Give A Grad A Go is a global graduate recruitment agency that challenged our team to completely overhaul their digital infrastructure and marketing. They needed help to enable their team, expand their market share and elevate their customer experience.
We delivered a new brand, website and marketing strategy, as well as a custom self-service jobs portal.
- Lead time:
- 28 weeks
- Sector:
- Recruitment
- Target Type:
- B2B & B2C
- Demographic
- Employers & Graduate Candidates
- Website Goal:
- Increase pool of employers and graduates, improve Google rankings, enable marketing team
- Services:
- Digital Transformation, Branding, Digital Marketing, Web Design, Web Development, eCommerce, Jobs Portal, WordPress, Laravel
‘We’ve had a brilliant experience working with Plug & Play — I wouldn’t have trusted this project to any other of the agencies we initially spoke to.’
The challenge
Give A Grad had ambitious growth targets and were ready to rethink their customer experience and utilise beautiful design and high performance technology to achieve their objectives.
They challenged us to create a new brand identity and launch a sector leading recruitment website that would showcase their offering and attract graduate employers and job seekers with an effective marketing strategy.
Give A Grad also partnered with us to deliver a self-service jobs portal that would enable them to tap into a new part of the recruitment market. The website and jobs portal needed to integrate seamlessly to deliver the best user experience to job seekers.
- Scope
- UX & UI Design
- Adobe XD Wireframe Prototypes
- Adobe XD Design Prototypes
- WordPress Development
- Laravel Development
- WordPress Website
- Multi-territory
- Jobs Portal
- International SEO Strategy
- Brand Identity
- Digital Transformation
- Resource
- 1 x Lead Designer
- 1 x UX Designer
- 1 x Brand Designer
- 1 x Technical Lead
- 1 x Laravel Developer
- 1 x WordPress Developer
- 1 x Digital Marketing Specialist
- 1 x Quality Assurance Tester
- 1 x Project Manager
Digital transformation
The project involved a number of interfaces and required a complete overhaul of their technology. Our team created a digital transformation roadmap and strategically selected technology to meet the current and future needs of the business.
SEO
Give a Grad A Go already had an established digital footprint in the UK and Australia and ranked for a variety of high value keywords. Our team delivered an SEO strategy that would take their search engine rankings to the next level by growing existing rankings and expanding their keywords targets.
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Increase in UK search engine visibility following launch
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Increase in Australian search engine visibility following launch
The charts above show Give A Grad A Go’s keyword rankings following the new website launch. The blue bars represent positions 1-3 in Google, green bars represent rankings on the rest of page 1, and purple bars represent page 2 rankings.
The international website
The new website design specifically targets graduates, utilising the new brand identity to create a playful and fun design that aligns with Give A Grad’s target audience.
We developed the website in WordPress with 2 territories to target the UK and Australia. Each territory has optimised regional messaging and a regional SEO strategy to maximise reach, discoverability and conversion rate.
Resource hub
We grouped articles into user friendly guides that provide a continuous user journey that encourages content consumption and keeps users on the site.
Design style
We created a playful website design that would appeal to Give A Grad’s target demographic.
Job search
As the powerhouse of the new website, the job search needed to be fast, intuitive and deliver high quality results. We introduced a number of new features to provide a seamless and engaging user experience.
- A split screen view for easy job searching
- An optimised text layout for job post skim-ability
- A tagging structure to highlight job benefits
- A map view to visually represent locations
Jobs portal
We launched a new self-service jobs portal that enables Give A Grad to capture a greater percentage of the recruitment market. The portal enables employers and candidates to manage job ads and applications and seamlessly integrates with the website.
Our UX design team constructed optimised UX designs and user flows to deliver a portal that is intuitive, fast and engaging. Our developers coded the portal using Laravel which provides Give A Grad with a flexible framework that can be expanded as the business need grows.
Developing the brand
Give A Grad’s old brand was dated and no longer reflected the business size and position in the market. They needed a new brand identity that would provide greater flexibility and could grow with the business.
We created a playful and bold brand that targeted graduates and appeared professional and trustworthy to employers. Balancing the two main audience types was critical to producing a successful brand.
Logo
Drawing on inspiration from brands such as Whatsapp, the speech bubble represents approachability and the ‘keeping in touch’ culture.
The use of lowercase letters in the logo creates a personable feel in contrast to the corporate image presented by many competitor brands.
Shape & form
We created a series of fun shapes to compliment the new logo. The shapes act like physical stickers and can be overlapped to break up layouts and create depth.
Patterns
We created 4 core brand patterns that are a nod to sketchbook aesthetics. They add texture to large areas and elevate simple content into something fresh and interesting.
Colour & gradients
The new colour palette combines vibrant dark and light colours that can also be utilised as gradients. We established colour pairing guidelines to enable the Give A Grad team to consistently apply the brand colours.
