Give A Grad A Go is the UK’s top graduate recruitment agency. They challenged our team to completely overhaul their digital infrastructure and marketing. They had ambitious plans for their website and broader online ecosystem.
- 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:
- Branding, Digital Marketing, Web Design, Web Development, eCommerce, WordPress, Laravel
- Scope
- Adobe XD Wireframe Prototypes
- Adobe XD Design Prototypes
- WordPress Development
- Laravel Development
- Website & Portal
- Multi-territory
- International SEO Strategy
- Brand Identity
- 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
The challenge
The Give A Grad team wanted to launch a sector leading website that would showcase their offering and attract graduate employers and job seekers. To become the recruiter of choice, Give A Grad knew that they needed to overhaul their brand identity and provide an industry leading user experience.
In addition to delivering a new website, Give A Grad wanted to create a recruitment portal that would enable them to start offering self-service recruitment alongside their existing managed recruitment offering. They challenged us to create a portal where employers could manage career vacancies and applications, and candidates could apply for positions.
Our approach
We created a digital strategy to improve Give A Grad A Go’s search engine rankings. This informed the new website structure and user journeys to ensure that new users could discover the website and land on the appropriate content.
Our brand team overhauled Give A Grad’s brand identity, creating a flexible visual toolkit for the marketing team to apply across their marketing and literature. Our website designers implemented the new brand within a fresh new website design and our WordPress developers coded the site to optimise performance.
Alongside this, our UX team created the user experience for the new recruitment portal, building user journeys to reduce friction and maximise engagement. The portal was built using Laravel, providing a flexible framework with plenty of scope for future growth.
Job search
As the powerhouse of the new website, it was critical to innovate when it came to the job search functionality. The ease of browsing jobs would impact the number of graduates searching on the site, which in turn would impact the number of employers posting jobs.
We introduced a number of new features to provide a seamless and engaging user experience.
- We created a split screen view, with the list of job ads on the left and a preview of the selected advert on the right
- We designed an optimised text layout for the job specs and utilised emojis to increase the skim-ability of text
- We implemented a tagging structure to highlight key job benefits
- We introduced a map view on the job search to visually represent the location of roles
Multi-territory targeting
The new website launched with 2 territories available: the UK and Australia. Each territory hosts its own content and SEO strategy that is tailored to the regional audience. Our multi-territory WordPress approach maximises SEO opportunities and enables Give A Grad A Go to adapt their services and strategy for each location. Give A Grad also have the option to create additional territories in the future.
‘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.’
SEO
Give a Grad A Go already had an established digital footprint in the UK and Australia, appearing highly in search engines 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 to include new targets.
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51
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Increase in UK search engine visibility following launch
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42
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Increase in Australian search engine visibility following launch
The chart above shows 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.
Resource hub
We increased the accessibility of article content by grouping articles into user friendly guides. This provides a relevant and 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.
A multi-platform experience
We overhauled Give A Grad’s digital ecosystem to provide a consistent and engaging user experience.
Contact us UX
Give A Grad’s ‘contact us’ user flow was complex and heavy, with a wide range of content, contact details and FAQs to communicate. We implemented an effective filtering system to guide users to the relevant content.
Developing the brand
Give A Grad’s old brand was looking dated and no longer reflected the business size and position in the market. They needed a new brand identity that would provide greater flexibility to their marketing team and could continue to grow with the business.
As a brand that targets graduates, Give A Grad challenged us to create a playful and bold brand that also looked trustworthy and reliable to employers. Balancing the two main audience types was critical to producing a successful brand.
Jobs portal
We delivered a brand new jobs portal for Give A Grad which enables employers and candidates to manage job ads and applications. The goal of the portal was to open up a new self-service recruitment offering to employers, enabling Give A Grad to capture a greater percentage of the recruitment market.
For candidates, the portal needed to provide a seamless transfer to and from the website, and a smooth application process. The success of the portal was dependent on the ease of use compared to competitors in the market.
We constructed optimised UX designs and user flows to deliver a high performance portal. 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.
