Poets and Potential: Why we’ll always bet on entry-level talent and growing from within

People tend to like to stay at LaunchSquad. In fact, the average tenure of our senior leaders (VPs and above) is a whopping 12.3 years — more than four times the average agency tenure, according to PR Week. 

I myself am one of several boomerangs, having gone in-house to lead comms at Loom in 2021 after eight years at the Squad, before coming back in 2023. Why did I return? The simplest answer is I missed the people. I missed the opportunity to work closely, day-to-day, with dozens of (kind, funny) comms people who care about thoughtful storytelling. I missed being part of someone's growth from their slightly dazed entry out of college to a collected, strategic leader in their own right. In short: I missed this team. 

As we continue to celebrate the parts of our work that make LaunchSquad what it is for its 25th Anniversary, I wanted to understand more about our approach to hiring and how we’ve built a culture focused on retention. What is it about LS that creates so many agency lifers, and entices other agencies and clients to poach so often?

For that, I turned to Stephanie Fryer, our VP of Talent with 15 years under her belt at LS, and Emily Plante, our Director of Talent and Experience who’s been here for nine years. It's worth noting that both of them credited so much of what they’ve learned to Meghan Cavanaugh. Meghan is an SVP at LaunchSquad who led and built the foundation of our talent team and whose approach to hiring they still use and follow today.  

Read on to learn why they still believe in the value of entry level talent in the age of AI, what growth from within truly looks like in practice, and how to "hire for potential." 

Emily Busse: Let’s jump right in with the elephant in the room. AI is changing how we work. How does that impact the way you view entry-level talent?

Stephanie Fryer: AI is here, and we know it’s going to change the way we work. But we are not going to stop hiring entry-level talent. It is core to our growth and development framework. What we have to figure out — and what we are actively working on — is how AI changes the role. How do we adjust our training? How will our team structure change? What does the day-to-day look like for a coordinator now?

We don’t have a crystal ball, but we know that investing in junior talent is non-negotiable for us. We have to ensure that as the tools change, we are still providing the foundation for a long-term career.

Emily B: That leads perfectly into our philosophy on hiring. We talk a lot about "hiring for potential." What does that actually look like in practice?

Stephanie: It’s the core of what we do. When we interview, we are constantly asking: What can this person contribute on day one, and where do we see them in a year or two? Our ideal scenario is to hire someone and have them grow with us for three-plus years. You have to make sure they are a good fit for the job and the job is also a good fit for them. 

We look for core traits like curiosity and critical thinking. How do you interact with your work? How do you handle challenges? We look for the things we can’t easily teach, and then we build a plan for the things we can teach.

Emily Plante: To add to that, when we say we hire for potential, we aren't just looking for skills that make someone a good Account Coordinator. We are looking for the skills that will eventually make them a great Account Executive, Account Manager or Vice President. We look for early indicators of leadership: How do they think about a team? How adaptable are they? How do they use their resources? We are looking for the spark that tells us they will be successful across every stage of their growth here, not just the first role. 

Emily B: One thing that surprised me when I first joined was how many people don't necessarily come from a traditional PR background or PR major. I’ve found that having an outside perspective is a skill in itself with our teammates who come in from teaching, journalism, science, and other disciplines. How does that diversity of background play into this "potential" framework?

Stephanie: We are always looking for "alternative" candidates. Especially at the junior levels, not everyone has a PR internship, and that’s okay. We look at transferable skills: writing, flexibility, and how they build things from scratch. Our job is to take those raw skills and visualize how they plug into our work. We try to identify the learning curve early so we can support them, but we value the different perspectives they bring.

Emily P: It’s important to understand that skills from other disciplines are highly transferable to PR. Years ago, I hired a poetry major. She ended up being an incredible pitcher. She had no idea that she had already honed a skillset of thinking specifically about every single word, being concise, and being intentional with language. She wrote the most incredible pitches because of it.

When we hire folks from diverse educational backgrounds — history, literature, political science — they approach the work differently. That makes us all better because it makes our team more diverse and the work more interesting.

