If you've ever run a formal RFP process to hire a PR consultant and come away feeling like something was off - the finalists were fine, but not quite right - there's a structural reason for that. The consultants you actually wanted may never have applied.
Understanding why changes how you approach the whole decision. And for a nonprofit or mission-driven organization, it's one of the most consequential hiring calls you'll make.
Knowing how to hire a PR consultant in a way that actually attracts experienced candidates - and leads to a working relationship that holds up - is worth getting clear on before you send anything out. The short answer: a lengthy, formal RFP process often filters out exactly the people you need.
Why Does a Lengthy RFP Process Drive Away Strong PR Consultants?
A formal RFP signals that decisions will move slowly, approvals will require multiple stakeholders, and trust will be hard-earned. Experienced consultants have seen this pattern before - and many choose to pass.
The logic isn't cynical. When a consultant sees a 20-page RFP with a committee review process, a scoring rubric, and three rounds of interviews, they're not just calculating the time investment of responding (which is often significant and rarely compensated). They're making an inference about what it will actually be like to work with that organization.
PR work depends on speed, trust, and the ability to make judgment calls quickly. A story breaks on a Tuesday afternoon and you need a decision by 4 p.m. A funding announcement gets moved up three weeks and the whole communications plan has to shift. Consultants who have been doing this for a long time know that if getting started required this much process, the working relationship itself will probably run the same way. So they pass, and your team spends weeks on an evaluation that may not surface the best fit.
This is especially common in the nonprofit and social impact sector, where procurement habits inherited from larger institutions get applied to communications hires in ways that don't quite fit. A lengthy RFP process makes sense for a technology vendor or a construction contract. For a senior communications partner who will be advising your CEO, it often works against you.
What Does a Better PR Consultant Hiring Process Look Like?
A simpler, conversation-first process leads to better information, stronger candidates, and a faster path to getting PR work started.
The alternative isn't giving up on due diligence. It's redirecting that effort toward the things that actually tell you whether someone is the right fit. Referrals from trusted peers are a far stronger signal than an unsolicited proposal. A conversation where you walk through your organization's communications challenges - and watch how a consultant thinks in real time - tells you more than any written response will.
A practical process that respects everyone's time: talk to two or three candidates who came through a direct referral or warm introduction, ask smart questions about how they've handled situations similar to yours, check references, and make a decision. Organizations that hire this way consistently end up with better matches and can start the actual work faster. Research on consulting selection published in academic management literature has found that reputation and demonstrated industry experience are the top two criteria clients use when they ultimately report high satisfaction with consulting engagements - not proposal quality or process rigor.
When leadership genuinely needs a structured process - and sometimes they do, for governance or accountability reasons - structure it around the right things. Define what you're evaluating before you start. Ask every candidate the same questions. Document how you made the decision. The goal is a clear process, not an exhaustive one. If you're still figuring out what "clear goals" even looks like for your PR program, how to set PR priorities is a good place to start before you begin any vendor search.
What Questions Should You Ask When Hiring a PR Consultant?
The right questions reveal how a consultant thinks, not just what they've done. Ask about specific decisions - not past results.
Written proposals can be polished into near-perfection by anyone with good writing instincts. What reveals actual judgment is how a consultant responds to a real-world scenario in conversation. Ask them to walk you through how they'd approach a media inquiry on a sensitive issue. Ask what they do when a client's leadership wants to go in a direction they disagree with professionally. Ask how they'd prioritize if you could only do one thing in your first 90 days together.
The answers - the specificity, the directness, the willingness to have a point of view - will tell you far more than a proposal section on "our methodology." You're looking for someone who can advise your CEO and your board, respond quickly when things get complicated, and bring a clear external perspective to decisions that are hard to see from the inside. That kind of judgment doesn't show up on paper as well as it does in conversation.
Pay close attention to how they talk about the organizations they've worked with. Do they speak about clients with genuine respect and discretion? Do they have a clear sense of what kinds of organizations they do their best work with - and what kinds they don't? A consultant who is honest about fit is one you can trust to be honest about other things, too.
