As June passes in July, we celebrate our fourth anniversary as an Agency. A little one, but a great one. I couldn’t be more proud of what we have achieved over the past four years. Particularly in the last year. The last crazy year. Recruitment has always been a good barometer for the state of the World, and the World has been in a pretty awful state for the past 18 months. And for many, so has recruitment. But we’re still here. And we’ve been doing more than just keeping the lights on.

We’ve welcomed a few new clients

It seems that we’re rapidly gaining a reputation for being great people to work with. How can we tell? Well, people and organisations are starting to come to us. It seems that all the blog writing, webinars and LinkedIn activity is paying off. We feel very lucky to have started working with the likes of Anchor Hanover, Deichmann, Derbyshire Constabulary, Gazprom, ISG, Reward Gateway and Somerset County Council this year. And on some really nice projects as well.

We’ve enhanced our team

We’re really proud of our associate assisted delivery model. It means that we’ve been able to work with some fantastically talented people across all our projects this year. But it would be wrong of me not to pick out one in particular. And that’s David Thompson.

We knew David when we were at ThirtyThree, and his knowledge of employee engagement, employer proposition definition and employer branding development are unrivalled. And we are blessed to have him in our little agency. Clients love him. The creative team love him. He’s been with us for over a year, and we celebrated this milestone by filling up the beer fridge we bought for Oli’s anniversary.

Work that we’re proud of

We’re unapologetically a start-up, therefore every job we do needs to be impressive. It needs to delight the client not simply answer the brief. Which is handy because that’s the only way we would approach a project anyway. And our clients have given us the projects and freedom to delight them:

We designed, developed and delivered a careers website for Jaguar Land Rover
We designed, developed and delivered a careers website for Derbyshire Constabulary
We developed an employer brand for The Telegraph Media Group
We designed, developed and delivered a careers website for NFU Mutual
We designed, developed and delivered a careers website for Wolseley

They’re all projects that we are very proud of. And some of them have been recognised by our peers.

An award-winning agency

Our thoughts on the value of awards are well documented, but we certainly didn’t think that we’d be picking any up in our first few years. But we’ve got some clients whose ambitions match our own, and with the work that we’re doing having an almost instant impact, we had something to talk about and something to enter for awards.

The FIRM Awards: Best Development of an Employer Brand 2020 – Toolstation (Winner)
NORAs: Best Newcomer Award 2020 – Derbyshire Constabulary (Winner)
EBMAs: Best Employer Brand Management (Retail Sector) 2020 – Toolstation (Winner)
Communication Lens Awards: Best Use of Video (Media Sector) 2021 – The Telegraph (Winner)
RAD Awards: Employer Brand National 2021 – The Telegraph (Finalist)
Recruitment Marketing Awards: Employer Brand 2020 – The Telegraph (Finalist)
Recruitment Marketing Awards: Employer Brand 2020 – Toolstation (Finalist)

And there are a few that are still yet ti be announced this summer.

Recruiter Awards: Most Effective Employer Brand Development 2021 – The Telegraph (Finalist)
Personnel Today Awards: Employer Branding Award 2021 – The Telegraph (Finalist)
EBMAs: Best Employer Brand Management (Media Sector) 2021 – The Telegraph (Finalist)
s1jobs Recruitment Awards: Best Recruitment Website 2021 – NFU Mutual (Finalist)
Bristol Life Awards: Creative Business of the Year 2021 – That Little Agency (Finalist)

Not a bad little haul for 2020. Oh, yes and we also picked up the award for ‘Boutique Marketing Agency of the Year’ at the Bristol Prestige Awards. Were particularly proud of that one.

Sharing some great content

If you follow us (or Mark) on LinkedIn then you’ll know we’re working hard to help people negotiate the subjects of employer branding, marketing, careers websites and meaningful data through our blog. That’s because we wanted to not only show you how to do something – such as building and launching your careers website or developing your employer brand, we also wanted to help you show the results of your hard work.

In the last few months, we’ve covered:

What makes compelling content for your careers website?
Using a great candidate experience to help build your employer brand
Employer brand champions. How to get your people to share your story
But you can’t start a sentence with…

A real mixture of thoughts we’ve thunk around employer branding, careers website development and recruitment marketing.

Take a look at all of our articles on our blog

A new way of working

From day one we’ve made sure that everyone who works with us has the tools that they need to deliver great work. Laptops, mobiles, shared folders and VPN access has meant that we were already set up for remote working, COVID-19 just acted as a catalyst for establishing a new set of working practices. We call it ‘the world is our workplace’. Where everyone has the permission and support to work from wherever they feel most comfortable. Focussing on the delivery of key tasks and not the amount of time someone spends at a desk. We work in a way that we feel is best for the team, for the project and for our clients. Whether this is at home, in the office, in a coffee shop or even in the park if it is going to help them get the job done.

Saying thank you

It has been a great year. Challenging but thoroughly enjoyable. We’ve met some brilliant people, started working with some great clients, delivered some highly effective projects and picked up a couple of gongs. Not bad really for our cheeky little start-up. But we still don’t feel the time is right to celebrate. So we’ll wait until Christmas before we raise a glass to success. When we can invite everyone who had helped us in some shape or form over the past 18 months to join us for a boozy little lunch. No speeches. Well, maybe one little one.

What now?

Who knows what’s around the corner? So this year, I am not making any definite plans. We’ll continue supporting companies in telling their employer stories, we’ll deliver more high-quality (hopefully award-winning) projects and we’ll keep being told by our clients that they think we’re brilliant. And that’ll do for me. For now. Maybe things will change in 2022. Or maybe not. We’ll see.

If you feel that you’d like some help, support or even a little chat around defining your employer value proposition, developing your employer brand or any aspect of your talent attraction strategy just drop us a line. After all, much of our best work has started with a cup of tea and a biscuit.