Branch Tech Recruitment

Branding, Development

The Brief


When you’re starting a new recruitment company, you need to get out of the blocks quickly. Matthew Lewis, director of Branch, needed a brand, website and tone that matched his ambitions and ethics, all from scratch. As someone who works to tight deadlines, quality and speed also needed to go hand in hand.

From the outset, Matt wanted to build a brand that he could quickly take to market while retaining quality. Having set up a business that was part of a holding group, the brief was to build a brand from scratch, including logo development and content. Additionally, we needed to build a website that could launch quickly yet hold the scope to add in extra features on a rolling basis.

Given the nature of the recruitment sector Branch was entering, we took additional care and afterthought to the technical development aspect of the website, anticipating the technical audience Matthew and Branch would be targeting visiting the site and judging them on their own digital asset development.

The Response


With a deadline of just two weeks, we initiated several sprint sessions that covered identity (logo, devices, copy), web design and, finally, development and build. Upon launch, the site was going to be “skinny”, due to the nature of being a new start-up. Job posts, integration with job boards and extra page functionality were all planned to launch at later dates.

"It was fantastic to work with the team at Code + Create. I came to them with an idea of how I wanted Branch to look and feel. I left with a brand and website I can be proud of." - Matt Lewis, Managing Director, Branch Tech Recruitment.

    Branch love a testimonial, because they're always positive. You'll have to visit their site to read the details though!
    Content to find the right people.
    Recruitment means jobs, this sites got job listings for days
    It's still wordpress, just different

The Technical Bit


Given the nature of the recruitment sector Branch was entering, we took additional care and afterthought to the technical development aspect of the website, anticipating the technical audience Matthew and Branch would be targeting visiting the site and judging them on their own digital asset development. So we went high-tech. From a user experience perspective, the overriding objective was to push visitors to the job vacancies available, with calls to action likely to come in at a later date. The design kept things simple, striking a balance between clinical and functional.

Branch tech was built with React and Gatsby. Gatsby is a static site generator, it builds React websites into static files before they get sent up into the cloud to deliver incredible performance. Altogether, this static nature means it’s incredibly quick, with page scores of at least 94 on a mobile test at Google's PageSpeed Insights. It's a lean, green, tech recruitment machine.

Gatsby can also wire in content from a CMS. We utilised WordPress coupled with the ACF plugin for this role. It's familiar, easy to navigate and quite a powerful CMS experience. When we use WordPress like this, we tend to call it 'Headless'. Scary! We used our bespoke 'Headless' theme. That means we have customised the wordpress experience to optimse for this use case and hidden elements that aren't used. We even bring SEO data down the pipe from the popular Yoast SEO plugin, a familiar workflow to put the power in users hands and keep SEO experts in the job.

The Results


PageSpeed

94

Google's page speed ranking service. Score high, rank high.

Payload

423kB

What the user has to download on their first visit to the website

Competitors Payload

4200kB

We searched Tech Recruitment to see how the first competitor compared