By Nadia Owen, 4MAT Business Communications
Established in 1981 and successfully recruiting IT staff into major corporate organisations across the UK and Europe ever since, the JM group (www.thejmgroup.com) have a well-founded reputation for quality, consistency and reliability.
During this time the number of recruitment agencies in the UK alone has tripled . Alongside technological developments which have quite literally changed the face, geography and nature of recruitment. We are now in a socio-economical climate where modernisation is prized and flashy designs are a sign of the times, but JM have refused to follow the crowd and instead have created an original new website that embraces classicism and abstract imagery.
Partnered with recruitment web development and marketing specialists 4MAT since 1999, this front-end revamp of their original dotVacancy2 platform is visually distinct, representative of their business plan and historical development. “We’ve been around for a long time and have already survived a couple of recessions,” says Alan Bawden, Director of the JM group. “This put us in a unique position from which we could draw on our experience and improve our business over the past year. Now that economists are predicting improvements for 2010, we took the opportunity to change the look and feel of our site – to reflect the consultative nature of our recruitment business and move away from the “stack ‘em high and sell them cheap” philosophy of some of our competitors.”
The end result is a classically effective website with modern visuals that contrast with their jaded competitors’ sites. Their flash-focused rivals may scoff at the simplicity but surveys are finding that as a result of the current recession, people are indicating an overriding preference for tradition and abstract interpretations of minimalism, and in JM’s case, this has already been proved by the overwhelming number of leads the new site has generated (both client role requests and candidate registrations).
“We are an executive search, selection and contracts recruiter, and I believe that we have fully seized the opportunity to align our business plan with the website,” continues Alan. “We have always had a clear focus for the website, for which ROI is a key criteria. We didn’t want a brochure site, we want to interactively update pages as and when required to ensure our content remains up to date and relevant to our target audience.”
Further investment in a comprehensive digital marketing campaign including search engine optimisation (amongst other things, the JM group are top rankers for the search query “IT recruitment London”) and AdWords sponsorship, combined with a consistent PR campaign will look to consistently drive both clients and candidates to the site.
