Fortune Hill is a small, specialist, successful recruitment consultant, that had ambitions to grow and expand its customer base. With a deep knowledge of people and networked connectivity, they focus on what success looks like, not just a short term answer to the current problem. Candidates are seen as humans not products, with an emphasis on engagement, regular contact, and making the client and candidate feel good and looked after. Fortune Hill take what they do very seriously, but don’t take themselves too seriously. So as a modern, human, relatable group of consultants they needed a new brand identity to reflect this.

Fortune Hill finds leaders who make businesses better, commercially and culturally. They are hugely discerning, dealing with AAA talent, and celebrate that. More often than not, they simply work harder than anyone else, have a deeper reach and understanding. The offer is premium yet attainable, with confident experts delivering outstanding value for money.

Fortune Hill takes a different approach to looking for the right talent. Rather than just assuming that the person will come from a competitor or within sector, they use human skill, flair, connectedness and emotional intelligence to the process of finding the right candidate. They use the same flair to portray the roles available in a more exciting and relevant way, and they have more desire and persistence to secure the right fit. The marriage of intellectual property (their market understanding) and robust yet agile process, yields the best possible results.

The challenge was to be recognised as the leading headhunters for senior marketing/leadership roles in mid-cap consumer businesses, and as confident experts with a playful tone. To do this by updating the brand identity of Fortune Hill, to better represent the company as being experts, rigorous, energised, human and empathetic, rather than formal, sloppy, arrogant, snobbish and ‘corporate’. Most competitors used either abstract imagery or very generic corporate people photography, so there was scope to do something more playful and engaging.

Being a human-focussed company resonates with customers, but can be potentially difficult when visualising that message. Diversity, equality and inclusion must be carefully considered to respect a level playing field. Our solution was to simplify the depiction of people, and the potential candidates and companies, to a level where all types of people were represented in a way that wasn’t too serious, had an element of playfulness, and could be easily replicated in different arrangements to tell different stories and messages.

The suite of ‘line people’ could then be used to support more ‘human’ copy that focussed on the definitive rather than the potential. Fortune Hill finds leaders, and doesn’t just search for them: “Other firms search for Executives. Fortune Hill delivers Leaders”.

The desire was to have a strong, bold, and simplified brand toolkit, with a dynamic and confident colour palette. This allowed the strong, definitive message to be delivered with warmth and personality, giving their clients the confidence that they would deliver an effective new hire, but with a human touch.