The Reed Group is one of the largest recruitment companies in the UK and operates across the employee and employer life cycle- from direct recruitment, to learning programmes and health & wellbeing initiatives. As Reed’s digital partner, we’ve helped design, build, and roll out their new digital estate across half a dozen properties, including reed.com, on their new headless CMS platform.

One of our first pieces of work with Reed saw us consolidate core sites into a new .com, making it a streamlined and comprehensive first point of contact for all customers. With a focus on conversion and SEO, we split the navigation between employers and employees to ensure each audience’s needs were met throughout their journey and created sector-specific content-led hubs. The results achieved from this approach was carried into the design of subsequent sites of Reed’s estate, including Reed Learning, Reed Wellbeing and Reed Talent Solutions.

Our design team took Reed’s recently refreshed brand guidelines and refined them to fit a digital landscape. We evolved certain design recommendations as well as assessed factors such as accessibility and ease of application. We created a shared global component design system, ensuring that each new Reed website could use existing components, but refreshed to fit the brand’s unique identity. To answer some of the brand’s specific design requirements, we add new components to the central asset library to be re-shared across all other brands in their CMS. The result? For every new site, design and development velocity increases, creating cost and time efficiencies across all business units.

We’ve opted for a progressive web architecture approach, running a component-driven React framework to ensure efficient workflows. All new sites are driven by the headless Contentful CMS and use dynamic forms via Hubspot to provide one single source of customer data and insight. As well as building and launching new Reed sites, we support existing sites, complete optimisation tasks and proactively look for security vulnerabilities in the ecosystem.