By Editorial TeamBuilding a great PR team isn’t about scanning resumes for keywords. You have to figure out how candidates think on their feet, work with others, and handle things when it all goes sideways. Your whole PR hiring process needs to be designed to pull out those behavioral traits. This means you have to get past the fluff questions and into their actual past performance. So, how do you build an interview plan that shows you who can really do the job and fit in with your team?
Key Takeaways
- Ask about what candidates *did* in specific situations, not what they hypothetically *would do*. Get the story.
- Use a scoring rubric for behavioral answers so you can compare candidates fairly and avoid “good vibes” hiring.
- Make them work together on something. A collaborative exercise shows you their real-time teamwork and communication skills.
- See how they handle failure. Ask directly about times their strategy bombed and they had to pivot, hard.
- Hold your post-interview debrief within 24 hours while everyone’s memory is sharp and to stop recall bias from creeping in.
1. Define Core Behavioral Competencies for Your PR Team
Stop. Before you write a single question, you need to define the handful of behaviors that actually predict success on your team. This list has to be specific to you. For example, a fast-paced agency that lives on crisis comms needs people with resilience under pressure and rapid decision-making skills, which is a world away from an in-house team doing slow-burn brand building. I always pull my top performers aside and ask them: what qualities do you use every day? What are the biggest challenges you have to muscle through?
Get this down to five to seven key areas. Think things like: adaptability, proactive problem-solving, stakeholder empathy, persuasive communication, or strategic foresight. These competencies are the foundation for every question you’ll ask later. With this clarity, your interviews have a purpose and you can actually compare candidate A to candidate B on an apples-to-apples basis. There’s data on this: a 2025 HubSpot State of Marketing Hiring report found that companies defining these behavioral competencies upfront cut their mis-hires by a solid 18%.
Pro Tip: Get your current team involved in defining these competencies. It gives them ownership of the process and makes them much better at spotting the right traits when they sit in on peer interviews.
2. Craft Situational and Behavioral Interview Questions
With your competencies set, you can write questions that force people to tell you real stories. The STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) is your playbook here. Don’t ask, “Are you a good problem-solver?” Instead, try: “Tell me about a time you walked into an unexpected PR crisis with no budget or time. What was the situation, what were you supposed to do, what exact steps did you take, and what happened?” This makes them walk you through a real experience, giving you solid proof of their skills.
If you’re hiring for a role heavy on media relations, you could ask: “Describe a time you had to land coverage for a really difficult or boring story. What was your strategy, how did you build your pitch, and what were the results?” For a team leadership position, you need to know how they handle friction: “Tell me about a time you had to sort out a major disagreement between two team members. How did you get involved, and what was the outcome?” I try to have at least two different questions for each core competency.
Common Mistake: Relying on hypotheticals like “What would you do if…?” These questions can give you a glimpse of their thought process, but you’ll mostly get the “right” answer they think you want to hear. What they *have done* is infinitely more valuable than what they say they *would do*.
3. Implement a Structured Interview Scoring Rubric
Gut feelings and “I really liked them” don’t build great teams and can lead to biased hiring. You need a structured scoring rubric. It should be tied directly to your competencies and the questions you just wrote. For every question, set up a simple 1-to-5 scale and define what each number means. A “5” for “Proactive Problem-Solving” might be a candidate who saw an issue coming, came up with a few smart solutions, and executed one with clear, positive results. A “1” is the person who waited to be told what to do.
Give this rubric to every single interviewer and make them take notes against it during the conversation. This isn’t just about a score, it’s about forcing them to justify that score with evidence from the candidate’s answer. If you’re using tools like Greenhouse or Lever, they have this functionality built-in, which makes comparing notes later much easier. A structured process means everyone is judging by the same yardstick, and your hiring decisions become way more defensible.
Pro Tip: Add a simple “red flags” section to the rubric. It’s a good catch-all for concerns that don’t fit neatly into a competency score but are still important to discuss later (like talking over the interviewer or blaming others for every failure).
4. Integrate Collaborative Exercises for Real-Time Observation
Stories about past performance are great, but seeing a candidate perform in real-time is better. For any role that requires serious teamwork or client-facing skills, you need a collaborative exercise. It could be a mock press conference prep, a simulated client meeting where they have to present a quick strategy, or a group brainstorm on a fictional campaign. You’re not looking for the perfect answer. You’re watching their communication style, how they add to a discussion, and how they take feedback.
