A Guide to EMPLOYER BRANDING AND RECRUITMENT MARKETING SPECIALISTS
Introducing our Agency 3 EVP & Employer Branding 4 Talent Attraction 5 Career Websites 6 Employee Communications 7 Research 8 Social Media 9 Video 10 Design & Print 11 Media Planning & Buying 12 Early Careers 13 Diversity & Inclusion 14 Winning Awards 15 Our Clients 16 Getting in Touch 17 2
WDAD Communications provides the expertise, imagination and inspiration to help organisations recruit and retain the right people. We’re specialists in Employer Branding and Recruitment Marketing with over 30 years’ experience of working with HR teams, in-house recruiters and recruitment companies in all sectors. Not only do we get results, we also reduce the overall costs associated with hiring. Why use us? Because we provide objective, intelligent strategies and uncompromising creativity that will help you crack the most challenging recruitment conundrums. We partner with clients in the UK and internationally. Our services include EVP and employer branding, career website design and build, employee engagement and internal comms, social media attraction, diversity and inclusion strategies, and recruitment media planning and buying. What differentiates us is the depth of our customer relationships and award-winning design, creative and production services, combined with a talent for doing the basics well. Our wholly independent business is 100% focused on helping organisations achieve their business objectives - and nothing makes us happier than satisfied clients.
EVP & Employer Branding ENHANCING YOUR REPUTATION We can help identify, communicate and manage your reputation as an employer. It’s a research-led strategic exercise that could take the form of employee surveys, in-depth interviews, focus groups, competitor benchmarking and market analysis that in simple terms helps us to understand everything that matters to employees at work; it’s what makes you ‘unique’. This is your Employer Value Proposition, and once agreed, our awardwinning creative team will use this as the foundation to help visualise and articulate it through your employer brand. We will make sure that everything you say, at every touch point of the candidate journey from initial attraction right the way through to induction and beyond will be consistent, impactful and built on fact. Based on three core values of Become your Best, Make Friends and Have Fun, we developed the ‘Hungry For’ employer brand for Pizza Hut which has been used by their equity and franchise businesses across the UK and Ireland. For Frimley Health NHS Trust we undertook internal and external research to develop an EVP and a distinct employer brand which was rolled-out across their website, advertising collateral, brochures, and a wide range of internal comms material. 4
5 Talent Attraction STANDING OUT FROM THE CROWD Whether brand building, or driving traffic for specific roles and campaigns, our creative team’s strength is based on three factors. Their talent for producing bold, imaginative and original ideas. Their ability to turn those ideas into a highly polished final product. And the fact that everything they create whether copy content or design, has a clear, logical and persuasive argument behind it. And when combined with our media planning and buying expertise, we’re confident we can find the talent you need. Whether traditional job boards, programmatic campaigns, targeted social, out of home, radio, podcasts, or print campaigns, this combination of style and substance guarantees eye-catching, effective work, whatever the media channel and whatever the budget. From web build to social networking and traditional online advertising, we created a highly successful senior leadership campaign for the iconic Bobby Moore Academy. Following our EVP discovery, we rolled out a new employer brand that included a suite of online and offline collateral using ‘composited’ images of their people and projects to help Sir Robert McAlpine really stand out from their competitors.
6 Career Websites TURNING INTEREST INTO APPLICATIONS We’ve helped some of the UK’s leading digital brands and organisations across all sectors to develop their online presence. We design and build careers websites that are impactful and engage our clients’ future talent giving them a positive and meaningful insight into their organisation - its culture, its values and of course, its people and career opportunities. Our sites are built from mobile up, and are fully responsive on tablets and desktop devices. SEO is embedded into the very core of our platforms and through an easy-to-use CMS you will have the opportunity to control and update the content, although we’re always on hand to help and support you if required. Whether fully-fledged careers sites or smaller ones dedicated to specific campaigns, we have a wealth of experience at delivering timely, cost-effective and engaging destination sites. A pan-European website for PPHE Hotel Group showcasing 15 different consumer brands in a beautifully designed and effective careers site. Designed from mobile up, this website showcases the amazing GFSL team who are responsible for the upkeep of the facilities and estates in nearly 50 prisons. We designed and built a deliciously responsive site for Pizza Hut which features engaging videos and GPS job search functionality.
