you’re a PR professional, this is somewhat of a blessing as you should be accustomed to chit chat. That said, if you spend too much time beating around the bush, you run the risk of missing the point and blurring the lines between knowing what you’re talking about and demonstrating that you’re only spouting off fluff. Get to the point, exude confidence, and rely on your experience to provide examples for reference.

Public relations professionals also need to know whether their campaigns are working and where their clients’ traffic is coming from. Whether it’s Google Analytics, Yahoo! Web Analytics or another proprietary software, brush up on the tools you’ve used so you can talk a little about what you use and how you use it during the interview.

Content plays an important role in public relations as it helps in promoting brand perception and creates awareness through meaningful content.

When a PR is able to create a sound content strategy, it becomes clear what media outlets, events, and social media channels work best for the promotion.

Content tells about the insights and observations about the customer life cycle, content gaps, competitive weaknesses, content types, and content maintenance. Through this the organization can improve its overall activities and achieve its business goals.

All of the panelists we talked to stressed good writing skills as part of an ideal PR job candidate. You need to know how to articulate ideas in a way that is undeniably clear, concise, and impossible to take the wrong way. Make sure to have writing samples ready or perhaps even an online portfolio from sites like Global Guideline.

These types of "behavioral" interview questions are aimed at finding out how you’ve behaved in the past, in order to get a sense of how you’d handle a similar situation in the future. As with all questions that touch on your weaknesses, briefly mention the struggle you had, but then dominate the conversation with more about how you worked to solve the problem and what you learned from it. In other words, turn a negative into a positive.

The in-house PR will act as a representative of your product to the outside world, and being an in-house PR, he can give a total dedication for branding of your product.

Public relations specialist maintains a favorable image of an organization or a person he is representing by creating press note or releasing documents to media personnel about their client or organization.

This one is fairly straightforward, but it’s also a behavioral question. Talk about the problem or issue you faced with the client, the steps you took to solve it, and the eventual outcome. If you have numbers such as how many more followers you gained or how much earned media -- another name for press coverage -- you got from the effort, mention those numbers.

This is a more personal question, but it’s a chance for you to share some information about yourself that can help sell your candidacy. Without going overboard, tell the hiring manager that you’re great with people, that you enjoy problem-solving, that you have great analytical skills, or that you really enjoy writing.

If the candidate responds in the vein of, “Because I like people,” that might be a red flag. While PR no doubt is a people business, the communications discipline doesn’t call for candidates to be chummy with their clients or media reps but, rather, how PR and communications align with corporate goals and financial objectives.

Consumers will always find something to rip apart and send angry tweets about. Think about the recent US Airways PR Blunder. However, they will respect you more if you are honest and transparent. It’s good to send a prompt and genuine apology and to address all the issues and concerns without lashing out.