Root RPO

Root RPO provides embedded talent support for scaling businesses, covering employer branding, recruitment advisory and embedded talent specialists placed inside client teams. Tom Brown, Al Frater and the team launched the business with a clear philosophy and needed a brand to carry it. Halt created the identity and the brochure website they went to market with.

The Brief

There is a particular pressure in building a brand for a business that builds brands.

Root RPO offer employer branding as one of their three core services, and they have an Employer Brand Director on the team. They know exactly what good looks like, and their own identity had to stand up to that scrutiny. It is the kind of brief that concentrates the mind, and one of the more flattering a design team can be handed.

The proposition itself is a considered one. Root take a strategic view of talent acquisition, working on the principle that a team is the best product any company will ever build, and their brand needed to communicate that thinking straight away. There was a lot to hold: three interconnected services, a performance-based commercial model quite different from traditional agency fees, and a tone that is warm and conversational while talking to founders and executives about something they take very seriously.

Alongside the identity, Root needed a brochure website to launch on.

Our Actions

The identity landed on green and pink with a minimalist arrow mark, which gives Root real distinctiveness in a sector that leans heavily on blues and greys. It is confident and modern without shouting, and it matches a business with a warm, encouraging tone of voice.

The brand also had to carry three services that belong together: Root Employer Branding, Root Advisory and Root Embedded Talent. Each needs to stand as its own offer while making the parent brand stronger every time it appears, so the naming and the visual system were built to do exactly that. Getting that architecture right at launch saves a business a great deal of trouble later.

The brochure site then set the whole proposition out clearly: the three services, the philosophy behind them, and the commercial model that makes Root different, all in a structure a scaling business can follow without effort.

Our Results

Root RPO went to market with an identity that holds its own against the standard they set for their own clients, which is the endorsement that matters most on a project like this one.

The brand gives them genuine distinctiveness. In a market of blue logos and cautious language, green, pink and a clean arrow mark get noticed and remembered, and that counts for a lot when a new business is introducing itself.

The service architecture means Root can talk about employer branding, advisory or embedded talent individually, and every conversation builds the same parent brand. And the brochure site gives Tom, Al and the team somewhere to send a prospect that explains the model properly before a first call.

For a start-up whose whole business is helping companies present themselves well, launching with a brand that does the same is a good place to begin.