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A recruitment sub-brand is a deliberate decision to build a second brand identity inside your business, usually to reach a distinct audience, specialise in a new market, or position against an emerging opportunity. Done well, it extends your reach without diluting what you have built. Done badly, it does the opposite. Right now, sub-brands are having a moment. The AI opportunity is real, and many recruitment businesses are responding by launching something new: a new name, a new look, a new positioning. That can be the right move. But what I keep seeing is brands launching before the strategy exists. The logo comes before the thinking. That is where it starts to unravel. So before you go anywhere near a launch, here is what you actually need to have sorted. Start with the ICP, not the name The first question is not "what do we call it?" It’s "who is this actually for?" Not who you hope it will be for or who sounds impressive in a slide deck. Who it really is. More importantly, how does that audience differ from the ICP of your existing brand? If you are a tech recruiter launching an AI-specific brand, be honest. Are these people genuinely different from the ones already buying from you? Different problems, channels, language, or buying journey? If yes, a sub-brand might make sense. If mostly no, you probably need a new service line or a content pillar, not a whole separate brand, which is expensive in time, money, and attention. There is a communication piece too. If your audience has heard from you under one brand for years, they need an explanation when something new appears. What is this? Why does it exist separately? How does it relate to the business they know? Answer those questions proactively, or they will fill the gaps themselves, rarely in the way you would want. Answer the cannibalisation question honestly This one is uncomfortable, which is probably why most people avoid it. How much loss on the existing brand are you prepared to accept in order to grow the new one? A sub-brand doesn't exist in a vacuum. It competes for everything: your team's time, your content calendar, your budget, your headspace as a leader. Every hour spent building the new thing is an hour not spent protecting what you've already built. Client attention is finite too. If your market is used to seeing you talk about one specialism and you suddenly start talking about something adjacent under a different name, some of them will be confused. Some will think you've lost focus. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. But go in with your eyes open. Decide what you're willing to trade, and for how long. Make it a conscious commercial decision rather than an enthusiastic one. Don't underestimate the internal piece This is the one that gets missed most often, and it can do real damage. When a business launches a shiny new sub-brand, especially one positioned around AI, the consultants on the existing brand notice, and they feel it. There's already an undercurrent in the industry around AI and the fear of being left behind, of being on the wrong side of whatever's coming. Your team will feel that too, whether they say it out loud or not. If the new brand gets all the investment, all the leadership excitement, all the energy in team meetings, and the existing brand quietly starts to feel like the old thing, the legacy thing, you will lose people. Not necessarily to redundancy, but to disengagement. And disengaged consultants are expensive in ways that don't show up on a spreadsheet until it's too late. You need an internal narrative that runs alongside the external one. What's the story for the people on the existing brand? Why does that business still matter? What does success look like for both? Leaders need to articulate that clearly and consistently before launch, not after. Plan for when the market shifts This needs saying, even if it's not what people want to hear right now. AI is genuinely transformative. The opportunity is real. But the way it's being talked about in recruitment right now, the urgency, the gold rush energy, that will shift. Markets recalibrate. The hot thing becomes the normal thing. Some of the businesses that launched fast will have built something with real staying power. Others will have built something that made sense in 2025 and doesn't quite fit a few years from now. The question worth asking before you launch is: if this sub-brand needs to pivot significantly in three years, what's left? Is the core brand still strong? Is it still being invested in? Is the team behind it still motivated? Your main brand is an asset you've spent years building. Client relationships, reputation, specialist knowledge, market presence. Don't hollow it out chasing a trend. Protect it with the same intention you're putting into building the new thing. Think about visual coherence early I have a background in brand and design. I came from retail and FMCG, sectors where brand consistency is genuinely non-negotiable, and when I moved into recruitment I was taken aback by how loosely some businesses were treating it. It's improved, but the principle still applies. If you launch a sub-brand that looks completely disconnected from your parent brand, you create a problem that gets harder to fix the longer you leave it. Two brands with no shared visual language send a confusing signal: are these the same business? Are they competitors? What's the relationship? The solution isn't to make them identical. It's to make them coherent: shared typography, a colour system that lets both sit in the same palette, a visual thread that signals they are related. Picture them together on a pitch document or in the same LinkedIn feed. Do they look like the same family, or two businesses that happened to end up in the same room? Building a sub-brand in practice It's worth saying that "sub-brand" isn't one thing. At Kitto we've built a few different types, and each one comes with its own strategic questions. The group brand that sits above. Sometimes the job is the reverse of a launch: you're not adding a brand underneath, you're building one on top. We