Helping Brunning & Price find talent with a new digital marketing strategy

The client

Brunning & Price are an established pub restaurant group with over 50 pubs in rural locations across the UK. The group pride themselves in offering a unique experience to customers by retaining the varied character and heritage of each of their pubs.

The brief

In this instance, an effective recruitment strategy was required to help attract quality candidates to apply for numerous chef roles. Our primary research concluded that potential applicants were drawn to chef roles within hotel and restaurant establishments more as these appeared to offer a “fresh food culture” and independence within the role. Although fresh food and autonomy are at the heart of Brunning & Price’s ethos, the group needed a new digital marketing strategy to more effectively convey these values to candidates.

To reach high calibre chefs and fill vacancies at their pubs, we devised a digital marketing campaign which, after initial training, could then be adopted and carried out by the Brunning & Price team easily.

The solution

An initial conversation with the marketing and HR team enabled us to understand the crux of their challenge. Alongside in-depth competitor research, we carried out an audit of Brunning & Price’s recruitment strategy, from their careers page and job board advertising to their social media adverts, on-site signage and internal staff communications.

The audit revealed that although the group’s recruitment materials indicated a relaxed, flexible working culture with fresh food preparation noted as a key value, these were not clearly and prominently communicated through their website, social or on job boards. Having identified which digital channels required a different approach, we designed a detailed recruitment strategy that could be efficiently actioned by their in-house team.

The result

Within the report, we delivered comprehensive action points from suggestions to improve the website user experience on the careers page, to guidance for advert messaging and positioning. As well as proposing the creation of key assets to help demonstrate the group’s “fresh food culture” within job roles, the report detailed structures for social media campaigns on Facebook and Instagram.

To ensure their in-house team were equipped with the knowledge to action our recommendations successfully and with consistency, we conducted a workshop to train team members. The agenda included both the creation and monitoring of paid and organic social media campaigns.

The reaction

“We thoroughly enjoyed working with the Salad team. We found them to be personable, insightful and extremely knowledgeable in their field. Their work was incredibly thorough and so they were able to quickly get under the skin of the mission that we had asked them to help us with. Most of all, they were very patient in making sure that we had fully understood a world that we are not naturally familiar with. We would jump at the chance to work with them again in the future.”

Nicola Stuart, Head of Marketing and Communications at Brunning and Price