Public Relations Job Description Templates
Free public relations job description templates: PR specialist, manager, coordinator, director, boutique agency, and first hire. Download as DOCX.
Public Relations Job Description Templates
6 free templates by role and setting. Download as DOCX or copy-paste.
The public relations job description is one most companies copy from a generic recruiting template that lists "write press releases and manage media" and stops, missing the things that actually shape this hire: PR is a ladder where a specialist, a manager, and a director are very different jobs at very different pay, junior coordinators can be non-exempt and owed overtime, and most PR hiring happens at small agencies and growing companies where one person wears many hats. A company copying a single generic template often posts a role that does not match the level it needs, or misses the agency and first-hire realities entirely.
At FirstHR, we build templates for the small agencies and growing companies that do most of the PR hiring, including the businesses making their first PR hire. The six templates below cover the role by level and setting: PR specialist, manager, coordinator, director, boutique agency, and an in-house first-PR-hire version. The agency and first-hire versions fill a real gap that the big job boards leave open. Fill in the brackets and post, and the guide to writing a job description covers the fundamentals.
What Does a Public Relations Role Do?
A public relations role builds and protects an organization's public image through media relations, messaging, and reputation management. The industry association PRSA frames public relations as a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and its audiences. In federal occupational data the core role maps to public relations specialists, who create and maintain a positive public image for the people and organizations they represent.
For the employer writing the posting, the useful frame is that the core PR work stays constant while the level and setting shift the scope: hands-on execution for a specialist, strategy and team leadership for a manager, executive counsel for a director, support work for a coordinator, multi-client work at an agency, or a broad PR-plus-marketing hybrid as a small company's first PR hire. That is why the templates below differ by role and setting.
PR Duties and Responsibilities
PR duties center on media relations, messaging and content, strategy and measurement, and reputation and crisis work. The level shifts the weights, hands-on writing for a specialist versus strategy for a manager, but the categories hold. These are the duties grouped the way the templates use them.
A strong posting grounds these in the level and setting with specifics: the seniority, whether the role is in-house or at an agency, the audiences and channels, and the experience expected. PR candidates read postings for the level, the scope, and the pay, before applying. For a structured way to scope any role before posting, the guide to defining job responsibilities walks through the process.
PR Job Titles and Career Levels
Public relations titles form a ladder by scope and seniority, and naming the level precisely keeps your posting accurate and attracts the right caliber of candidate. Here is how the levels relate.
| Level | Scope | Typical experience |
|---|---|---|
| PR Coordinator / Assistant | Supports campaigns, media lists, tracking | 0-2 years (entry-level) |
| PR Specialist | Hands-on writing, pitching, media relations | 2-5 years |
| PR Manager | Owns strategy, budget, and the team | 5-7 years |
| PR Director | Sets direction, counsels executives, leads | 7+ years |
The titles are not perfectly standardized, and at a small company or boutique agency one person often spans several levels at once. The practical rule: a coordinator supports, a specialist executes, a manager directs, and a director leads. Use the title and template that match the actual level you need.
Which Template Should You Use?
Pick the template by the level and the setting. The core PR work runs through all six, but the scope, the seniority, and the environment differ enough that the matched version always reads more credibly. Use this guide to choose.
6 Free Public Relations Job Description Templates
Download all six as a single Word document or copy individual templates. Each follows the same structure: company overview, position summary, key responsibilities, qualifications, pay, and how to apply, with the FLSA status flagged for the level. Fill in the brackets and post.
Template 1: PR Specialist (Standard)
The base version: writes and pitches stories, manages media relationships, and supports social and content. Start here for a standard mid-level PR role.
Template 2: PR Manager
For a managerial role: owns media strategy, manages campaigns and budget, leads the team, and handles crisis communications. Typically exempt.
Template 3: PR Coordinator / Assistant (Entry-Level)
For a junior hire: builds media lists, supports campaigns, and tracks coverage, with a learning focus and a path to specialist. Often non-exempt.
Template 4: PR Director
For a senior role: sets strategic direction, counsels executives, leads the team, and serves as a senior spokesperson. Typically 7+ years.
Template 5: Boutique PR Agency (Multi-Client)
For a small agency: works across multiple client accounts with billable time, account management, and new-business support. A version no generic template offers.
Template 6: In-House / First PR Hire (Small Business)
For a growing company hiring its first PR person: a broad hybrid of PR and marketing who builds the function from scratch and reports to the owner.
