Brand, PR and communications recruitment

A brand manager owns how buyers recognize and remember your company: the visual and verbal identity, the guidelines every team and agency works to, and brand campaigns that build awareness before buyers are in market. Product marketing owns why a product wins the deal: positioning against alternatives, launches and enablement. In consumer goods the title often means running one product line’s profit and loss. In B2B it means owning the brand itself, judged on awareness, share of search and consistency.

A PR manager earns coverage the company cannot buy: relationships with reporters, analysts and podcast hosts, the pitches and the announcements, judged on coverage in outlets your buyers read. A communications manager owns everything the company says and to whom, across press, customers, employees and partners, with PR as one channel. Small teams often combine them. Once internal, executive or customer communications need their own plan, split the seats; PR usually sits inside the communications team.

We charge a flat 15% of the hire’s first-year base salary, payable only once they start. On a $120,000 base that is $18,000, and the same 15% applies at every level, from brand manager to corporate communications lead. We are a contingency communications recruitment agency, not a retained one: no retainer, no exclusivity and nothing to pay without a hire. If a placement leaves inside the guarantee period, we rerun the search at no further fee.

Salary.com puts brand managers at $115,818 to $129,338 base and PR managers at $123,104 to $147,496 (October 2026), with communications managers at $110,271 to $132,455. Self-reported data on Built In runs lower for PR managers, at a $76,000 median base. The BLS puts the middle half of public relations managers between $106,580 and $204,520 a year (May 2025). Sector, team size and whether the seat speaks for the CEO move the number.

Ten working days from a signed brief to a shortlist of three to five calibrated candidates. Our evidence review, coverage for PR and guidelines for brand, sits inside that window, so your interviews can focus on judgment and fit. Interviews and the offer then run at your pace. Strong communications candidates often run more than one process, so a decision within a week of the final interview keeps them.

Hire the seat that fixes the more expensive problem: a brand manager if the company looks and sounds different on every channel or a rebrand is coming, a PR or communications manager if launches and funding news land without coverage. In B2B, communications usually comes first, often alongside a PR agency. Brand earns its own seat once enough people and agencies produce work in the company’s name.

We screen for evidence behind the work, not the presentation of it. PR candidates walk us through three pieces of coverage: the pitch, the reporter and what it changed. Communications candidates draft a short announcement from your brief. Brand candidates show guidelines they wrote and who followed them. A former manager confirms how they handled a bad week. Every search also runs on four standards: behavioral fit, role-based skill evaluation, industry and function alignment, and scalable hiring tracks.

Yes. Several seats hired as one structure is how we run a pod: for example a communications lead, a PR manager and a brand manager, briefed together so each search builds on the last instead of restarting. The same 15% applies to each hire, payable as each one starts, and we sequence the seats so the person who sets the story is in place first.