How Should You Evaluate PR Consultants Without a Formal Scoring Process?
Reference checks and a direct conversation about working style will tell you more than a scoring rubric. Talk to people who've actually worked with the consultant under pressure.
References are worth more than most organizations use them for. The standard reference check confirms basic facts. A real reference conversation - where you ask about a difficult moment in the engagement, not just the highlights - tells you what you actually need to know. How did they handle it when a launch got delayed? What happened when a story didn't land the way everyone hoped? How did they communicate when something went sideways?
Worth asking directly: how does this consultant like to work? How do they prefer to communicate, and how often? What does their availability look like? What do they need from your team to do their best work? These aren't soft questions. They're the practical realities that determine whether a working relationship actually functions well. The best-fit consultant on paper can become a frustrating engagement if the operating styles don't align.
This is the kind of work organizations bring to firms like Orapin - and the conversations that matter most happen before anyone signs anything. Relationships that work well, for both sides, start with real conversations and clear expectations, not polished proposals. That's true whether an organization is looking for a full-service PR partner or senior-level guidance for an in-house team running PR on its own.
Is an RFP Ever the Right Approach for Hiring a PR Consultant?
For most nonprofits and social impact organizations, a formal RFP is rarely the right tool for a PR hire. It's worth challenging whether procurement norms developed for other kinds of vendors apply here.
There are contexts where an RFP makes organizational sense - primarily when a board or funder requires a documented competitive process, or when a government grant mandates a specific procurement approach. In those cases, the goal becomes designing the best possible RFP within those constraints.
Even then: keep it short, make it specific, and compensate consultants for their time if you're asking for substantial strategic thinking upfront. A shorter RFP with sharper questions will attract better respondents than a long one that asks for everything. And the interview stage matters far more than the written response. If you're locked into a formal process, put your energy into designing strong conversations - not longer documents.
Outside of governance requirements, the question worth asking your leadership team is: what is this process actually trying to accomplish? If the answer is "we want to make a confident, well-informed decision," there's a faster path to that outcome. Most experienced PR consultants have a general policy against participating in RFPs for exactly this reason - the time investment is real, and the format doesn't allow for the kind of direct conversation that builds confidence on both sides. This pattern shows up again and again when nonprofit PR strategy gets deprioritized in favor of process - momentum gets lost while the RFP grinds forward.
What to Do Instead: A Simple Hiring Framework
Knowing how to hire a PR consultant doesn't require a formal process. It requires the right questions, the right referral sources, and a willingness to trust what a real conversation tells you.
Start with referrals. Ask peer organizations, funders, and board members who they've worked with and trusted. Warm introductions filter the pool before you've invested any time.
Talk to two or three candidates - not ten. Three is enough to compare approaches and instincts without burning out your team.
Use the same questions with everyone. Structure the conversations, not the process around them.
Make reference checks substantive. Ask about a hard moment, not just the highlights.
Decide at a pace that respects everyone's time. A decision that drags for three months is a bad signal for both parties.
That's a complete hiring process. It's faster than an RFP, it produces better information, and it doesn't filter out candidates with enough experience to know better than to participate.
What This Costs When It Goes Wrong
A lengthy PR RFP process that surfaces the wrong candidates doesn't just waste time during the search. It sets the working relationship up poorly from the start.
When organizations spend significant internal resources evaluating proposals - committee meetings, scoring sessions, multiple rounds of interviews - there's a natural tendency to defend that investment by rationalizing the eventual hire. The sunk cost creates pressure to make it work even when early signs suggest it won't. And a PR engagement that doesn't work well has real costs: delayed communications programs, missed media opportunities, strategy that never gets traction because the fit wasn't right.
If you're thinking about what comes before any of this - the groundwork that makes a PR partnership actually productive - what to do before launching your PR program is worth reading first. The organizations that approach this hiring decision most effectively are the ones that treat it like what it actually is: the start of a working relationship, not a procurement transaction. The best PR consultants work the same way their clients do - through trust, direct conversation, and the willingness to say difficult things clearly. It makes sense to hire them the same way.