built the QXi Group brand from the ground up to unify three specialist tech recruitment businesses: Montash, Remobi and Trillion. We've done similar work with Auxo, a global workforce solutions group bringing multiple specialist businesses together under one unified brand focused on STEMx industries. In both cases, the challenge wasn't differentiation from the parent. It was coherence: how do several established identities sit together as one family without losing what made each of them work? The new specialist brand inside a group. Trillion is the other side of that same story. When QXi added a third specialism, we concepted, designed and launched the brand from scratch, with its own identity, tone of voice and campaign strategy, but a clear place within the wider group. This is the classic sub-brand play, and it's where the ICP and cannibalisation questions matter most. The service-line brand for a different buyer. Then there's amity, the people and talent advisory division we helped launch for TRG (wonder where the name inspo came from 👀). This one exists because the audience is genuinely different: founders and scaling leaders who need fractional People and Talent leadership, diagnostics and coaching rather than recruitment. A different problem, a different buying journey, a different conversation. Exactly the test I set out earlier. The type you're building dictates the questions you need to answer. A group brand lives or dies on coherence. A specialist launch lives or dies on whether the audience is truly distinct. Get the type right first, and the rest of the strategy has somewhere to hang. The bigger point: differentiation is still the real prize Sub-brands aside, I want to say something about recruitment marketing and branding more broadly, because I think the real opportunity lies there. Recruitment branding has genuinely improved over the last several years. I came from big retailers where your brand guidelines are treated like a legal document, and the contrast with what I saw in recruitment was shocking. It's better now. But "better than it was" is a low bar. There are still too many recruitment businesses with a logo, a colour palette and a LinkedIn page, and nothing that ties it together into something the market actually remembers. And when you scroll LinkedIn today, where most of the game is being played for recruitment businesses, there are pages and pages of content that could have come from anywhere. No distinctive voice. Nothing that makes you stop. The test is simple: can your audience say "oh, them, they're the ones that do X"? If they can't finish that sentence, you don't have a brand yet. You have a name. At Kitto, we have the elephant. It's not subtle, and it's not for everyone. That's entirely the point! Differentiation is what we sell, so we'd look pretty rubbish if we didn't practise it ourselves. But you don't need an elephant. You need something; a perspective, an identity with actual character. A voice that sounds like a human being. Something that accumulates into recognition over time. That's as true for a sub-brand as it is for your main one. Actually, it's more important, because a sub-brand doesn't have years of relationship-building behind it. It has to earn attention from scratch. Give it something worth paying attention to. Before you launch If you're sitting on a plan to launch a recruitment sub-brand, my honest advice is to slow down by a couple of weeks before you do. Do the ICP work. Answer the cannibalisation question. Have the internal conversation with your team before the external one. Think about what happens if the market shifts. Make sure someone with a design brain has looked at how the two brands will actually coexist. The businesses that do this well will have built something with real staying power. The ones that skip these steps will be rebranding again in eighteen months, and that's expensive in every sense. Recruitment has always been a marketing job. Businesses that treat it that way, consistently and over time, build something worth having. That's true whether you're launching something new or protecting something you've already invested years in. Want to go deeper? I talked all of this through in more detail with Nitin Sharma on the RecTalk podcast. Watch the full episode: Sub-Brands or Brand Refresh? How Recruitment Businesses Should Really Scale This article is adapted from Amity’s appearance on the RecTools podcast with Nitin Sharma
Amity Watts
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I recently joined recruitment leaders at TALiNT's Rec Marketing Innovation Lunch & Learn in Manchester to talk about one of the biggest questions facing our industry. As recruitment businesses look for sustainable growth, stronger brand positioning and ways to scale with AI, where does the real competitive advantage come from? AI has changed everything. Content is faster to produce, outreach is easier to automate and every new tool promises to save you time. But that means the bar has been lowered across the board. When everyone can produce polished marketing, polished marketing stops being enough. So if everyone has access to the same tools, what makes someone choose one recruitment business over another? How is AI changing client trust in recruitment marketing? Buyers still want to hear what an agency can do, but they're spending more time asking for proof. References, testimonials, case studies and measurable results carry more weight because they're harder to fake. That being said, I’m talking about videos, I’m talking about impact-and-results based reports. Not ‘anonymous’ talking about how they ‘were really pleased’. Candidate data shows how fragile trust us. Gartner (August 2025) found that only 26% of job candidates trust AI to evaluate them fairly, 25% trust an employer less because AI is being used to assess them, and 32% worry AI could fail their application unfairly. AI hasn't removed the need for trust. It's increased it. Why brand matters more as AI becomes more common In ‘Alchemy’ Rory Sutherland talks about how humans don’t necessarily follow the data. And about how sometimes, the way we feel about things matters