PR Skills and Qualifications
PR qualifications center on strong writing, media relationships, and communication judgment, which makes the posting's job naming the real requirements clearly so candidates can self-qualify rather than guess.
| Weak requirement | Strong requirement |
|---|---|
| Good writer | Strong writing and editing across press releases, pitches, and messaging |
| Knows media | Established reporter relationships and a track record of earned coverage |
| Communications degree | Bachelor's in PR, communications, or journalism, plus relevant experience |
| Experienced | [N] years matched to the level, from 0-2 (coordinator) to 7+ (director) |
| Handles pressure | Sound judgment under deadline and in crisis or sensitive situations |
For PR, writing ability and media judgment usually matter most, which is why asking for writing samples in the posting is worth doing, and accreditations like APR are a plus rather than a requirement. Keep every line job-related, and for the standard sections of a posting, the SHRM job description tools describe a good job description as a plain-language summary of a position's tasks, duties, and responsibilities.
FLSA: Are PR Roles Exempt or Non-Exempt?
Most PR roles are exempt, but not all, and the level is what decides it. A PR specialist, manager, or director is typically exempt under the FLSA, usually through the professional or administrative exemption, because the work involves advanced knowledge and the exercise of independent judgment and discretion on significant matters, paid on a salary basis of at least $684 per week. That fits the strategic, judgment-heavy nature of most PR work.
The exception is at the junior end. A PR coordinator or assistant whose primary duties are support-oriented, building media lists, compiling coverage clips, scheduling, monitoring, may not meet the independent-judgment test and can be non-exempt and owed overtime beyond 40 hours in a week, even if you pay a salary. The classification turns on the actual duties, not the title or the salary. Mark the status based on the real duties, track hours where the role is non-exempt, and keep the posting job-related and neutral, since the EEOC prohibits job advertisements that show a preference based on protected characteristics. This is general information, not legal advice; confirm with an employment attorney.
How to Write a Public Relations Job Description
A strong PR posting takes about 25 minutes and does two jobs: it gives a candidate the level, scope, and pay they screen on, and it sets the role up correctly on classification and expectations. Here is the process the templates are built around. If this is among your first hires, the guide to hiring your first employee covers the steps around the posting itself.
Public Relations Salary
PR pay varies widely by level, which is the single most important thing to get right when you set a range, since a specialist and a manager are nowhere near each other.
Within those benchmarks, a junior coordinator sits below the specialist median, a director sits above the manager median, and pay rises in major metro areas like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago where PR concentrates. An agency or first-hire hybrid role is priced on its scope rather than a single title. Because pay is one of the first things PR candidates screen on, post a concrete range for the specific level, which is why the templates leave pay as a field. National compensation surveys can help you set a range for your market and level.
Hiring PR at a Boutique Agency or Small Company
Most PR hiring does not happen at big corporations with full communications departments. It happens at small agencies working multiple client accounts and at growing companies making their first PR hire. Both need something the generic templates do not provide. Here is how to do it well.
After You Hire: Onboarding
The job description is step one, and a PR hire onboards a little differently because the role speaks for the company, so the messaging and approval context matters from day one. Send the offer with the pay and the correct FLSA classification, collect the signed offer, complete Form I-9 within the first days along with the rest of the new hire paperwork, gather tax forms, and add a confidentiality or media-policy acknowledgement.
Then run the role onboarding that gets a communications hire productive fast: a walkthrough of your brand voice and messaging, your spokespeople and approval process, the media contacts and tools they inherit, and clear expectations for the first 90 days, the kind of structured start the employee onboarding guide lays out and a 30-60-90 day plan template can anchor. Since PR usually sits with marketing, a marketing onboarding template fits well, and once the offer is ready the offer letter template handles the core terms with the classification. FirstHR handles the offer with built-in e-signature, the onboarding workflow and AI onboarding wizard, document management for signed agreements and policies, training assignments, and a self-service portal in one place, so a new PR or agency hire steps into a defined start. FirstHR does not run payroll or administer benefits, so connect your payroll and benefits providers for those functions. Applicant tracking is coming soon to FirstHR.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a public relations role do?
A public relations role builds and protects an organization's public image. The core work is consistent across levels: writing press releases and pitches, building relationships with reporters, securing media coverage, drafting messaging and talking points, supporting social and content, tracking results, and helping manage reputation and crisis communications. As the industry association PRSA frames it, public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and its audiences. What changes by level is scope and seniority. A PR specialist does the hands-on work, a PR manager owns strategy and the team, a PR director leads at the executive level, a coordinator supports the team as an entry point, an agency role works across multiple clients, and a first PR hire at a small company does a broad hybrid of all of it. This page offers a template for each.
What is the difference between a PR specialist and a PR manager?
