With the halls decked, the bells a-jingling and our little Christmas party fast approaching, it seems that we’ve become a tad reflective. Reflective on what has been a really, really interesting year. So now seems to be a good time to tell our little story. Part four.
We’ve grown a great little client base
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, presenting and hosting breakfast seminars is paying off. We feel very lucky to have worked with the likes of Jaguar Land Rover, Leicester City Council, NFU Mutual, Nisbets, Pinsent Masons, Telegraph Media Group, Toolstation and Vectura 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 Oli Nitch-Smith.
We knew Oli when we were at ThirtyThree, and his knowledge of careers websites, applicant tracking systems and biddable media are unrivalled. And we are blessed to have him in our little agency. Clients love him. The design and development team love him. He’s been with us a year and we celebrated this milestone by buying a beer fridge.
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 Leicester City Council
We developed an employer brand for Toolstation
We designed, developed and delivered a careers website for Toolstation
We designed, developed and delivered a new graduate recruitment campaign for Pinsent Masons
We helped deliver a new website for Manchester Metropolitan University
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 is 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.
What we ended up with was:
FIRM Awards: Best development of an employer brand for Hastings Direct – Winner (Website)
All About Law Awards: Best website for Pinsent Masons – Winner (Website)
OnRec Awards: Best corporate use of online recruitment for Phoenix Group– Finalist (Website)
Recruiter Awards: Most effective employer brand development for Hastings Direct– Finalist (Website)
Recruitment Marketing Awards: Most effective employer brand development for Toolstation – Finalist (Website)
Chip Shop Awards: Ad most likely to start World War 3 – Highly Commended (Website)
And we’ve just found out that the work we’ve done with Toolstation has been shortlisted in the ‘Best Employer Brand’ category of the RAD Awards. As would expect, we’re cock-a-hoop.
Not a bad little haul for 2019. Oh, yes and Mark was even shortlisted for ‘Recruitment Industry Entrepreneur of the Year’ at this year’s Recruiter Awards. Sadly, he didn’t win. But we’ve already seen new business enquiries coming from people who’ve seen us shortlisted or picking up an award. So, see, awards are still valuable.
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 build and launch your careers website and develop an employer brand, we also wanted to help you show the results of your hard work.
This year we’ve covered:
Google Analytics, your careers website and your candidates
Recruitment metrics, what you should be recording, how and why
Making sure Google can find your careers website and vacancies
Measuring your online application process with Google Analytics
All this focus on Google and measurement doesn’t mean we ignored employer branding this year. Far from it. If you have employer branding on your 2020 to-do list, you won’t go far wrong with our most popular piece of content this year.
Building your employer brand. A ten-point checklist
Written to help you plan and deliver your employer branding project it covered everything from getting sign-off on the project to deciding what awards to enter. Well, why not?
Saying thank you
It has been a great year. Challenging but thoroughly enjoyable. We’ve met some brilliant people, been engaged by some great clients, delivered some highly effective work and picked up a couple of gongs. Not bad really for our cheeky little start-up. So what better way to celebrate Christmas then by saying thank you. We invited everyone who had helped us in some shape or form over the past 12 months to join us for a boozy little lunch. No speeches. Well, maybe one little one.
What now?
We think that the next 12 months are going to be really important to the agency. We’ll continue supporting companies in telling their employer stories, we’ll deliver more high-quality (hopefully award-winning) projects and we’ll keep getting told by our clients that they think we’re brilliant. One thing’s for sure December 13th will be a quiet day in TLA towers.
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.
