Helping an evolving accounting firm attract top talent

A local but established accounting firm, Accuity wanted to stay ahead of the curve in an evolving landscape. Armed with a new strategic plan in hand, the firm redeveloped their business strategy in a number of ways to assure their future success not only in the local market but also nationally as well. One of their goals was to develop and retain a strong team of next generation business leaders to support their new and existing business services. 

After initial discussions with the team, I was able to further define the challenge with the 5W1H framework:

5W1H Framework

What am I building? A redesigned website, social media visuals

Why am I building this?
Business Need: As Accuity, I want to recruit top talent.
User Need: As a user, I want to work for a reputable firm that values professional development.

Who am I building it for? Prospective employees (and business clients)

When and where will it be used? Responsive devices, schools, leisure settings, offices

How could I measure it? Engagement, conversion, net promoter score

We spoke with key stakeholders to understand who exactly their ideal recruits were. I created these user personas to encompass based on those findings:

I researched who their competitors were and evaluated their digital landscape to see what worked (and didn’t work) for them. Then I created a list of descriptors and highlighted where Accuity overlapped.

Since our target audience was on the younger side, perhaps younger professionals or new grads who were still starting off their careers, a potential pain point they might experience was not having much experience with interviews. We saw this as an opportunity to beef up the Careers section with various guides to demystify the interview process.

Other types of content such as employee profiles and testimonials would give recruits a chance to see Accuity behind-the-scenes and highlight their company culture. The addition of this kind of content—and more importantly the easy and relaxed tone they were written in (shoutout to our amazing copywriter Lauren)—helped to set Accuity apart from their competition, especially their local counterparts.

A fresh an innovative company meant bold phrases, outstanding stats and a dynamic layout.

The higher-level visual identity rebrand was conducted by my awesome Creative Director Scott, and we collaborated on ways we could translate the style guide into a design system for the digital space.

As usual in my design process, I designed 2 different homepage options in order to explore a range of design styles and treatments. I was going for something modern, cool, and disruptive, but still kept things business casual.

Option 2 ended up winning clients over, and with a few tweaks I applied the winning option throughout the UI, keeping a lighter feel so as not to compete with all the text.

Video produced by me

Besides the website, updating their social media accounts with new branded graphics and fresh content was part of our strategy to reach potential employees, especially the younger demographic. I collaborated with Jordan, a fellow designer at iQ, to create these snazzy animated videos. We wanted to revamp the traditional image and sound of accounting, so we sourced loud graphics and fresh, upbeat music.

I assisted with concepting and storyboarding these animated videos for their social media. I completed the animation in Adobe After Effects.

On the street, Accuity was very popular with new grads at on-campus recruitment events after gaining an increase in website traffic and social media engagement. This testimony from a new grad was my fave: “The website didn’t look like that of an accounting firm—it was so different from anything out there. Even though I’m not an accountant, I wanted want to work there!”