7 Employee Communications ENGAGING YOUR PEOPLE Getting people to join you is one thing. Keeping them engaged and invested is something altogether different. From engagement surveys, on-boarding portals and induction materials, employee referral schemes, rewards and recognition initiatives and events, right the way through to advocacy and full-blown organisational and cultural change programmes, we have the experience and expertise of working with internal comms and HR teams to make a real difference. We helped to introduce a values and behaviours framework for North Middlesex University Hospital NHS Trust, culminating in their first Staff Awards event, which we project managed. WDAD were asked to create an impactful film that the Chief Constable could play at employee workshops to celebrate the Force’s moving out of ‘special measures’. Having designed the employer brand for St Andrew’s Healthcare, we then rolled it out across a suite of employee engagement materials including their career pathways booklets, refer-a-friend schemes, offer and induction packs etc.
Research We undertook several focus groups and in-depth telephone interviews across all the Whitbread brands, which amongst other things was used to help support their Table Table corporate launch. Following some of the country’s worstever flooding, we were commissioned by the Environment Agency to undertake an extensive national research programme across eight regions to find the next generation of Flood-Risk Engineers. UNCOVERING THE FACTS Research supports every aspect of our work at WDAD from informing the brief to testing creative work and analysing the results of the campaign. It also underpins all our EVP projects, ensuring our clients’ employer brands are authentic, compelling and targeted. Employing the full range of qualitative and quantitative tools, our Research and Employer Brand Consultants can gain invaluable insights into your organisation, your perspective employees, and your competitors, all of which adds an extra dimension to our work and provides you with a competitive advantage when attempting to attract and retain the very best talent. Our extensive EVP research programme and subsequent analysis for Softcat led to the identification of an overall value proposition, as well as subsidiary ones or ‘reasons to buy’ for specific talent market segments. INSPIRING SUCCESS 8
9 Social Media Our award-winning 12 month social media campaign featuring Ferne McCann resulted in a 30% increase in applications from females wanting to become Bus Drivers. ENGAGING WITH YOUR AUDIENCE To help grow online followers and build online reputations and employer brands, we create social engagement plans and produce regular content and collateral assets for clients to use across their own organic posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X and other social channels. We also use key social networks, Google Adwords and Google Display Network remarketing in our advertising strategies. Using AI tech, we assess skills, job titles, experience, education and qualifications, search behaviour, interests, and other contextual data points to serve creative adverts to highly relevant passive candidates. Our bespoke social media advertising campaigns typically run for up to a month, and uses behavioural and contextual targeting to generate a highly relevant and high quality response.
10 Video GIVING YOUR ORGANISATION A HUMAN FACE Whether recruiting new talent, or communicating with those already in your employment, video is the most effective way to showcase the very best that your organisation has to offer. We have the capability to shoot videos around the globe, using a range of techniques and styles to create a glimpse into the unique culture and benefits that you have to offer. Video is great for mobile, and importantly, people generally recall 50% of what they see and hear as opposed to the 10% of what they read, therefore the ROI can be significant. It is also great from a Google perspective. And what’s more, once you have the film content it can be edited and used as part of your social strategy and in your advertising campaigns to great effect. We shot this film for North Middlesex University Hospital NHS Trust to showcase their apprenticeship scheme. This short and highly engaging and innovative stop-motion animation for Softcat perfectly sums up the culture and USPs of the company. A three day shoot in Amsterdam and London gave us the opportunity to capture some amazing employee stories to bring Park Plaza’s employer brand to life. This video celebrates how career opportunities and work life balance go hand-in-hand.
11 Design & Print MAKING YOU STAND OUT WDAD offers you creative expertise in branding and design for recruitment and corporate materials alike; from logo design, candidate packs, employee handbooks, on-boarding brochures, mailers, posters, annual reports, roller banners, exhibition stands and giveaways, to just about anything else you can print on. We have an excellent eye for detail and crucially, a highly agile team that from brief to the supply of finished artwork can turn around highly-polished work extremely quickly. And through our close relationship with a number of printers, we have a knack of securing some pretty good print costs too. WDAD created a striking visual style to help employees embrace a new set of values and behaviours. The initial roll-out expanded to include various areas such as advertising, induction, freedom to speak and anti-bullying, as well as staff recognition material. We also organised and managed the Trust’s hugely successful Employee Awards’ events. For the Careers in Hospitality exhibition, our ‘eatsleepdrink’ theme was applied to the design of Whitbread’s stand and to all the supporting material including corporate video and promotional campaigns. The employer brand strapline later became their corporate strapline. We created a beautifully crafted e-candidate pack incorporating video to really help Manchester Metropolitan University stand out.
