Three steps to create a successful brand

No matter how you look at it, building a brand strategy is a MUST for the recruitment industry. 

We’ve heard it all before, ‘we don’t need branding’, ‘we just need a quick logo or banner that resonates with our users’. Or more often than not, ‘no need for a branding exercise, just run the client case study and grab some images and our logo from the internet’. Sound like you?

These issues can impact on your brand and affect profit and efficiency. This can lead to:

• Your business becoming another anonymous recruitment agency

• Being seen as bland

• Undermining candidates’ intelligence with irrelevant graphics because your business felt it was cool at the time

• Undermining your clients with generic MS word proposals, case studies and other sales tools

• A lack of a brand story

We believe every recruitment agency can be unique and authentic. Just as every person is different, each recruitment agency is different. You just need to invest the time and effort into finding your individual brand story that will make candidates and clients think ‘this agency is for me’.

I get that day-to-day task, sales targets, managing a team, time and budget can lead you to loose sight of creating your brand.  However, aside from making money, just consider - do clients and candidates see you as ‘just another recruiter’ in a noisy and saturated market?

By breaking down the following tasks, defining your needs and whys, measuring and mapping, you can begin to see what your brand could stand for. Here is a simple overview of how strategy-led design for recruitment can work for your brand.

The business goal

• build the needs and whys

• prioritise

• find the unseen need

• research

The brand

• needs and Whys

• who are your customers

• what is your business back story?

• create brand attributes

• colour, form, type, imagery

The user

• needs and whys

• timeline

• persona, traits

• segmentation

By first understanding the issue and need you can determine the direction of your brand and how to implement the what and where. All this helps to streamline the process to make better business choices, and develop solutions that are real and unique to you.

Visual design counts towards better communication. It leads to:

• better engagement with clients and candidates

• stronger brand awareness

• consistency - marketing internal - sales tools

• a consistent tone of voice

• efficiency in creating and communicating marketing needs

• easy use of your brand assets

So it’s not just about chucking a logo together with some generic stock images. Creating a brand strategy is a vital requirement in today’s world of recruitment. Don’t get complacent by pushing out your marketing strategy before you’ve developed the brand first. 

Recruitment is about people, so why wouldn’t you want to create a brand that builds a community, empowers and develops trust through visual communication? People are attracted to a good brand, ahead of the services or products the business offers.

What do you think? Give it a go and see just how it can make a difference to your agency.

About the Author

Matheos is a brand designer, who works with recruiters to find their voice through branding and visual communication.