1
Start with building a relationship:
get to know each other, share your goals, make them a priority and go from there.
AND Digital is a digital, professional services firm with a forward-thinking mindset and is listed by the Sunday Times as a top 100 “Best Small Company to Work For”.
AND Digital help their clients to reach their digital aspirations, in a disruptive way. They work with clients to build their digital skills in-house by providing top talent to work alongside their people, as well as technical coaching to enable them to build products fast. In other words, they help their customer scale and upskill, and thus emancipate them from long term external support.
It’s a generous, empowering approach that resonates hugely in the market – and has led to the business growing to more than 200 people in just over three years.
AND Digital is also unique in the way they have designed their business. Their organisation is structured around ‘Clubs’ of 80 ‘ANDis’ to support a culture built around collaborative working and empowering its people and clients. Each Club is built of ‘Squads’, cross functional teams who all join on the same day and go through an intense but seriously fun Bootcamp together, building a sense of shared identity.
Growth
Hiring over 140 people each year to achieve a workforce of 600 people by the end of 2019
Talent
Find unique talent that brings technical skills, people skills and curious minds in one of the most buoyant markets in the world - London
Culture
Continue to build AND Digital’s unique culture of being a remarkable place to work
Rachel and Marketing Lead, Claire Baxter know that having a close relationship and an end-to-end attraction strategy is the underlying element to the success of achieving such growth.
"I don’t see Recruitment and Marketing connecting in quite this way in other businesses. It really helps that AND Digital has always prioritised putting budget behind Recruitment Marketing and building a candidate-facing brand."
- Claire Baxter
Marketing Lead, AND Digital
Bringing AND Digital’s unique, community-focused working experience to life is a key goal of the shared strategy for both Rachel and Claire. AND Digital’s attraction strategy rests on a collaborative working relationship between Recruitment and Marketing. “Rachel and I catch up on a weekly basis to not only monitor our engagement on LinkedIn, but develop new ideas for content that can bring AND Digital to life to the people we’re trying to attract. We do not aim to plan the year’s content in one go, as we work in more of an Agile way tweaking our content to reflect the needs of the business” says Claire. “I don’t see Recruitment and Marketing connecting in quite this way in other businesses. It really helps that AND Digital has always prioritised putting budget behind Recruitment Marketing and building a candidate-facing brand.” The pool of new followers are always the first group to be looked at for new roles, creating opportunity from content.
AND Digital leverages social channels such as LinkedIn to reach out and become familiar to candidates before roles are even open, building their talent pipeline. Its LinkedIn Company and Career Pages are filled with videos and stories that take people behind the scenes to experience life as an ANDi. Using LinkedIn’s Sponsored Updates to distribute these stories to the right candidates helps to immerse them in ANDi culture from the start.
“We use a combination of professional and ‘of the moment’ viral style videos on our LinkedIn Career Page to highlight roles, client work and working at AND Digital - but more importantly they help people visualise what it’s like to be an ANDi. We find people like to see a Day In A life Video as much as a Go-Pro video from inside our infamous Red beer fridge” says Claire.
Claire and Rachel collaborate to reach out to candidates with engaging content as well as in person projects like their ‘Coffee AND Code’ campaign which epitomises the company’s cohesive approach. They developed the idea for a branded coffee van, visiting hotspots for technical and digital talent in London, and handing out free coffee in exchange for customers following AND Digital on LinkedIn and other social channels. It enabled the team to reach out to both potential candidates and likely clients at the same time. The campaign more than doubled their LinkedIn followers – relevant prospects for both sides of the company’s brand, as well as creating a huge boost in online engagement and content, thus creating the candidates of tomorrow.
Through the close collaboration of Marketing and HR, AND Digital are overcoming the challenges that come along with rapid growth and recruiting tech talent in a competitive market. Follower growth on all social media channels is surpassing goals, and Rachel’s team are achieving 100% direct hires, proving the case for cross team partnership.
"Through the collaboration of Recruitment and Marketing, we have been able to strive towards our ambitious growth targets AND amplify the AND Digital brand with both prospective candidates and clients. LinkedIn has played a key role in enabling us to do this. The engagement we’re driving on LinkedIn and other social tools is enabling our teams to compete for some of the most sought-after talent in London, whilst still maintaining the culture that’s crucial to our proposition."
- Rachel Harvey
Recruitment Lead
HR & Marketing combine – Rachel AND Claire’s top tips:
2
Recruiters, think about how your Marketing team likes to work – whether that’s a project-based approach or an always-on strategy – and find a way to partner on this basis.
3
Experiment with throwing the stiff year long plan out the window, catch up on a weekly basis and share your ‘of the moment’ needs in order to plan for the day, week or quarter.
4
Bring leadership on the journey of this collaboration. Experiment with a campaign and let the results do the talking. Use LinkedIn analytics to help you build a case for ROI. Think of the talent pipeline like the Marketing funnel and set out targets for each stage.
5
Think about the benefits from their perspective – partnering on a campaign could attract more potential leads as well as candidates, for example. We’ve even had rejected candidates become client prospects due to the positive experience they have had with the brand.
6
Get to know your own people and use that insight to build content campaigns together; we recently ran a focus group with our Senior Developers as this is a role we find challenging to recruit. As a result, we have lots of great ideas and actions to work together on as we understand the market so much better.