12 Media Planning & Buying FINDING THE RIGHT AUDIENCE We cover everything from traditional job boards and Indeed to far more targeted jobs and display marketing programmatic campaigns, mobile and AI-powered social media programmes, as well as outdoor formats and all forms of printed media. Our clients trust us to separate the hype from the reality and apply the elements that will deliver results, which can be tangibly demonstrated via metrics. Accessibility and inclusion are central to all of our proposals, and wherever it’s available, we’ll use data to demonstrate how we can reach all target demographics whether here in the UK or anywhere in the world. We executed a year-long, high-visibility creative campaign for South London and Maudsley Foundation NHS Trust that used traditional print media as well as online and social channels to help recruit over 150 Band 5 Mental Health Nurses. It saved them nearly £2million in staffing agency fees! We’ve planned and run highly successful programmatic campaigns for various locations in the USA, Mexico and the UK for AIG; a global leader in commercial and personal insurance solutions.
13 Early Careers CREATING THE RIGHT IMPRESSION We work with organisations both large and small to help plan and execute entry-level campaigns. We use research to develop targeted EVP messaging and an employer brand to promote awareness of internships, apprenticeships and graduate schemes. WDAD has the experience and expertise to help you make a strong first impression in this highly competitive sector, whether through advertising, on-campus marketing, social engagement or early careers website development. For several years we’ve worked with Stagecoach to help attract apprentices and graduates to their Engineering, Management and Financial group-wide schemes. We delivered an on-campus experience for Softcat which included a highly popular interactive memory game. We created a brand for the Whitbread Apprenticeship scheme that rolled out across advertising material, exhibition events, competitions, Facebook and a dedicated microsite.
14 Equality, Diversity & Inclusion We succeeded in challenging the perception that bus driving was a maleonly career with our award-winning Women behind the Wheel campaign for Stagecoach London. St Andrew’s Healthcare needed a vibrant brochure to highlight their journey to becoming a truly inclusive organisation. We were able to help them tell their story and highlight their many accolades and awards, including being number one in the Stonewall Healthcare Equality index. We also produced a series of similarly designed advertisements for diversity media. CELEBRATING DIFFERENCES WDAD can help you to understand the perspectives of people with different cultures and experiences. You’ll discover how they perceive your organisation, the barriers to engagement, and what they want to hear about you. We’ll help to make you more attractive and inclusive as an employer, enabling you to attract and hire the best talent from the widest pool, and then making sure that they feel like they belong by fostering a culture of respect and giving everyone a voice. And it’s not just about the overall strategy; we help at the tactical level too. For example, making the language of your job listings more inclusive. Or ensuring your website is accessible to visitors who are neurodivergent. Some of our initiatives addressing gender inequalities have been recognised nationally, as well as being highly successful.
Winning Awards Over the years, we’ve created highly effective and impactful solutions for our clients that have been recognised at numerous awards ceremonies. Here are just a small selection: TIARA TALENT ATTRACTION AWARDS • Best Employer Brand: Tata Consultancy Services - FINALIST RAD AWARDS • Best Campaign: Whitbread - FINALIST • Best Central Government: Defence Vetting Agency - WINNER CIPD RECRUITMENT MARKETING AWARDS • Best Diversity & Inclusion Initiative: Stagecoach London - FINALIST • Best Press Advertisement: Bidwells - WINNER GROCERY ADVERTISING & MARKETING INDUSTRY AWARDS • Recruitment Agency of the Year: WDAD - WINNER • Best Recruitment Campaign: Costa - WINNER PPMA AWARDS • Best Employer Brand: Royal Borough Kensington & Chelsea - FINALIST • Best Frontline Campaign: South London & Maudsley NHS Trust - FINALIST • Best Value Campaign: Warwickshire Police & West Mercia Police - FINALIST • Best Resourcing Provider: WDAD and Lewisham & Greenwich NHS Trust - WINNER 15
A SELECTION OF CLIENTS WE’VE PARTNERED: 16
Getting in touch To find out how we can help you, please contact Mike Heal, Managing Director. 020 7025 3500 mike@wdad.co.uk www.wdad.co.uk Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH 17
your-brochure-online.co.ukRkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTI5NzM=