Client profile
Based in Altrincham, Greater Manchester, Futura is the UK’s largest and most successful recruitment-to-recruitment company outside London – and is the Northwest’s rec2rec specialist.
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“The service we got from Labrow Marketing went way beyond providing an attractive design – although we got that too! Our new site leaps ahead of our competitors in terms of functionality and our proposition is communicated very clearly.”
Bernie Wilcox, Chairman, Futura
Futura
A fully content managed website for the largest recruitment-to-recruitment agency outside of London.
More than just a website – a complete on-line strategy
When the Northwest’s leading recruitment-to-recruitment company, which specialises in Greater Manchester, Cheshire and Northwest recruitment jobs, approached Labrow Marketing, the brief was to provide a new website, as the current one, it was felt, was substantially underperforming.
Rather than starting to design the new website right away, Labrow Marketing proposed that the nature of the issues was understood in depth. Futura felt that its current site suffered from having:
- very poor search engine performance.
- a very small number of visitors to the site.
- no connection between the site and the business.
So, Labrow Marketing undertook an extensive analysis programme, benchmarking Futura’s website with those of its leading competitors – that way, the new site could be specified and built around what was known compared to what was supposed.
The analysis looked at many factors of competitors’ websites, including the:
- search engine positions for specific keywords.
- ease of finding information.
- quality of design.
- technical quality of the sites, especially in terms of how ‘search engine friendly’ they were.
This enabled Futura to directly compare its own website with those of its competitors, using meaningful feedback – some of it empirical (such as search engine positions) and some of it based on an experienced viewpoint (such as quality of design). Based on this feedback, the strategy for the new website was developed.
The core of the proposition and the visual design was to focus on Futura’s leadership position in the Northwest rec2rec (recruitment-to-recruitment) market. A strong visual design, using images of Northwest landmarks, was selected.
It was decided that the ‘core’ of the site would be the advertised jobs and candidates, so this was made into a key visual feature – making it as easy as possible for candidates to find jobs – and for companies to find candidates. People can browse to jobs by selecting regions within the Northwest, regions outside the Northwest, and key industries. There is also a postcode search, which provides a fast list of jobs which are nearest to a specific postcode.
Candidates can get updates of the latest jobs delivered to them using SMS text messages to their mobile, RSS newsfeeds to their browser or e-mail alerts to their inbox. Other useful tools are also provided, such as the ability to send job information to a friend, and also add jobs to a shortlist so that a candidate can enquire about more than one job at once.
Free training, such as hints and tips and a professionally produced training podcast aimed specifically at recruiters, provides an additional incentive for recruitment professionals to visit the site.
The overall result is a site that has been built based on knowledge and acquired intelligence, rather than just a series of assumptions – helping to make the site not only more useful for visitors but also visually and functionally richer than those of Futura’s competitors.
This website was developed in partnership with Bawden Quinn Associates, which provided the technical development for the content management system and the integration with the postcode system used to find jobs by postcode.