How Maxwell Bond utilised LinkedIn to increase brand awareness, challenge traditional industry perceptions and establish itself as the recruiter of choice
SUCCESS STORY
A recruitment consultancy that puts people first
Maxwell Bond, the award-winning tech and digital recruitment specialist, was founded by Steven Jagger in 2016, and was established because of a deep desire to create a recruitment consultancy that puts people first.
Steven wanted to challenge the traditional, often negative perceptions of the recruitment industry and to position Maxwell Bond as a recruiter of choice, by increasing its visibility and using intelligent marketing to challenge the status quo. This involved a focus on reputational marketing and letting their people, clients, and candidates speak for them, to build a strong reputation for doing the right thing.
Utilising their partnership with LinkedIn and their key successes with the platform, Maxwell Bond now upskill their own clients, providing strategy advice and content support to help them build their employer brand.
THE CHALLENGE
Growing brand awareness
Since its inception, Maxwell Bond has used LinkedIn to source talent and build its market share but with expansion plans on the horizon, the consultancy needed to turn up the dial and take its brand marketing to the next level.
At first, Jagger outsourced Maxwell Bond’s marketing function, but soon realised that it required in-house marketing expertise. Bethany Stevens joined the agency. As Senior Marketing Executive, Bethany quickly accelerated Maxwell Bond’s presence within the tech and digital recruitment market, heightening the company’s profile and building significant brand awareness.
However, Bethany faced sizeable challenges against stiff, ever-growing competition. She needed all Maxwell Bond employees to invest in marketing. This would help to position the business as the recruitment partner of choice in the UK and Germany. To do this, she had to demonstrate that Maxwell Bond’s recruiters were knowledgeable and dispel common recruitment perceptions. Furthermore, it fell to Bethany to escalate Maxwell Bond’s presence in Germany, which continues to be a growing market for the organisation.
“I joined Maxwell Bond as their first in-house marketer in 2019,” explained Bethany. “Before that, all marketing was outsourced, which was mainly just social media posts. My role was to build the marketing function in house, which started with solidifying and building out a great brand and a new website. I needed to create more content that was niche, original, and bespoke to our business, but also build out a branded platform presence to share this through, and then direct relevant and targeted traffic back to our website to encourage job applications or enquiries. I also needed the team to become more engaged with the brand and marketing to achieve this.”
THE SOLUTION
Delivering value, demonstrating knowledge and providing key market insight
It was time to add more to their value proposition. Maxwell Bond leveraged LinkedIn, particularly the platform’s Talent Insights solution. Bethany said: “LinkedIn has always been a big part of our recruitment process. In the last two to three years, we have invested more in the platform, giving our consultants access to Insights and Recruiter tools. This allows them to really stand out as consultants.”
Consultants use the real-time data found in LinkedIn’s Talent Insights reports to explain the recruitment landscape to clients. Bethany continued: “For example, we can use the data to explain to clients why roles have not been filled. We can explain to them why they are struggling to attract talent; we can explain where talent is moving from and to and we can show our clients what they are offering in terms of salary and benefits and compare it to other sectors. Such insight has helped us to boost salaries or alter benefits packages to make clients more attractive. We share this detail, in the form of infographics, on our social channels. It shows the market that ‘we have knowledge’ and we have insight.”
Team members are empowered to use LinkedIn tools to their full potential, positioning the business as an expert. Tangible results are then shared with the team, demonstrating the value of marketing insight.
Growing confidence to forge strong client relationships
Valuable data is shared with clients, guiding them through decision making processes, helping them to resolve talent bottlenecks and pain points. Again, Maxwell Bond is positioned as a valued knowledge resource, with LinkedIn giving the team confidence to fortify a strong client relationship.
Bespoke content – posted on LinkedIn – has differentiated the company from other recruitment agencies that simply push out CVs, and Maxwell Bond’s About Us pages and Life Pages have enabled the agency to segregate the brand into UK, Germany, and Internal, and direct specific traffic to each page depending on their motivation for visiting. Again, using LinkedIn Talent Insights, Maxwell Bond has been able to provide data driven content and general consultancy to German prospective clients to showcase that it knows the market.
Bethany explained: “Our consultants now know how to access and use the data provided through Insights to be the expert in their market, effectively use Recruiter to identify the top tech talent for our clients, provide an honest and transparent consultation to their clients, and guide decision making throughout the recruitment process.”
Driving traffic through LinkedIn
LinkedIn has been a trusted partner to Maxwell Bond beyond the tools on the platform. For example, LinkedIn provided Maxwell Bond with specific training on how to write and optimise InMails. This is in stark contrast to the generic and traditional marketing practices that were adopted prior to the huge brand awareness push.
Bethany concluded: “Our consultants have really started to see the value of online branding both for the company, and for them as individual consultants. They are posting more consistently, driving more traffic to our LinkedIn job slots and our website, and are generally more engaged with the platform. We are really seeing an improvement in leads coming in from LinkedIn and account expansion based on content we have shared on the platform.”
Main product used:
THE RESULTS
Grow brand awareness
Increased total followers in 2020 by 460%, followed by a further increase of 178% in 2021
Position Maxwell Bond as the recruiter of choice
Jobs and Life Pages views increased by 1,508%
Increase engagement with talent pool
Consultant InMails – number of emails accepted increased by 2,360%
In their own words
“LinkedIn has enabled our consultants to add extensive value to our network by empowering consultants to consistently share high-quality content, enabling them to be known as the thought leaders in the markets we operate. With the training provided, we’ve helped write more effective job adverts and InMails to increase response and improve our overall brand visibility on LinkedIn. This has significantly increased our follower growth, engagement, InMail acceptance, and job application rates to become one of the fastest growing tech recruitment agencies in the UK and Germany.”
“LinkedIn has given the team at Maxwell Bond all the tools it needs to build a solid online presence and bolster their reputation as market experts in the UK and Germany. It has allowed us to build a robust, multi-channel marketing strategy, with a strong consistent brand, that attracts an increasing number of inbound leads through our company pages and our individual consultants’ pages. All our consultants are more engaged with marketing thanks to the wins and clear ROI we are seeing in our results.”
“Bespoke LinkedIn training for Recruiter and Insights really showed the whole team how to optimise the use of these tools to ensure we are maximising our potential, adding the most value to our clients, and standing out as experts in our field.”
“LinkedIn has been fundamental in growing a reputable, knowledgeable brand. Talent Insights alone has provided a wealth of relevant, live data that has been converted into market-illuminating content, which has been highly requested from tech leaders across the UK, who rely on Maxwell Bond for the latest market updates and insights.”
"LinkedIn has really helped Maxwell Bond build its reputation as an elite, high-performing tech and digital recruitment consultancy across the UK and Germany, trusted by so many key businesses. The platform has allowed us to position ourselves as knowledgeable market leaders who can effectively guide, advise, and support businesses through key hiring decisions. This has ultimately led to Maxwell Bond becoming well known as the best specialise tech and digital recruitment agency in the UK and Germany."
About Maxwell Bond
Maxwell Bond is an award-winning recruitment partner who provides specialist digital and tech recruitment consultancy services. They work across the UK and Germany for the Software, Cyber Security, Cloud and DevOps, Product and Project, and Digital Marketing sectors. They drive technological and business growth through talent acquisition across these tech specialisms, valuing honesty, integrity and transparency.
INDUSTRY:
Staffing & Recruiting
No. OF EMPLOYEES:
11-50 employees
HEADQUARTERS
Manchester, UK
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