Joslin Rowe is one of the UK's leading professional recruitment agencies specialising in permanent, temporary and contract placements within the financial and professional service sectors. Joslin Rowe has offices in London, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Joslin Rowe started talking to us in early 2007 about refreshing their web presence and online brand. In a competitive industry they realised the key to success would be to differentiate themselves with a highly usable web interface supported by efficient business processes and an online and offline brand that marked them out from their competitors.

The Brief

Create a fresh, professional, easy to use website that caters to Joslin Rowe's disparate user base which includes permanent, temporary and part time workers across a number of salary bands.

What we did

Joslin Rowe has been trading for over 25 years and has strong reputation amongst its peers, clients and candidates. Recruitment is a people business and although the web is invaluable as a shop window and candidate management tool the actual placements are made offline. Joslin Rowe are justifiably proud of the close relationships that are built between consultant and candidates and the loyalty this engenders.

In light of this we were not tasked with taking the business online, we were trying to enhance the users' experience with Joslin Rowe as an organisation by ensuring that the online experience matched and augmented the offline process.

The approach to this project was very much a collaborative one. We spent a lot of time with business stakeholders identifying the key users and the primary requirements of each of the separate user types. This is the core to our approach and forms the basis on which we build formulate and validate the site structure and functionality.

We also spent time documenting Joslin Rowe's business processes highlighting the online and offline touch points in the recruitment and relationship management processes.
This consultative approach proved valuable to the business and provided them with an opportunity to revisit their processes across multiple divisions and to consolidate areas where inefficiencies were occurring.

We also undertook detailed interviews with Joslin Rowe candidates and consultants to get feedback as to how it felt to interact with Joslin Rowe. This is a time consuming process but it gave us invaluable insight into how candidates expect to be communicated with and the information they would like to have available during the recruitment process.

The initial site designs were validated by the business stakeholders against the business requirements and were validated against user requirements in a series of tests carried out with our partner company Flow Interactive.

Our belief is by undertaking a significant process of research and validation early we can significantly reduce the risks (and attendant costs) of building and delivering a site which will need further amendment on launch.

The re-launched site addresses the requirements of both temporary and permanent candidates, allowing consultants to manage the relationship logistics directly through the candidate's account section. Temp candidates who have multiple engagements are also catered for and can manage appointments through the site calendar functionality.

Employing the revised Joslin Rowe brand the site draws the company out of the brand space occupied by other recruitment companies to ensure they differentiated themselves from the homogonous clusters of recruitment brands.

The combination of a robust development process and an eye catching brand have delivered Joslin Rowe a distinctive and effective site which will see them standing head and shoulders above their competitors for some time to come.

Back to case studies