Once upon a time, a company went through a major inflection point, like scaling rapidly or dramatically repositioning their product or navigating a thorny crisis. Employees got angry and/or confused. Executives at the company said, “We need Comms to help with this!” and Comms said, “We need to hire an internal comms expert to help with this!” And so Comms began to search for an internal comms practitioner, only to discover that there are lots of kinds of internal comms practitioners, each suited to solving a different type of problem.
Much like the question of where to put internal comms in your business, the question of which internal comms profile to hire is essential. No hire is equally as well-rounded at all parts of the job, so it’s important to understand what you’re optimizing for—and what you’re not.
To help you hone your hiring profile, below are a few of the most common types of internal communicators, as well as a bit of color on their relative strengths and weaknesses.
Executive Comms
Executive communicators get energy from mind melding with company leaders. They are often superlative writers who can extrude an executive’s stream-of-consciousness into a variety of formats, from blog posts to live presentations to tweets (er…X posts). They may be former political speechwriters or corporate chiefs of staff. They probably have at least one book in them.
Hire an executive communicator if most of your internal comms strategy hinges on the voice of a small number of executives. This is often the case at early stage companies with a strong founder/CEO, or in divisions of larger companies whose leader has a strong personal brand. An executive comms hire may want to grow by taking on additional operational internal responsibilities and special projects within their executive’s team, à la a chief of staff, or by assisting with external as well as internal executive comms.
This person is may not be world-class at putting on events, but unless there’s another team that can manage logistics, an executive communicator should be able to passably put on an All Hands. They should also know their exec’s preferences for things like a confidence monitor/teleprompter, lapel vs. handheld mic, and so on.
Other weaknesses include their inability to see outside of their exec’s reality distortion field and really understand at a grassroots level how the average employee is feeling and how a particular message will land. Employees may also be reluctant to share their true feelings with an executive communicator because they’re seen as an extension of the executive’s brand.
Crisis Comms
Crisis communicators typically get their start in external comms, moving over to internal either full- or part-time when a media crisis starts to metastasize internally. For example, I moved into internal comms at Palantir as part of my broader remit to help the company navigate the controversy around its government contracts during the Trump era.
Crisis communicators tend to be great at media relations and good at short-form writing. They get energy from working end-to-end across internal and external comms and thrive when the role is scoped to allow them to do both. At Epic Games, we called this “company comms”; at other places, it might simply be “corporate comms.” At places where internal comms is periodic rather than always-on, hiring a crisis communicator with a good eye for internal might be all you need.
Don’t hire this person if you want someone to plan regular internal events or send a weekly “What’s Happening” newsletter to the company. Crisis communicators are used to working on high intensity, high stakes projects where the rewards are immediately apparent (e.g. killing a media story, sending out an internal response to a crisis); they’re likely to get bored when the stakes are lower or the lead times longer.
Employee Experience
Employee experience strategists are HR/People professionals at heart. In fact, I’d recommend locating these hires within HR to keep them close to people strategy. Sometimes these roles are also called “internal marketing” or “employee communications/engagement.”
Employee experience strategists are excellent at planning events, know how to manage the backend logistics of procurement and vendor relations, and are extremely detail-oriented—they are, in other words, excellent project managers. They are the people you want directing traffic day-to-day, when things are business as usual. Their growth path tends to involve getting involved in more areas of HR, like employee relations, DEI, or recruiting.
Employee experience strategists are also hyper-attuned to how the average employee is feeling (and often love to back up these intuitions with Pulse surveys). Conversely, their failure mode can be over-indexing on the sentiment of the true average employee and failing to home in on the feelings of the most valuable employees.
Employee experience strategists may or may not be excellent writers. They are likely to chafe in environments where internal comms is infrequent, hyper-direct, and/or executive-driven. In fact, one of the most common mistakes I see Comms teams make is hiring an employee experience strategist when they need one of the other two profiles. If your company does not engage in always-on internal comms, don’t hire someone whose sole responsibility is internal comms! (As an old boss used to say, if you hire an Events team, they’ll plan Events!)
This advice also applies more generally: Hire for the problem you’re actually solving. If you’re really hiring someone to sit with your CEO and distill his ideas into internal memos, hire someone who loves to do that kind of distillation (ie an executive communicator). If you’re trying to put out a fire, hire someone with a background in crisis management. And vice-versa: If you’re trying to hire someone to make sure there are fun events in HQ every week, don’t hire a writer.
I personally consider myself an executive communicator firstly, with crisis comms coming in a close second. I can get into the employee experience headspace, but ultimately I’m a better partner to a true employee experience strategist than I am one myself. Realizing that made it so much easier for me to filter out jobs that weren’t a good fit.
Companies need to be similar ruthless in their filtering of candidates so they don’t hire someone ill-suited to the actual task at hand.