An Evaluation on Public Relations Profession through Online Job Advertisements

Nowadays the need of building and maintaining strong ties and relations with the stakeholders has brought more responsibility on public relations practitioners and thus it has increased the need of professionalism of public relations profession. The professionalism of the field is related with the roles of the public relations practitioners taken responsibilities within the organisation. The roles for public relations function are the behaviour patterns of the practitioners and although the individuals differ from one another, the roles provide a model for the process of organisation or the function. The expectations of organisations from public relations function arise through the public relations roles and at the same time it reflects how the organisation adopts its communication approach. While public relations practitioners represent each roles in the organisation, how often they conduct these roles determines the dominant role. Thus it is important to figure out how public relations practitioners carry out their roles and which roles have prioritisation in order to find out the perspective of the organisation for public relations and how public relations profession is described in the organisation. Accordingly, in this paper it is aimed that the public relations roles are identified through online job advertisements and thus the current status of public relations profession is evaluated through the practitioners’ roles. The shift from mass communication to interactive digital communication both makes the digital communication basic dynamics of everyday life and also the speed, frequency and accessibility of all the process through digital media have drawn attention of individuals and organisations. So the evaluation of current public relations profession through online job advertisements is congruent with this situation. As a field study, this paper is a descriptive research. By searching “public relations” key word, 227 job advertisements in 10 online job advertisement sites which has highest hit rate in Turkey are analysed in the research. Descriptive analysis was used to evaluate the data. Results indicate that public relations practitioner roles do not reflect on job advertisements