Looking to brand or rebrand your recruitment business but have no idea where to start? 

Branding is so much more than simply creating a logo and website; it’s creating a visual identity that will shine through in every you do. Therefore, it’s vitally important that you get it right, so the end result leaves you with a brand that means as much to your clients and candidates as it does to you and your teams. 

Embarking on a project that will either be/change the face of your business isn’t something that should be done on the fly and needs a well thought out and delivered effectively to ensure its success. 

Here are our seven essential tips for branding your recruitment business:

What is the purpose of your brand?

There are five key questions you need to ask yourself when discovering/rediscovering the purpose of your brand:

• Why your business exists?
• What differentiates your business in the market?
• What problems does your business solve?
• How your business solves these problems?
• Why your target audience will buy from your business?

Answering these key questions will enable you to discover the purpose of your brand and give you the basis of which you can build out your brand, strapline, messaging, tone of voice and visual identity.

Research your competitors

Researching what your competitors are up to shouldn’t be approached as an exercise that will leaves you being envious of them, or in many cases, a box-ticking exercise to ensure you do the same as them.

The goal is to inform and inspire you to ensure your brand differentiates from them and gives you an identity that will support you in convincing your target audience to buy from you, instead of them.  

The biggest challenge your brand will face is standing out from the competition, so it’s crucial to the success of your branding project that you don’t miss this step.  

To keep it simple, choose no more than three competitors initially and then research their websites, social accounts and Google search results to help you answer the following questions: 

• Is it easy to understand what problems they solve, how they do it and why target audiences should buy from them?
• What differentiates them in the market?
• Is their website easy to navigate?  
• Is it obvious how they market their brand and services? If so, what tactics are they undertaking?

Identify your target audience

The next key step is knowing exactly who your target audience is, what’s important to them, what challenges they are facing and what they are influenced by. Many businesses make the mistake of hashing together a brand that just focuses on themselves and promoting their services, without considering the audience’s pain points and needs. 

Instead, take the time to get to truly understand who your target audience is and what they care about.

If you haven’t already, you’ll want to develop audience personas for both your clients and candidates. In short, these are profiles with basic information and demographics of what challenges they face, what inspires them, and what they look for when searching for a recruitment business to support them.

A quick guide to what information you need to create an audience persona

Kick-off by making a list of key information you need to capture and then make some general assumptions and observations about your target audience based on your previous experience and engagement with them. Key information to list and answer include:

💼 Job Title/Position/Industry

🎂 Typical Age

🎓 Education

📍Location/Commute

😎 Personality

🤔 Introvert or Extrovert

🎨 Analytical or Creative

⚖️ Conservative or Liberal

👋 Passive or Active

🎯 Personal Goals & Motivations

🚀 Companies Goals

😱 Frustrations, Pain-Points, Challenges

🫶 Brands they are inspired by 

Conduct market research and subtly sense-check these with existing clients and candidates to find out what information they look for, what stops them scrolling and what they care about most when using social media in a professional capacity. Once you’ve compiled your research, start to flesh out your audience personas.

Create your mission statement

A mission statement is the ‘why’ and ‘what’ your business does!

In order to create a brand that means as much to your clients and candidates as it does to you and your teams, you need to know what value your business provides.   

Your mission statement must capture the core purpose of your business and forms the foundation of your brand identity. This in turn then needs to be reflected in your logo, strapline, messaging, tone of voice and personality to ensure it resonates with your target audiences.  

Imagine you are describing what your business does to a child or elderly relative, your mission statement is effectively what you do in one sentence.

Discover your brand personality and tone of voice

Your brand personality and tone of voice shine through in how you communicate with your target audiences; therefore, it needs to be aligned with your audience personas to ensure your brand resonates with them. 

In a similar exercise to identifying your target audience, ask yourself if your brand personality and tone of voice are the following:

• Informal or Formal 
• Serious or Humorous 
• Mature or Youthful 
• Flexible or Rigid 
• Niche or Full Service 
• Traditional or Digital 
• Clear or Vague 
• Strategic or Reactive 
• Standard or Distinctive 
• Established or New kids on the block 

Understanding your brand personality and tone of voice is important when developing a social strategy and producing content for your website and social media. Ensuring consistency will strengthen engagement with your target audience and followers, as they will quickly come to expect a certain look, feel and tone when they engage with your brand and content.

Unsure where to start with developing a content strategy, check out our 10 Tops Tips for creating a social media strategy for recruitment businesses. 

Develop your messaging

Your messaging should be immediately associated with your brand and tell the world who you are on a human level, in order to create an emotional connection with your target audience. 

Combing your findings from your brand purpose, mission statement, brand personality and tone of voice, build out your brand messaging in the following structure:

• Why do you exist?
• What problems do you solve?
• How do you do it?

Create your visual identity

The most exciting part of any rebranding project is creating the visual identity of your brand. It’s what will shine through in everything you and your business do going forward. 

Having completed the steps above, you will now have a clear understanding of what your brand needs to look like and represent, enabling you to brief professional designers or a branding agency on what you need in order to stand out in the market and captivate your target audiences. 

Unsure what you need when creating a visual identity, here’s a checklist to help you:  

• Logo design (responsive to work across all platforms and mediums) 
• Brand Guidelines featuring:
• Logo usage and placement 
• Colour palette
• Typography and fonts
• Photography/Imagery style
• Iconography
• Illustrations 
• Sales collateral 
• User templates and toolkits (Letterheads, Presentation decks etc)
• Print design (brochures, leaflets, business cards)
• Social media graphics and user templates
• Website elements 
• Motion graphics 
• Video templates
• Signage and stationery 
• Merchandise design 
• Interior and workplace design 
• Signage and stationery 
• Merchandise design 

Struggling for the resources or investment needed to build a brand and visual identity that matches your ambitions? Kick off your journey and increase your chances of success with our affordable creative branding packages.