While many companies scrambled to adapt to remote work during COVID, Carabiner Communications had already perfected the ‘work from anywhere’ model.
The Atlanta-based public relations firm, which works with B2B startups and fast-growing companies, leveraged decades of experience balancing a fully remote-first team to the ‘new normal’ of Zoom meetings and phone calls.
Carabiner’s remote hiring strategy has long been about attracting top-tier talent”over two decades ago, says Peter Baron, who started the firm in 2004.Baron and his team started Carabiner after an already seasoned PR career. After a successful acquisition of his previous firm, Baron wanted to create a new type of agency. Over the years, he recognized that most people left the agency world after about seven years because of pressure and high expectations, opting instead to freelance or go into a corporate setting.
That means that traditional agencies struggle to keep seasoned talent.
“Agencies in the traditional models survive on bright young people graduating from college every year and signing up because they’ve got big ambitions. Agencies tend to put those people in direct contact with media and direct contact with clients. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always produce the best results. It’s a great way to find new talent and to train them, but often clients aren’t delighted by that,” Baron told Hypepotamus.
In an industry where high turnover among seasoned professionals is the norm, Carabiner’s approach bucks the trend, offering a sustainable solution to keep expert talent engaged. He wanted to flip that script with Carabiner and create an agency that recruited established talent who might not want to travel constantly or go into an office.
“We want to give people the opportunity to have freedom for what they consider to be their top priority, whatever it is,” Baron added. He recruited people he’d worked with who had around ten years of experience who had a proven track record in media relations, communications, writing, marketing, and event management. The deal: People could set their own hours and work from anywhere.
The hiring model was an easy sell for clients as well. Since Carabiner recruited experts, clients — whether they are up-and-coming tech companies or established brands — get the “best advice and the best results.”
“In the old model, we lost clients every year. We also had to repitch sometimes,” Baron added. “We started to realize we kept our clients [longer] and our team members were happy and motivated.”
By recruiting industry veterans, Carabiner not only improves client satisfaction but also delivers consistent, high-quality results — as evidenced by their 17-year relationship with a core client.
“Life and experience is a great teacher, and that is what we are trying to leverage here.”
Navigating The Changing PR and Marketing World
A lot has certainly changed over the twenty years that Carabiner started remote work. The AOL Instant Messaging platform, Skype, and conference bridges were replaced by the Microsoft Teams Suite as the team’s go-to communication tools. Quarterly lunches in Atlanta were replaced by an end-of-the-year meetup.
While Carabiner’s hiring strategy remains constant, the PR and marketing landscape around them has evolved drastically. Specifically, the type of clients coming to PR agencies for help has also changed dramatically, says Baron. Gone are the days when email just email blasts and a few posts on Instagram can count as quality marketing and can bring in quality leads. As the marketing landscape changed, brand credibility becomes more important. And that’s where PR comes in, Baron said.
“Clients may have a fairly well fleshed out marketing department and a good program, but they’re not doing well with media relations or speaker placement or analyst relations, and that’s bread and butter for us.”
He equates PR to “vitamins for a [company’s] marketing” efforts.
“It makes it work. All of a sudden, people are starting to believe what you say, because a third party that they trust is saying good things,” Baron added.
As the PR world continues to evolve, Carabiner’s commitment to flexibility, expertise, and client trust positions them to lead the way in the future of remote work and results-driven public relations.