Emily B: Once people are here, we of course want them to stay. To that end, we invest is multiple layers of development and support — from our peer cohorts, to our mentorship structure, to our level-by-level L&D curriculum. How has LaunchSquad’s approach to development evolved since moving to a remote-first model?

Stephanie: In 2020, when we went remote, we realized that peer-to-peer relationship building wasn't happening the way it used to in the office. Folks were lacking that peer-to-peer connection that is so vital to your overall experience. 

"Cohorts" were the outcome of that. We saw an opportunity to group people by level (like Senior Account Executives) and facilitate conversations at a peer level where they could still learn but also be open and honest and build connections. It started as L&D content, but it became about relationship building. Now that we do cohort gatherings in person, it has become an impactful part of the experience.

Emily P: In a virtual environment, it can be intimidating to Slack someone and say, "I'm stressed about this assignment." We take feedback really seriously and are always thinking about ways to improve each employee’s experience on our team. The feedback we’ve received coming out of the cohort sessions is that it’s reassuring and also encouraging to sit face-to-face with someone in the same position as you who is doing the same work and often learning the same things. 

In cohorts, we’ve had circles where people shared fears about client calls or shared a piece of writing they were proud of. Seeing your experience reflected in a peer creates a different kind of safety and learning than you get from a manager. It normalizes the learning curve.

Emily B: You both live and breathe talent development. Is there a specific moment or type of interaction that makes you say, "This is why I do this"?

Emily P: Because we’ve been here so long, we get to watch the full lifecycle of an employee. For me, one of the best moments is when I’m talking to a brand new coordinator, maybe four months into their role, and they say, "I will never be as good as [Name], the Senior Account Executive on my team. They are so smart; I’m learning so much from them."

And I just smile, because I vividly remember talking to that Senior Account Executive when they were four months into the Account Coordinator role, and they said the exact same thing about the person above them. Seeing folks grow, become leaders, and then have the next generation look up to them—that cycle is so endearing and rewarding to me.

Emily B: I want to talk about retention and also why people return to LaunchSquad after taking new roles. It seems potentially unique to LaunchSquad that so many people return. Especially given not every company is happy to welcome folks back into the fold. What is your philosophy on that?

Stephanie: I don't know if we have a formal philosophy, but I think it reflects the experience people have here and it highlights the importance for hiring folks that reflect our values. When people leave, their number one comment is usually about the people they worked with and the support they felt. LaunchSquad is a place that meets people where they are. When you build a culture where people form real bonds and feel supported, it becomes a place they want to return to.

Emily P: I think it comes down to trust. We aren't an agency where people are only out for their own wins. We want to produce great work, but we want to be good teammates first. A part of being a good teammate at LaunchSquad is that we’re comfortable sharing bad ideas, asking questions and sharing what we don’t understand. That builds a deep level of trust. You know your team has your back. People might leave to learn new things or try a new industry, but they often come back because they miss that high-trust environment.

Emily B: Looking ahead to 2026 and beyond, what do you see as the biggest opportunity — or challenge — for talent in PR & comms?

Stephanie: I want to double down on our commitment to hiring entry-level talent. There are agencies out there whose philosophy is to poach talent with 3 to 4 years of experience rather than training their own. There is a core issue to this approach. If we aren't investing in developing the next generation, it’s bad for the PR industry as a whole. When we need to go out and hire someone with 2-3 years of experience we know we are contributing to that talent pool. We will continue to hire entry-level folks and invest in their development, even as the landscape changes.

Emily P: What I find most exciting is educating people about PR as a career option who have never considered it and then offering new paths for them to enter the PR industry. We’ve done this through our participation in the Foster the Future program but also through diversifying the types of candidates we’re proactively recruiting at an entry-level. I love finding that English Lit major or History major who is asking, "What am I going to do with this degree?" and showing them that their research and storytelling skills are exactly what we need.

It takes time and effort to recruit that way, but it’s exciting to show new candidates that there is a career path here where their skills are relevant and valued. I was a nervous English major once, too, so that mission is very close to my heart.