Ellis Mason

01

Insight

Our brief: to rewrite the rules of recruitment website design.

Ellis Mason is a recruitment agency in Hertfordshire, hiring candidates at all levels across a range of office specialisms. With many years’ experience within the recruitment industry, they have a keen understanding of their sector and their competitors. Tired of their old website and the ‘grey’ design templates most recruitment websites offer, they sensed now was the time to do something different — something exciting!

Young girl dressed in jeans and a red superhero cape and mask punching forward in powerful stance.

02

Branding

From the start of this project, we were intent on marrying the website design with the copywriting through a strong concept. By creating a website with a concept at its heart, we knew we could develop Ellis Mason’s branding into something far more memorable and engaging.

Boy dressed in star-graphic T-shirt, superhero cape and mask, holding his arms out in triumphant pose.

One of Ellis Mason’s core strengths is their ability to see their clients as more than just candidates. They see them as individuals, each with unique skills and personalities. It was this ability that sparked our idea for the website. The idea of exploring candidates’ personalities and skills, uncovering their alter egos, finding their superpowers. And so #worksuperpower was born.

What our client said

Union 10 are the complete power duo. From their design concepts through to their delivery, they have been superb to work with. They listen, they absorb and they deliver.

Emma Ellis // Director Ellis Mason

03

The rebrand

As part of the rebrand, the Ellis Mason logo design had a ‘mild’ makeover to allow it to fit more neatly in the website header. (It was previously in a square box that took up a lot of space.) We retained their corporate colours and fonts, keeping our main focus on imagery.

We developed two tiers of imagery: superhero shots that provided the backbone to the branding; along side a subset of more metaphorical images that represent a candidate’s particular skill set. For example, we chose a juggler to represent a multitasker; we showed a neon sign emblazoned with the words ‘Do something different’ to represent a motivator.

Whilst Union 10 can provide bespoke photography for websites, on this occasion, we took all our imagery from online image libraries. Sourcing images online requires careful selection. For example, our hero homepage shot of the girl punching forward, had just the right stance, colour palette and the right amount of attitude.

Page from Ellis Mason branding doc showing logos and colour swatch references.

04

Website design

Our recruitment website design takes the rebranding to its fruition, bringing copywriting and imagery together in a vibrant, powerful design layout.

Truly bespoke, the site provides attention to detail in all aspects of design. We developed a ‘superpower’ icon with a flash detail that helps sign-post specialisms. We’ve also hinted a comic book style with a dotted/flash background in the call to action sections and pop-up.

We tried to achieve the right balance of action hero comic genre verses a cool, edgy sophistication injected by the abstract photography. We needed to project Ellis Mason’s professional image with the right amount of fun and humour.

Website project by design agency hertford.

05

Website development

Recruitment website design should include the functionality to show job feeds and allow searches. Ellis Mason already had a very good CRM system (Firefish Software) that they had been using on their old site, but whilst this worked well for their business it lacked the scope to build a more creative website. So, the solution was to keep this CRM for the Jobs section of the site and to develop the main website using WordPress.

We built the site using flexible templates, which gives the client more control of page layouts and allows them to easily create individual landing pages for Google Pay Per Click campaigns and social media marketing.

The site has many call-to-actions that appear globally throughout the site. We built a central, single location from where to control them, meaning one edit would make a global change throughout the site. This is another example of how bespoke web development can make a site much more efficient.

Close-up of hand holding mobile phone showing the Ellis Mason recruitment website

06

Support and Maintenance

As with all our clients, we gave Ellis Mason training on how to use the site and optimise pages (SEO). We gave them a Brand Guidelines document that detailed their logo, iconography, colours and fonts. We are also provided support with marketing material for their social networking.

# Recruitment website design