as much as the pound and pence value attributed to it. That’s really relevant here. Whilst AI can make the numbers look good and do things at a huge scale, it can’t replicate that most human emotion and feeling, trust. Guess what - the client won’t always work with the best consultant. Or the best business. Or the cheapest. Sometimes, they’ll work with the one they like because they get taken out for a pint. Or lunch. Or they support the same football team or don’t like dogs. The cliche is that recruitment is a person-to-person industry and we really need to emphasis that personal bit with everything we do. And that’s to all four of our audiences: clients, candidates, colleagues and future hires. Recruitment marketing is an investment in growth If brand and trust are becoming more important, marketing can't simply be the team that creates campaigns. Recruitment businesses need to stop thinking about marketing as a support function and start treating it as a growth function. AI can produce more content. That's a given. What it can't do is decide what your business should be known for. That's marketing's job. The opportunity isn't to publish more. It's to build stronger positioning, create better thought leadership and give consultants more credibility before they ever speak to a client. That's why investing in brand is one of the few competitive advantages AI can't level. Building that kind of trust comes from consistently showing what your business knows and why clients should believe you. Related read: How to build a personal brand content strategy for your business. What should recruitment agencies automate and what should stay human? You should see your data as a pyramid before automating anything to do with it. At the bottom is the waste of time stuff. Contacts and candidates with no email, no phone. Get rid of them. Automating that creates efficiency without changing the customer experience. The higher you move up the pyramid, the more valuable human judgement becomes. Active clients, active candidates and commercial conversations should receive the greatest investment of time from an actual person because that's where trust is built and relationships are won. Used well, AI doesn't replace those interactions. It protects them by removing the work that gets in the way. Small AI shortcuts can become a bigger brand problem Beware of "micro compromises." If you don’t know what that is, it’s this: A generic LinkedIn post. An average email. A thought leadership article that sounds like everyone else's. On their own, they're unlikely to damage your brand. The problem comes when they become the norm. If dozens of consultants are creating content from the same prompts, shortcuts become patterns. Those small compromises shape how people experience your brand until sounding generic becomes your reputation. AI isn't the risk. Lowering your standards is. And it has a compound effect. If every LinkedIn post and blog you write is 5% worse, that’s catastrophic at scale. The next time you ‘write’ something with Claude and say ‘it’ll do’ think about if it really will, or if it should. Trust is the advantage AI can't automate AI will continue changing how recruitment marketing is delivered. What it can't do is build a reputation, earn a recommendation or create the kind of relationships that keep clients and candidates coming back. The agencies that stand out won't necessarily be using more AI than everyone else. They'll be using it more deliberately. They'll automate the work that doesn't require human judgement and invest more time in the conversations that do. That's the opportunity for recruitment leaders. Don't use AI to replace what makes your business different. Use it to protect it. Follow Kitto on LinkedIn for more insights on recruitment marketing, employer brand and the future of AI.
Kris Holland
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Five careers page mistakes we see on every single audit We've audited a lot of careers pages, and after a while, you start to spot the same handful of mistakes turning up again and again, regardless of the sector, the size of the business, or how much money went into the last "rebrand." Here's the thing about careers pages in recruitment: they're often the last page anyone in the business thinks about, and the first page a candidate actually judges you on. Marketing gets the homepage. Sales gets the case studies. The careers page, the one page built specifically to convince someone to change their whole working life, often gets whatever's left over. So, here are the five things we see going wrong time and time again, and what to do instead. 1. The stock photography giveaway You know the one. A woman in a blazer laughing at a laptop that clearly isn't showing anything funny. A group of people high-fiving over a spreadsheet. Nobody in the history of work has ever high-fived a spreadsheet. Stock photography isn't inherently evil, but when it's the only visual language on your careers page, it tells candidates something you didn't mean to say: we didn't think this was worth the investment. And candidates notice. They're not daft; they're job hunting, which means they're paying closer attention to your business than almost anyone else on the internet that day. What works better: you don't need an expensive shoot, though if you can, do it. You need whatever you use to actually reflect your people, your office, and your culture, rather than screaming "generic corporate library." 2. Talking about the company, not the person reading it Most careers pages read like an annual report that's wandered into the wrong folder: mission statements, values laid out in a neat grid of icons, a paragraph about "market-leading solutions." None of that is wrong exactly; it's just generic, and generic is its own problem. It's written from the company's point of view, when the only person reading it is one candidate scrolling on their phone during their lunch break, trying to work out if this job is going to make their life better or worse. If the page could belong to any company in the sector with a quick find and replace of the name, candidates will read it that way too, and skim straight past. Try this instead: flip the lens. Answer the questions candidates are actually asking: what will my day look like, who will I be working with, what happens if I'm good at this, what happens if I'm not sure yet. It's the difference between "we pride ourselves on collaboration" and actually showing what that collaboration looks like in practice. 