It's the innovation that makes it work

We put digital thinking and practice at the heart of everything we do.
One size does not fit all. Every organisation should have its own digital strategy.
Results matter because effective metrics drive continuous improvement.
Keep it integrated: a well-planned strategy always beats knee-jerk reactions. 

For every project, large or small, we always take the time to understand your objectives. Whether it's a simple build or the creation of a complex online community, we work with you to define what success looks like and how we measure it. We make sure we know the target audience and how they behave online, so that we can create rewarding candidate journeys. And we use metrics to measure and improve performance. 

Why are metrics so very important in the digital world?

Digital Planning

Our media planning methodology puts you in the driving seat, exploiting the opportunities of the digital landscape to achieve your objectives

Effective digital media planning gives you a decisive edge over the competition when it comes to attracting and engaging with the right talent. It starts with digital research: we can find out everything you need to know about the behaviour and preferences of your target audience; we can map out the media landscape and measure the relative performance of available channels.

When you know what you're dealing with, we can help you identify the best approach to achieve your campaign objectives. It might be a tactical quick-response solution or a profile-raising brand solution; it might involve the development of a talent bank or something new and innovative that nobody has ever tried before. This is all about answering important questions about your best channels to market: what role will job boards, media networks, search engine marketing, social media, mobile or behavioural targeting have to play in your strategy? What combination of media will deliver the results you need?

We can help you distinguish between the valuable innovations and the over-hyped fad-wagons. And why? Because we are concerned about RESULTS and we are committed to MEASUREMENT. Whenever we plan media, we build in measures of effectiveness that give you transparency and a strong grasp of Return on Investment. So your media spend is not just a one-off cost but an investment in continuous improvement.

Digital Research

Everything and anything you need to know about the media landscape, audience demographics and behaviour and relative channel performance.

The world of digital media world is moving fast. There may be thousands of options but one combination of media will provide the optimum solution to engage with your target audience. Digital research is a key component of the digital planning process and it gives you absolute understanding of your audience. Our digital research team will show you around the current digital landscape and the media mix within it. They will also show you the media profile of your target audience, their behaviours, geographies and preferred method of consuming media. And they'll also show you that engaging with the people you want is a good deal easier than you might have thought.

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing from Pay Per Click to Search Engine Optimisation can deliver phenomenal results in both candidate generation and brand positioning: we can show you how.

Quite simply, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) involves the promotion of your website, or service, or career opportunity, using search engines such as Google, Yahoo! or Bing. With well over 130 billion searches being made globally on search engines every month, it's obvious that an effective SEM strategy can be a powerful tool when engaging with relevant talent. There are two main techniques: each has its own strengths and both have a role to play in effective digital strategies…

1. Pay per click (PPC)

PPC allows you to appear immediately at the top of relevant search results pages by sponsoring and optimising keywords and phrases.

2. Search engine optimisation (SEO)

SEO is the process of improving the quality and volume of visitors to your website by enabling it to appear naturally against relevant search queries. These results listings are commonly known as 'natural' or 'organic' results.

Online and Digital Media

We can help you identify the best online media channels to engage with your target audience and to meet your campaign objectives.

Don't be spoilt for choice. We can help you choose the best online media channels to engage with your target audience and meet your campaign objectives. Our digital planning and digital research teams will build a tailored solution for you which is guided and underpinned by effective measurement and analysis.

Mobile Technology

Short code, QR, IVR, web apps, native apps and web solutions - it's moving fast, but we can keep you ahead of the curve, harnessing the benefits and dodging the fads.

Mobile devices have transformed the way many people live their lives, and the pace of the revolution is picking up. Recent developments in handsets allow people to consume and engage with brands in entirely new ways. With Apple, Google and Blackberry all driving the market with constant innovation, the scope for mobile interaction is growing swiftly and steadily. This is why so many employers now build mobile strategy into their wider digital strategy, whether it's delivering a careers site via a mobile device or using the mobile internet as an advertising platform.

Social Media

We can steer you through the new landscape, arming you against the threats of the Hype Cycle and the Barbara Streisand Effect, while building a positive presence in the networks that matter to you.

With over a third of the UK population on Facebook alone, plus over four million UK professionals on networking sites like LinkedIn, social media are now an important part of the digital landscape. We can help you get your organisation ready, build your communities, and train you to interact, measure and exploit social media to the full. These are the benefits you can expect…

• Building an engaged community that is aligned with your employer brand.
• Gain a better understanding of what your community wants from you.
• Generate more engaged traffic to your website.
• Reach into communities that typically have not considered you as an employer of choice.
• Maximise your chance of hiring the best people.
• Drive SEO rankings higher for your careers website.

Measurement and analysis of social media is critical to understanding its effectiveness. It is also important to understand that traditional metric models do not always apply to social media solutions. We have developed a full suite of online reputation and measurement reports to show how your social media strategy is performing.

Onboarding

Digital on-boarding helps people to develop the sense of belonging that moves them smoothly from new recruit to engaged colleague. You're welcome.

