Graduate Scheme Communications Consultant

Inspiring Search; Greater London; On-site; GBP 23,000 - 29,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Pension

Healthcare

20 days holiday

Job summary

Inspiring Search is offering a graduate trainee programme in a small, dedicated team working across financial and professional services. You will start as a Consultant in a full-time role with exposure to client accounts, media relations, and strategy development.

The program spans two years, with structured training and opportunities to progress to Senior Consultant, while handling diverse PR tasks and maintaining high standards for client deliverables.

Responsibilities

• Act as the organisational backbone of the professional services PR team and support client accounts.
• Assist with new business proposals, pitches and client meetings.
• Coordinate media databases, press cuttings and client reports, and manage suppliers.
• Support in drafting press materials and organising events and interviews.

Job description

Would you like to join a Graduate trainee programme as a Consultant for a leading independent integrated communications agency?

You will be working in a small team across the Financial and Professional Services sectors.

About the Client

We are a leading independent integrated communications agency. Our financial and professional services team is small, yet we like to think (almost) perfectly formed. We are made up of seasoned communications professionals with a combined range of experience spanning decades across every facet of the marcoms mix. We pride ourselves on working hard to deliver results for our clients. We are a close-knit team, and everyone mucks in. This means we might be providing strategic advice to a client’s CEO one minute and compiling a media coverage report the next.

We have ambitious plans to grow, including overseas, building on our well-established group of networked offices in the US and Asia. We are looking to hire somebody to join us in a full-time position as a graduate trainee, with an initial job title of Consultant.

Salary  Benefits

The salary for this role will be £25,000 with an annual tax‑free bonus of £3,600 per year (paid in December.) There may be additional scope for a performance bonus on top of this amount, subject to the quality of work that the Consultant delivers this year.

The holiday allowance will be 20 days (with the period between Christmas and New Year usually granted as additional ‘free’ holiday time at the discretion of your manager).

The role offers a pension and healthcare

Note

the nature of our interaction with clients means that our client teams liaise with senior industry figures on a regular basis, as will you. This requires discretion, intuition, and an ability to work at the high levels that senior officers expect of their advisory teams. As a result, high standards of document presentation, timeliness of response, grammatical and spelling accuracy and a willingness to ask for help to deal with difficult problems are all important attributes for success in this role.

About the job

The role will consist of three parts.

Administration and organisation

You will act as the organisational backbone of the professional services PR team. You will be the central holder of all the shared information that our Partners, Directors and Associate Directors use to manage client accounts, and will be responsible for keeping this up to date, as well as supporting the client teams on PR tasks as directed.

You will be the central organiser for new business proposals, supporting the development of these and helping with the organisation for pitches and new business meetings.

This includes our media databases, press cuttings and regular client reports. We would look to you to proactively manage our relationships with the suppliers who deliver these services (Roxhill and Signal AI), and work to ensure that the team gets best value out of the technology that we have available, and that we can apply it to clients in the most effective and useful way. This may well include ‘evangelising’ new features and opportunities to the team to encourage adoption and use with clients. We would like you to be the central person who controls ‘horizon scanning’, forward feature planning and the forward-looking aspects of our media management; keeping an eye on upcoming government announcements, big stories and calendarized events that impact our clients.

We will also look to you to bring us together as a team, organising our team meetings and events, and ensuring that the team is efficiently organised, including both social and work interaction time.

Client account management

You will be asked to become part of several client account teams (initially 2-3 smaller accounts), where you will learn the skills needed to manage a client relationship effectively, as well as the day-to-day deliverables that our clients expect from us.

You will be trained in account management, relationship management and the practicalities of a retained business service relationship.

But you will also gain insight into how both large and small client organisations operate, the messages they need to communicate, both to their clients and to their staff, as well as the financial and corporate imperatives that drive their messages and strategies.

You will work with a variety of communications teams in-house and learn how they function, and how marketing, communications, investor relations, social media and internal communications all interact to create the ‘whole view’ of a business, as seen by the external world and its own staff.

Likely tasks will include drafting and distributing press releases, attending and taking notes at client meetings, setting up and attending media interviews; compiling coverage reports, writing pre‑interview press briefings, helping to organise a variety of client‑related tasks, such as photography, events, awards entries and external communications.

Graduate trainee programme

Finally, we will endeavour to provide you with a structured training programme that builds your skills over a two‑year period, with the aim that at the end of this time you can be promoted to Senior Consultant, and independently organise multiple aspects of client accounts without supervision.

The programme will cover

• Writing
• Journalist relationship building and management
• Social media and communications
• Corporate financials and results
• Insurance and legal technical training (to build your knowledge of these two fields)
• Crisis communications handling
• Integrating communications into a wider marketing plan
• National press vs trade press vs social media outlets
• International press management

APPENDIX: list of administrative tasks falling within this role.

• Monitoring for media coverage for all clients and filing it correctly in the designated folders
• Producing monthly media coverage reports for clients, working with the client team
• Producing media lists using the Roxhill database and keeping them up to date
• Issuing press releases and media alerts at the direction of the client teams.
• Supporting the client teams with research on client projects on a variety of topics, and presenting that research clearly, professionally and in a manner that is appropriate for clients.
• Drafting and posting social media posts for clients, including creating visuals to sit alongside these.
• Producing forward features calendars for the team and holding the central industry events and awards calendar for insurance and professional services
• Managing timesheets for the whole team and producing timesheet reports as required.
• Researching topics for articles and reports on behalf of clients