For example, if I were hiring a Senior PR Manager in Atlanta, I’d give them a brief: “A new tech startup near the Georgia Tech campus just had a product recall. You have 30 minutes to draft a press statement and a social media plan, then you’ll walk us through it like we’re the client.” This pressure cooker of a task shows me how they prioritize, manage the clock, and defend their thinking, insights I’d never get from just asking questions.
Common Mistake: Making the exercise a day-long marathon. Keep it focused and tight. A 30 to 45-minute exercise is more than enough to see what you need to see for one or two key competencies.
5. Train Interviewers on Active Listening and Probing Techniques
Your brilliant questions are useless if your interviewers don’t know how to listen and dig deeper. You have to train your team. Show them how to use follow-up questions to get past surface-level answers. When a candidate is being vague, they need to be comfortable asking, “Can you give me a specific example of that?” or “What was your personal role in that project?” or “What did you learn from that experience?”
The biggest problem I see is interviewers who talk more than the candidate. They spend half the time selling the company instead of listening. You have to drill this out of them. Regular check-ins where interviewers compare notes and scoring can sharpen everyone’s skills. Even my most senior people get a refresher on this stuff every 12 to 18 months because bad habits creep back in.
Pro Tip: Train your team to always ask “why.” After a candidate explains what they did, the follow-up should be, “You pitched that story to local press first. Why did you choose that approach instead of going straight to the national outlets?” This is how you uncover their strategic thinking.
6. Conduct Post-Interview Debriefs and Calibration
The process isn’t over when the candidate walks out the door. You have to debrief, and you have to do it fast, ideally within 24 hours, while everything is still fresh. In this meeting, everyone presents their scores from the rubric and the specific examples that back them up. You have to create a space where it’s safe to disagree. Why did one person score the candidate a ‘5’ on strategic foresight while another gave a ‘2’? Let’s talk about it. Did they hear a different answer or just interpret it differently?
This is where you build the full picture of the candidate, getting far beyond what’s on their resume. It’s also your best chance to spot and correct for any unconscious bias that might have crept into the scoring. According to Nielsen’s 2025 Workforce Insights Report, teams using structured debriefs improve their hiring accuracy by 22% over teams that just pass around emails. It works.
Common Mistake: Letting the most senior person in the room (or just the loudest) dictate the outcome. The debrief moderator has to make sure every interviewer gets to share their perspective and defend their scores.
Using behavioral questions this way is a serious investment, but it pays off. By defining what you need, asking targeted questions, scoring consistently, and observing people in action, you get past the surface. This is how you find people who don’t just have the right skills on paper, but who will actually make your team better and stick around for the long haul.
What is the STAR method in behavioral interviewing?
The STAR method is just a way to structure answers to behavioral questions. It stands for Situation (set the scene), Task (what was your goal?), Action (what did you do?), and Result (what happened?). It forces a candidate to give you a full, concrete story instead of a vague claim.
How many behavioral questions should I ask in a PR interview?
A good rule of thumb is 2-3 behavioral questions for each core competency you’re hiring for. So if you have 5 competencies, you’ll probably ask around 10-15 behavioral questions total, spread out across the different interview rounds. That’s usually enough to get a clear picture.
What are common red flags to look for during behavioral interviews?
Watch out for candidates who always blame someone else when a project went wrong, can’t give you a single specific example, seem to have learned nothing from their mistakes, or describe past experiences in a way that suggests they were a terrible teammate. Evasive, generic answers are a big red flag too.
Should I share the behavioral competencies with candidates before the interview?
Yes, I think it’s a good idea. Telling them the key competencies or success factors for the role upfront helps them prepare better examples. It shows you run a fair, transparent process and it also lets them decide if the role is actually a good fit for them before they waste anyone’s time.
How can I assess a candidate’s creativity in a PR role using behavioral questions?
You ask for stories about it. Try something like, “Tell me about a PR campaign you ran with a tiny budget. How did you get creative?” or “Walk me through a time when the usual PR tactics weren’t getting results. What unconventional strategy did you try?” You want to hear about their process for coming up with and executing new ideas.
