“Job vacancies up 240% & 14,900% LinkedIn audience growth”
The recruitment industry is highly dynamic and constantly evolving with changing job market trends, technological advancements, and shifting candidate expectations. It is also fiercely competitive, as agencies and companies vie to attract top talent while rapidly adapting to the demands of both employers and job seekers.
On Success
Our brand building exercise, amplified by all the various elements required to bring the brand to market, drove a 650% increase in Maddison Recruitment’s social media reach:
Job vacancies up 240%
14,900% LinkedIn audience growth
650% increase in social media reach
“You’re very clever you creatives! Not only does the website function superbly, accompanied with the full rebrand, it looks the business. We’re delighted with our investment.”
Maddison Consultants Simon Neil, Director,
On Course
Building brand momentum in a dynamic market
The recruitment industry is not for the faint hearted. To compete, consultancies must be seen to be at the top of their game.
As a company that values organic growth, Maddison Consultants’ success has been built on consistently applying best practice across international recruitment and training for a wealth of clients in the building services industry.
This has earned them a reputation as a uniquely specialist consultancy within the building services sector, providing unrivalled knowledge to many UK and Global businesses including GE, Fagerhult and Philips.
In building their brand and scoping website functionality, we were all too conscious of consolidating their position as a team that can confidently handle the challenges of national and international business and demanding recruitment challenges.
On the Challenge
Launching and elevating Maddison Recruitment with a new brand & website
Maddison Consultants had a fresh vision for their business and understood the need to evolve the business presence in the online space. In doing so, they aimed to future proof the business for the next 5 years, anticipating that a new brand and optimised website would bolster and enhance the organic growth they knew was not only realistic but highly achievable.
Our complementary vision was to ensure the brand would be effective and engaging at every touchpoint, maximising impact and speeding achievement of Maddison Recruitment’s ambitious goals.
On Solutions
As a nimble design and digital agency, we tailor bespoke solutions from our broad portfolio of expertise.
Taking the brand forward starts with a carefully crafted solution
With a blank sheet and undertaking a thorough, structured research and discovery project to fully understand the business and its ambitions, we successfully delivered a stand out brand, exciting recruitment website design, print adverts and associated social media account set up, LinkedIn launch strategy and content management.
Taking a partnership approach from the beginning and guiding the Bristol-based team through our structured approach, we undertook a full, thorough business and brand consultation.
This gave us a complete understanding of who Maddison Recruitment are, how they work, their goals for the business and how they set out to achieve them.
This exploratory session was key to completely understanding how we could position and create an exciting and engaging brand identity with a focus on ‘People and Communication – connecting them.’
The identity was unique within the building services marketplace at the time – a design style that broke the mould of the conventional image and photography led recruitment stereotype design.
And in another innovative move, long before flat UI became widely used, Chris led and guided production of an identity that stood out and was admired by the competition so much, that one approached Chris to discuss revamping their own website.
On Implementation
Designed to be consistently flexible, we developed a brand style that could be carried seamlessly across both printed and digital marketing channels, advertising solutions, a responsive website, advertising and ongoing social media.
It’s an excellent example of Cross-Platform brand scalability – essential in the multi-media, multi-platform corporate world.
Our brand also inherently captured Maddison’s vision for their business, a vision that was shared and realised by our team and theirs to move the business forward.
On Branding – people & communication
The brand identity we developed is based on the concept of people and communication: whether that’s between clients and Maddison Consultants or Maddison and candidates, to bring clients and candidates together through effective communication.
The ‘Communication Mark’ we created using clean typography (Foundry Typeface) symbolises this core focus on communication and it is used across all marketing channels, together with a clear and engaging font set, to give consistency and set the benchmark for future brand marketing design.
On Building services: brand icons
We made best use of iconography to illustrate Maddison’s seven distinct areas of expertise across all marketing channels and website. Clearly defining career vacancies to each target audience, they provide a clear visual link between brand and job search area and easy recognition in print media, social media and the job vacancies displayed on the Maddison website.
