Does PR support HR?

I spoke to Natalie Saunders, founder and managing director of human resources consultancy Morpho Advisory (and a former colleague during my lawyer days) about her experience and why she agrees that PR and culture must align. She says: “Culture and communication have the potential to form a powerful, mutually reinforcing symbiotic relationship. The stronger your organisational culture, the more you will want to shout about it – serving to attract talent as well as retain it.

“84% of respondents to a survey by HSBC (reported on in their Investment and Growth Strategies in Law Firms report 2022) identified the “war for talent” as an organisational challenge. At a time when the competition for good people in the legal sector is stiffer than ever before the way you differentiate yourself as a firm is crucial.

“Given that many firms offer the same, or a similar, portfolio of service lines, distinctiveness is hard to come by – and that’s where a great culture, exceptional people experience (read: not free fruit and yoga) and powerful PR rooted in reality and not aspiration, ambition or denial, come in.”

So what do we need to do?

I have very briefly talked above about some of the tools in the PR toolkit you can use to help with recruitment and retention. What’s important for every firm though is to work out a few simple things at the outset.

1. Goals what are you trying to achieve? And by when? Goals should be your top level, perhaps 3 to 5 things that you want to have done within a sensible and not too long time period. 6 – 18 months tends to be realistic.
2. Strategy at the top level – how are you going to deliver your goals? For example – we are going to appoint a specialist legal PR agency that understands our goals and can strategically support the delivery of two of them. Or our internal PR team will create and deliver a PR strategy that will help us to double our team.
3. Key Messages the messages that you consistently apply within the strategy. Key messages really drill down into the ‘why’, keep you consistent and on track. You need no more than 3.
4. Target Audiences who are you focussing your activity on? If potential employees – define them. If key current employees you deem a flight risk, again define them. If potential clients or retained clients you are worried about losing, I’ll say it again, define them. By define – I mean understand their key demographics – such as role, gender, location. From this, try and build out a profile or avatar to help you to understand how they behave, what is important to them, which social media channels they use, which media they read or engage with, if they read internal newsletters or prefer Slack or Whats app. The above are just things to think about and are not intended as an exhaustive guide to understanding and defining your target audiences Knowing your target audience in detail enables you to more easily put yourself in their shoes and start to understand the type of activity they will a) see and b) engage with. Limit your target audiences to a maximum of three. It is also completely fine and actually preferable if your target audience numbers are small, it makes it easier to be very focussed in your activity.
5. Tactics should always be defined towards the end of the plan. Everybody likes to play with the latest trend or social media platform, but before you do – ensure that they are going to be effective and deliver against your goals by considering whether they are a good fit with your target audiences. Otherwise, you’ll have a lovely time playing, but don’t count on the time spent having a good return on the investment. There are no right or wrong tactics to use – but we tend to include elements of media relations, social media, content and awards in the majority of our campaigns. Legal directories also have their place for many firms and are a real growth area for boutiques and the regional heavyweights of the future.

Why aren’t you being more specific about what we should do?

Whilst it would be lovely to be able to draft a blog that could answer all of your problems in less than a thousand words, it remains the case that every law firm is different and each practice has its own challenges. For me to prescribe a generic prescription for how to attract new talent or indeed retain your flight risks would, quite simply, be wrong.

I don’t know what your goals, strategies or particular challenges are currently. I certainly don’t know who your target audiences are, or which areas you want to grow in the future. What I have hopefully be able to do though, is give you some things to think about. I hope that this will help you to either understand what you need to do internally to start to address any recruitment or retention challenges, or at the very least, provide you with food for thought if you are considering whether PR might be something to consider for your firm in 2022.

As ever – if you like what you’ve read, and you’d like to have a chat, you can book a 30 minute call with me.