The gap between accepting an offer and starting a new job can be an uncomfortable vacuum and it's almost always a missed opportunity. A secure web portal can help your new colleagues to feel part of the team before they even join, which means they hit the ground running on their first day. Not only is it possible to get some of the paperwork out of the way in advance, you can also build the commitment and engagement of the new joiner, giving them confidence that they have made the right career decision.

Onboarding started as a defensive measure in the most fiercely competitive talent markets where new employees were lost to competitors even before they started. It's now more widely used to get people up to speed in their new jobs as swiftly and smoothly as possible.

• Benefits briefing
• System specification
• Social networking
• Referencing
• Health and safety documentation
• Mentor contacts
• Current projects
• Virtual inductions

Website Build

We create websites large and small, but everything we make is informed by best practice in usability, accessibility and scalability. That's a lot of abilities, but we guarantee no gimmickry for its own sake, just interesting, innovative content that people want to visit again and again.

We build anything and everything, from global careers websites and campaign microsites, to intranets, extranets and Flash animations. We routinely build online applications that create new experiences for the user, but that innovative flair is based on a robust commitment to best build practice...

• PRINCE2-certified web producers manage the full project cycle from specification to maintenance.
• We comply with best practice in accessibility, updating our processes in line with technological advances.
• We provide vendor-independent consultancy on content-management, building for a lifetime, not just for roll-out.
• Ongoing hosting available on our own secure and dedicated web server environment.
• Comprehensive measurement, SEO and tracking solutions help to optimise your web presence.

Employee Engagement

So many things count as employee engagement, from attitude surveys and staff consultation to leadership development; they all depend on digital delivery.

Digital communication was made for employee engagement because it puts the focus on the individual user and it promotes relationships, dialogues and positive interaction. It's not just another media choice: it's about how people relate to their role, their colleagues and the working environment; it's a practical expression of the culture, not just a commentator on it. Fundamentally, digital media allow you to communicate in a way that best suits the audience. Whether you're sampling the attitudes of a dispersed global workforce or inviting business leaders to take part in 360 feedback sessions, digital solutions make it happen. Find out more about our work in employee engagement

Measuring Effectiveness

Metrics and Analysis is a special interest for work, because it is so powerful in optimising media performance and ROI across the attraction and engagement cycle.

Digital media have exceptional reach and impact, but they are also uniquely measurable: there is real scope for tuning and continuous improvement over time. This is why we believe that measuring effectiveness should be the foundation and starting point of any digital strategy. Measurement is not simply a question of tracking and reporting on every possible variable: it needs to be fundamentally linked to your business objectives and goals. Benchmarks and targets should be set in advance as a basis for understanding and raising the performance of your campaigns. We have developed a world-class metrics and reporting system that will provide you with meaningful analysis supplied in the format and timeframe that works best for your business. For example…

• Full media metrics, analysis and trends
• Cost per hire by media analysis
• Website usability and trends
• ATS pipeline reports
• Brand monitoring of online reputation

A rigorous approach to measurement provides insights and data that can be used in predictive modelling techniques that allow us accurately to predict the outcome of a given advertising campaign before it runs.

Internal Communications

How do you grab people's attention when they are already receiving a million emails a minute? We have some ideas.

Information overload is an occupational hazard in many workplaces. People are deluged with messages: some are urgent, some are important and some are a complete waste of time – and it can be difficult to know which is which – so they ALL get junked. Improvements to internal communications often begin with a simple audit of the available channels and user behaviour inside the organisation; this is a consulting technique borrowed directly from Digital Planning. The understanding of the digital landscape that powers external campaigns can also help us to build two-way relationships with colleagues; rather than simply broadcasting corporate directives which get lost and ignored among the background noise, we can establish the kind of dialogues that drive dialogue and engagement.

Find out more about Internal communications here

Candidate Assessment

Online assessment strips cost and delay out of the selection cycle, while guaranteeing objective, consistent decisions about people. It also promotes high-quality hiring by showing candidates what they're getting into.

Digital media take the science of objective assessment and deliver it consistently in recruitment exercises where the volumes are high, the locations are dispersed or the audience is difficult to reach. It's not just a question of making the right selection choices, although this is the cardinal benefit of online assessment. It's also about delivering a positive candidate experience that helps people understand the opportunity and builds their motivation to join.

ATS Management

Our vendor-neutral advice helps you get the right technology in if you're buying – or make the best use of existing technology if you're not.

Applicant Tracking Systems do what they say on the tin – or rather they should do. They can take the administrative drudgery out of volume recruitment, they support a high-quality candidate experience and they should also provide the management information that puts you in the driving seat of the recruitment process. If the reality sometimes falls short of the promise, this can often be traced back to inadequate user training or faulty configuration. There are many proprietary systems on the market and we work with all of them. We are vendor-neutral which means we can work with whatever you have: we have particular expertise in tuning systems to help you get the most out of available technology. If you need a new system, we are happy to help you define your needs and specify the best solution.