sparks brochure

Let’s create...

Bright thinking and sparkling ideas

We’re Sparks. A bunch of bright “sparks” with some brilliant ideas about recruitment, advertising, marketing, communication, employee engagement and much more besides.

Creativity is our passion. Service is our watchword. Solutions are our business.

We’re a new brand for a new era, with all the drive, determination and dynamism of a start-up and all the know-how, experience and contacts of Feather Brooksbank, the agency we have evolved from.

Flexible, responsive and innovative, we’re a team of experienced, enthusiastic, passionate recruitment communications specialists, who always put our clients at the heart of everything we do.

Easy to work with, straightforward and up-front, we spend our clients’ money as cautiously as if it was our own: honestly, openly and as a trustworthy partner.

We hope you enjoy finding out more about us.

About Sparks

Ideas

www.sparks-careers.co.uk

In this business, there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution, to your attraction and retention needs. There may be several ways to achieve what you need and our job is to provide options, explain the pros and cons, make suggestions and give you the choice of how much or how little you want to follow through with.

It makes sense to be flexible. You can use us for a one-off answer to a one-off problem, or we can work in long term partnership across the whole employee communications spectrum.

You don’t have to be bound to us by a contract. Our no strings approach, great service delivery and knack for building open, trusting client relationships, will keep you attracted to us by creating a much more valuable kind of customer loyalty.

Our client retention record is impressive…because our clients enjoy working with us!

Sparks Choice

Attraction


At the heart of our service offering, we pride ourselves on offering strategic, innovative media planning that makes sure your message reaches the right people as efficiently as possible. We cover all offline media formats from press (national, local, trade) and out of home (ad-bikes, ad-vans, buses, posters, billboards, pavement art), to broadcast (radio and TV) and keep you at the cutting edge of new media developments.

Of course there are times when you just need a bum on a seat and quick ad hoc advertising is all you need. We’re here for you then too.

And regardless of the size of your campaign from a one off recruitment advert to an all singing, all dancing multi-media campaign, the one thing you can be confident of is that Sparks will negotiate the best possible price on your behalf as we are expert media buyers too. It’s what we’re known for, and our transparent, open door relationships with our friends at the media ensure that we can deliver you the very best rates, saving a number of our clients an average of 50% off rate card each year.

Offline Media Planning & Buying

Our services


We believe in being at the cutting edge of the ever changing media world. That way we can give our clients new and effective ways to reach out to passive and active potential candidates.

From traditional online recruitment like annual job board contracts and ad hoc job postings, through to more creative digital inventory such as page takeovers and peels, expandable banners and eshots, our team are poised to help with fabulous ideas and a speedy turnaround. And we back this up with more strategic attraction methods like behavioural targeting (when things you have searched on follow you round the internet), video job postings, Pay-Per-Click (Google PPC) advertising and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for your careers site – to make sure candidates can find you.

The surge in mobile job hunting applications creates a direct route to communicating with candidates that’s a must for every online strategy. And the great thing is that we can step outside traditional recruitment platforms, profiling the ideal passive candidate and targeting them while they’re on the go.

Managing your social media reputation is becoming massively important. Whether you want to have a proactive presence on social media or not, someone somewhere is probably writing about you. So it makes sense to control your external image and use all the platforms to your own advantage. We can help you manage your own pages or train your team to, and can support your activity with advertising across the likes of LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as seeding your jobs across social platforms to get them in front of passive job seekers.

And the great thing about digital advertising is that it’s all fully trackable, so you will be able to see just how well our approach has worked.

Our services


Digital, Mobile & Social Media

What looks good on your monitor doesn’t always look great on your mobile. Designing for the web needs a wider view than many may think. And with Google’s planned changes to the search-ability of non-mobile friendly websites, being mobile compatible and having a “responsive website design” is more crucial than ever.

Sparks will make you look your best on your website whether it’s viewed from a PC, laptop, smart phone or tablet…or even as an application or mini-campaign site.

We’ll produce your site, your traffic drivers such as banners, MPUs and e-shots and we’ll give you a range of tracking tools so that you can see just how people visit your website and the individual pages and sections within it.

You can even watch live recordings of how people use your site!

Our services


Responsive Website Design

We often get asked how to become an employer of choice. And the short answer is you need to behave like one! However, we can give you and your people the tools and understanding needed to start behaving like a top employer and in return, attract top talent.

The starting point is to create a strong employer brand, and by that we don’t just mean a consistent look and feel, logo or strapline; a true employer brand is something that your people create, live, and breathe. It is the culture that permeates every part of your business; the atmosphere that employees soak up from the moment they set foot inside your door; and represents the complete alignment of the promises your brand makes, delivered by the actions of your people.

We call the result an Employer Brand; we call the process Brand Alignment. The outcome is that your people become a seamless extension of your brand promise – both attracting new customers, and encouraging greater loyalty amongst existing ones.

Successful businesses are built through the behaviours of a productive and engaged workforce, who understand the overall company vision and the part they are expected to play in delivering it to customers, suppliers and stakeholders. And whilst aligning employees’ behaviours to deliver your brand vision every day is no mean feat, the team at Sparks can guide you through the whole process. From researching and refining your Employer Brand positioning, creating the communication strategies and the creative tools you’ll need, to assisting you in aligning your Employer Brand company-wide, we’re here to help.