It is a question of scope and seniority. A PR specialist is an individual contributor who does the hands-on work: writing, pitching, media relations, and tracking coverage, usually with a few years of experience. A PR manager sits above the specialist and owns the strategy: setting media direction, managing campaigns and budget, leading the team or specialists, handling crisis communications, and advising leadership, typically with five to seven years of experience. The specialist executes; the manager directs and is accountable for the program. For hiring, the practical difference is real money and real scope, so match the title and template to the level you actually need. This page includes both a specialist template and a manager template, and the comparison table maps the full ladder from coordinator to director.
What are the PR career levels in order?
The typical public relations ladder runs from coordinator or assistant at the entry level, to specialist as the core individual contributor, to manager who owns strategy and the team, to director who leads at the executive level, and on to VP or chief communications officer at the top. A coordinator supports campaigns and builds media lists with zero to two years of experience. A specialist does the hands-on PR work with a few years in. A manager owns the strategy and the team at roughly five to seven years. A director sets direction and counsels executives at seven or more years. The titles are not perfectly standardized across companies, and at a small company or boutique agency one person often spans several of these levels at once, which is why this page includes a boutique-agency template and a first-PR-hire template alongside the standard role levels.
Is a public relations role exempt or non-exempt under the FLSA?
Most mid-level and senior PR roles are exempt; some junior ones are not. A PR specialist, manager, or director is typically exempt under the FLSA, usually through the professional or administrative exemption, because the work involves advanced knowledge, independent judgment, and discretion on significant matters, paid on a salary basis of at least $684 per week. A junior PR coordinator or assistant whose primary duties are support-oriented, building media lists, compiling coverage, scheduling, may not meet the duties test and can be non-exempt and owed overtime, even if salaried. The classification turns on the actual duties the person performs, not the title or the fact of a salary. Mark the status based on the real duties, track hours where the role is non-exempt, and confirm with the Department of Labor or an attorney. This is general information, not legal advice.
What should a public relations job description include?
A strong PR job description includes a company overview, a position summary, key responsibilities, required and preferred qualifications, the FLSA classification, the pay, and how to apply, ideally asking for writing samples since this is a writing-heavy role. List the core duties: writing press releases and pitches, media relations, messaging and content support, results tracking, and reputation or crisis work, scaled to the level. State the experience level clearly, since specialist, manager, and director are very different jobs, and name the education, usually a bachelor's in PR, communications, or journalism. Confirm and state the FLSA classification, since junior roles can be non-exempt. And match the template to the setting: a boutique agency role works across multiple clients, and a first PR hire at a small company does a broad PR-plus-marketing hybrid, neither of which a generic single-role template captures.
How much does a public relations specialist make?
PR pay varies a lot by level. Federal data reported a median annual wage of about $69,780 for public relations specialists in May 2024, with the lowest 10 percent under $40,750 and the highest 10 percent over $129,480, and projected growth of about 5 percent through 2034. Public relations managers earned much more, a median of about $138,520 in May 2024, with the top 10 percent over $239,200. So a specialist, a manager, and a director sit at very different points, and pay also rises in major metro areas like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago where PR work concentrates. A junior coordinator earns below the specialist median, and an agency or first-hire hybrid role is priced on its scope. Because pay is one of the first things PR candidates screen on, post a real range for the specific level; the templates leave it as a field.
What does a boutique PR agency role look like?
A boutique PR agency role works across several client accounts at once rather than for a single employer. The day-to-day is the familiar PR work, writing, pitching, media relations, and reporting, but multiplied across multiple clients, each with its own voice, goals, and deadlines. Agency roles usually involve account management, tracking billable time per client, direct client contact, and some new-business support, on top of the core PR work. The pace is faster and the variety is higher than an in-house role. This matters for hiring because the big job boards offer only generic single-employer PR templates, which do not describe agency life: the multi-account juggling, the client-facing communication, the billable structure. The boutique-agency template on this page is built for exactly that, since most PR firms are small agencies and this is a real, underserved hiring need.
What happens after I hire a PR person?
Send the offer, complete the paperwork, and run an onboarding that gets a communications hire productive fast. Send a clear offer with the pay and the correct FLSA classification, collect the signed offer, complete Form I-9 within the first days, gather tax forms, and add a confidentiality or media-policy acknowledgement, which matters for someone who will speak for the company. Then the role onboarding: a walkthrough of your brand voice and messaging, your spokespeople and approval process, the media contacts and tools they inherit, and clear expectations for the first 90 days. For a boutique agency, repeat the context-setting for each client account the new hire picks up. FirstHR handles the offer with built-in e-signature, the onboarding workflow and AI onboarding wizard, document management for signed agreements and policies, training assignments, and a self-service portal in one place, so a new PR or agency hire steps into a defined start. FirstHR does not run payroll or administer benefits, so connect your payroll and benefits providers for those. Applicant tracking is coming soon to FirstHR.