Turning an electrical firm's culture into a recruitment advantage

The client had exactly the kind of business most skilled tradespeople would want to work for: interesting projects, a genuinely supportive working environment, and real investment in its people. The problem was that none of it was visible from the outside. Their online presence was built entirely around winning customer work, with nothing that spoke to the people they actually needed to attract - the electricians, apprentices and engineers considering their next move.

In a sector where outstanding vacancies directly limit how much work a business can take on, and where turnover means losing not just a person but the training investment behind them, this wasn't a marketing nice-to-have. It was a business constraint with a marketing solution sitting right in front of it.

The client came to us needing a new website. The project stalled due to an abundant project pipeline and a lack of employees and contractors to complete it.

It was clear the client needed help to build a culture that attracted the right sector talent to save the client time and complete pipeline work. So we suggested a strategy to help.

Most businesses in this position have a customer-facing website and treat recruitment as an afterthought bolted onto a careers page nobody optimises for. We approached it as a genuinely separate audience with its own intent, its own search behaviour, and its own content needs.

That started with getting the culture definition right before writing a word of external content - sitting down with leadership to understand what actually made the business a good place to work, rather than assuming or guessing.

From there, we built content that showed rather than told: real project work, the environment people would actually be walking into, and a clear picture of how someone could progress within the business.

The SEO work ran in parallel, targeting the specific, high-intent searches people use when they're actively looking for their next role in the sector - regionally relevant, role-specific, and built to surface the business in front of candidates already searching, not just customers.

• A reduction in outstanding vacancies, easing a constraint that had been directly limiting the volume of work the business could take on
• Improved employee retention, reducing the cost and disruption of losing trained staff
• An increase in successfully completed projects, a direct result of having a more stable, better-staffed team
• Higher-intent inbound enquiries from candidates actively searching for roles in the sector, rather than relying solely on recruiters and job boards

For a skilled trade business, employer brand isn't a soft metric - it's directly tied to how much work you can win and deliver. Making that culture visible, and making it findable to the right people, turned a hidden strength into a measurable business advantage.