3. No proof, all promise Every careers page claims to have a brilliant culture, great progression, and a supportive team. Every single one. Which means, on their own, those claims are worth almost nothing, because the reader has seen the exact same sentence on the last four pages they visited, and probably didn't believe any of them either. What actually works: proof, not promises. A real quote from a real employee, with a real name and a real photo, not "Sarah, Consultant" floating in the void. A case study of someone who joined as a trainee and is now running a desk. A number that means something. A video that isn't scripted to within an inch of its life. It's not really about the volume of applications; most careers pages will get some. It's about specificity doing the filtering for you: the more real and detailed the proof, the more it speaks directly to the calibre of candidate you actually want, and the less appealing it is to everyone else. 4. Burying the actual application process This one's almost too simple to believe, but we see it constantly: candidates get all the way to the bottom of a careers page, feel genuinely persuaded, and then can't find where to actually apply, or find it and have no idea what they're signing up for once they click through. Recruitment businesses, of all businesses, should understand candidate experience better than anyone, yet the careers page is often the weakest link in an otherwise strong candidate journey. It's a bit like a shop with a brilliant window display and a locked door. What actually helps: make the next step obvious and easy to find, and be upfront about what the process actually involves, how many stages, roughly how long it takes, and what to expect at each one. Give candidates real visibility of the interview process too: who they'll meet, what each stage is assessing, whether there's a task or presentation involved. Nobody enjoys mystery when it comes to their next job. 5. Treating it as a one-off project instead of a living asset This is the big one, and it's the one that actually explains most of the four problems above. Careers pages tend to get commissioned as a standalone project, usually attached to a wider rebrand or a new website, signed off, and then left completely alone for two or three years while the business changes around them. The mistake isn't really about the page itself; it's about treating it as a one-off deliverable rather than a live extension of your employer brand and EVP, something that should evolve at the same pace as everything else you're saying about who you are as an employer. New office, new leadership, new benefits, entirely new team, still the same page from 2022 with a photo of an office you don't work in anymore and a leadership team that's since moved on. Candidates can tell. It's one of the fastest ways to undermine everything else you're trying to say about being a great place to work. What actually helps: give it an owner. That could sit with L&D, a high-performing manager who's a good advocate for the culture, or TA, whoever it is, someone who needs to be accountable for it. Build a simple content cadence so it's reviewed and refreshed on a set schedule rather than whenever someone happens to notice it's out of date. And connect it to your other channels: pull real content from your socials into the page, and push the page itself out through those same channels, so the careers page and your wider EVP are reinforcing each other rather than sitting in separate silos. Why this actually matters None of this is about chasing design trends or ticking an aesthetic box. Every one of these five issues has a direct line to your bottom line: weaker application rates, more time-to-hire, more cost-per-hire, and a widening gap between the talent you want and the talent you're actually attracting. Your careers page is one of the clearest, most visible expressions of your employer brand and EVP, it's where all the work you've put into defining who you are as an employer either lands, or falls flat, depending on how well it's built and maintained. In a market where good candidates have options, it's doing more commercial heavy lifting than most businesses give it credit for. It's also worth remembering who's on the other side of the screen. Recruitment is a people business built by people who understand exactly how competitive the market for good candidates has become, which makes it all the more frustrating to see the one page built to win that competition treated as an afterthought. This is exactly the kind of thing we live for at Kitto. We audit careers pages against what candidates actually respond to, not what feels safe in a boardroom. We build employer brand and EVP content, from careers pages through to the social content and video that should be feeding them, that gets the proof, the tone, and the process right, not just the visuals. It's the same thinking behind the wider employer brand work we do with our recruitment clients: getting the story right once, then keeping it alive across every channel candidates actually use. See how we helped Auxo’s senior team to simplify how the business talks about itself. If you're not sure which of these five your own careers page is guilty of, and most pages are guilty of at least two, get in touch. We'll tell you straight, and we'll tell you how to fix it.
Alexandra Offer
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– Mollie O’Sullivan, Account Lead, Pesto Mum 6:30am - Rise & Shine (sort of) Pesto, my sidekick greyhound, is the only reason I see mornings before 8am. She insists on her walk, and I insist she doesn’t eat anything suspicious off the pavement. Our daily battle of wills usually ends with her side-eyeing squirrels while I try to remember how to function as a human.