Employer branding and brand alignment are two vital factors in becoming an employer of choice.

Our services


Employer Branding & Alignment

There simply isn’t a brief that doesn’t spark our imagination. Ideas are our business.

From creative concepts to detailed copy, artworking to production, we can either take care of the full process for you or work alongside your own in-house facilities. No job is too big or too small to stimulate our enthusiasm.

What’s more, we will give you ideas that work. From day-to-day advertising like engaging and optimised online copy (to replace those tired job specs that should never see the light of day) to a fully developed employer brand proposition, refer a friend strategies to exhibition and job fair stands and collateral, keep-warm materials to employee climate surveys, fully responsive websites to engaging video profiles. We delight in developing creative solutions that deliver real results.

Tight deadlines don’t frighten us and because we’re Northern based with lower overheads than our London competitors, brilliant creativity doesn’t cost you the earth.

Our services


Creative

At Sparks we’re always curious. It’s not enough to know what works. We want to know how, why, where and when it does.

Plenty of people will provide you with media research. After all, it’s an integral part of proper campaign planning. But we go further. We offer in-depth candidate research including employee profiling, where we analyse your employee database to get a breakdown of your workforce demographics, often useful for diversity monitoring or to get an understanding of what type of people you employ. We can also produce socio-demographic reports showing the breakdown of an employee catchment area for existing sites or new locations you might be moving into, helping pre-empt any areas where candidate calibre may be a problem. Or you might want to know how far people on different pay levels are prepared to commute to work, or to simply get a better understanding of what your candidate journey looks like and where it could be improved.

Success is always about informed decisions. Whatever you need to know, we’ll find out using bespoke research and focus groups to learn about your competitors, your public perception or whether your employer brand hits home.

On a broader scale we can commission industry specific salary surveys and competitor reports to ensure you’re always one step ahead within your industry and can adapt to attract the very best talent.


Our services

Research

The best way forward sometimes is to take a step back. We can work with you to offer new solutions - anything from a quick fix to a specific problem, to more medium or long-term strategies.

Over the course of time, as new systems are implemented or new messages emerge, recruitment processes change until they may no longer be the best you can have. So sometimes it’s really useful to look at them from a fresh perspective, to review the whole candidate journey and check out its many touch points.

At Sparks we’ve developed a special audit process to carry out this review. It includes an in-depth audit of all the employee communication tools that you use, methodologies, systems, materials - the lot. It covers the full candidate life cycle from attraction and recruitment to employee engagement, career progression, exit and alumni.

From the audit results we can formulate short, medium and long term strategies that get your messages and processes properly aligned and reflective of your wider brand positioning, so that you can source and retain the best people with the best return on investment.


Our services

Strategy

We’ve supported many of our clients on their journey from an outsourced recruitment model to an in-house direct sourcing team. With the necessary software and people with the right skills on board, you can efficiently fill your vacancies. We can liaise with potential ATS suppliers and manage the vetting process and at the same time we’ll help you define the team’s required skillset and can help you recruit or up-skill them.

We’ll structure clear strategic plans for the short, medium and long term. Identifying the tools you need to attract candidates for your routine recruitment and to fill long term posts resulting from expansion, development or succession planning. Our ultimate goal is to turn your team into an in-house agency that serves the rest of your organisation. We can complement this with talent mapping - where we use our knowledge and expertise in partnership with sophisticated software to identify your talent pools both internally and externally. We’ll help you use these tools to identify when candidates will be most receptive to your approach, helping to save you time and money.

Having said all that, we know that there are certain roles that just have to be filled by a specialist head-hunter. And we know that there are times when you have no choice but to outsource your recruitment to a trusted recruitment partner and we will happily work with your preferred suppliers. But relying on Consultancies and Agencies day-to-day is a costly way to recruit and it can be avoided with the right people and tools in place.


Our services

Direct Sourcing

Bright thinking and sparkling ideas

We’re Sparks. A bunch of bright “sparks” with some brilliant ideas about recruitment, advertising, marketing, communication, employee engagement and much more besides.

Creativity is our passion. Service is our watchword. Solutions are our business.

Flexible, responsive and innovative, we’re a team of experienced, enthusiastic, passionate recruitment communications specialists, who always put our clients at the heart of everything we do.

Easy to work with, straightforward and up-front, we spend our clients’ money as cautiously as if it was our own: honestly, openly and as a trustworthy partner.

We hope you enjoy finding out more about us.

About Sparks

Ideas


We hope you’ve found this document informative. If we’ve inspired you to want to learn more, to give us a brief or you simply want to get in touch to say hello (we’re a friendly bunch after all), please contact Anna Fleetwood [email protected]

Head OfficeAddress: 5th Floor, Greg’s Buildings, 1 Booth Street, Manchester M2 4DUPhone: 0161 836 6758Email: [email protected]

Scotland OfficeAddress: The Crystal Centre, Eastfield, Penicuik EH26 8HAPhone: 01968 671576

Get in touch

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