On Bespoke brochure design
Our custom, on-brand square brochure neatly repurposed website content to act as a leave behind after meetings and presentations. The printed brochure delivers tangible insight into the Maddison brand and leaves a lasting impression with its supreme print quality and paper stock.
On Responsive website design
Before we got into the build, we embarked on a thorough, three month, Google Analytics-informed research project to get a solid understanding of the current audience, their habits and the technologies they use.
This included monitoring human interactions to drive informed decision-making and analysing the market to get a solid understanding of both the recruitment and building services industry websites: the what’s, why’s and how Maddison’s competitors go about their web marketing.
We knew immediately that the dated design, lack of band clarity and limited functionality where all limiting the existing site’s potential. This was partly down to it being a template website that just didn’t cut the mustard in terms of sophistication, and also because it didn’t have the advanced technology to enhance functionality and the user journey.
Candidates and clients alike would have been left unimpressed at best, and at worst disappointed and frustrated with the lack of features and engagement.
This is a sure-fire way to quickly lose both audiences!
To overcome this, and to deliver a brand experience and full functionality, the website build was also designed to be:
Device ready – fully responsive for mobile and desktop
Search engine optimised (SEO) – maximising organic traffic reach and Google ranking performance
User experience optimised (UEO) – Enhancing the online consumer experience
Fully integrated with eBoss recruitment software – streamlining lead to sales process
While a bespoke design and development, we use a tried and tested process for every website design project and our solution for Maddison Recruitment was was achieved using our proven method.
Movement and dynamism are key qualities for any brand operating in the fast-paced recruitment sector.
So our Creative Director tore up the rule book and broke the mould by introducing flexbox style ‘job panels’ to draw the user in. With the header image clearly depicting the brand values and services, the idea was to expertly introduce depth that would be achieved through illustrative design and parallax effect development.
The research led into a few days of conceptualising wireframes that fed into the UX designs and made planning and building the framework much more efficient. That began with the mobile version, then the tablet and the full-size website. Starting with the mobile version allowed us to focus on the mobile user experience and maximise page load speeds.
Along the way we also added in browser fallbacks to support outdated web browsers such as IE9. Why? Mainly because we knew that Maddison’s corporate clients are notorious for being a few years behind browser advances. Invaluable industry insight!
“For years I wasn’t sure why corporates lag behind the rest of the world when it comes to the latest browser and security updates. As a team, we discovered that the barrier was updating many hundreds of employee workstations and browsers – no easy task. We would advise that if you’re working in a corporate environment with outdated browsers, you most likely have security vulnerabilities, and your people are missing out on the best possible browsing experiences.”
Chris Heighton
On Full integration with eBoss
Recruitment job board functionality
As well as needing to offer an exceptional brand experience, Madisson Recruitment’s website also had a functional, transactional job to do: making job posting a seamless and consistent process.
Most consultancies use the well-known recruitment software solution Bullhorn. Maddison opted to use eBoss, a third-party recruitment software solution, for their backend administration. We were happy to integrate this solution into the website for two important reasons: it had the capabilities to deliver job details and specifications to the website front-end AND eBoss is so good that it allows for customer branding too!
There was some complexity involved in managing the interaction between web development teams, but that was part of the challenge and very much worth it: Maddison Recruitment now enjoy an infinitely more streamlined admin process.
Our eBoss integration now provides a seamless job and career browsing experience on both desktops and mobile devices.
On Social Media
Our launch strategy, design & management
Our creative team’s vision for repositioning Maddison Recruitment’s brand didn’t stop at site design, print and advertising.
Our brief was to take Maddison into a new space, a space they hadn’t ventured before: the online space.
So, as the online experts, we did just that.
We set up, created and branded Maddison’s Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook accounts, putting together a social launch strategy with key advertising creative to target both audiences: candidates and clients.
To pull everything together, we then went one step further: working in partnership with Simon Neil to deliver creative advertising campaigns that included designs for insertion into key and leading publications including Architects Journal Magazine, Lighting Magazine, H & V News and Lux Review.
