Reshaping ACELR8’s Brand

Last year, we spent a lot of time thinking about how ACELR8’s brand influences our relationships with clients and candidates — no matter if past, current, or potential connections. We want to make sure it’s clear what benefits we offer, how our services work and how we can take care of your hiring.

At ACELR8, we want to approach recruiting like no one else, by truly understanding our clients’ needs, the business growth and supporting every part of their hiring to achieve their growth. We want our brand to be a part of their stories — our current offering has any different faces that had to be put next to each other, looking at all the content we produce and the services we offer. That’s how we started reimagining our own brand.

Ideation process

We wanted the brand to come truly from all of us, ACELR8ers, that’s why we decided to use our internal resources and run a series of internal interviews with people in our company with a variety of titles: Engagement Managers, Talent Partners, Associate Talent Partners, Office Manager, and more. We were trying to understand how the current brand is perceived and what it lacks. We came up with a series of questions, including ‘How to maintain the brand internally?’ and ‘How to include new services in the brand?’ It was a good place to start.

After that, we had a workshop with an external designer who helped us with getting more insights out of the information that we gathered before. We focused on three aspects:

• Clients — what are their needs?
• Attitude — how do we approach serving their needs?
• Credibility — why are we the right choice for our clients?

The main conclusion was the fact that all that ACELR8 does is focusing on people. When you look at how startups are built out, they do so with three pillars: people, product, and processes. ACELR8 takes care of one of the P’s, which is people. We shape companies by bringing outstanding talent on board, that in their turn shape the direction of the company. For example, if we hire a Head of Product, they will shape the direction of the product, or if we hire a Head of Engineering, she/he will shape the strategy of the engineering team. But also our Talent Partners themselves, who work onsite to hire talent, leave a mark in the company and shape the hiring efforts. Through the people we hire to build the companies, and by serving as the gatekeepers to get into these companies, we are shaping them. The word shaping is important for us for one more reason. With the knowledge and insights that we share, we shape the discussion around the topic of talent in our community of early-stage founders and HR leaders. That’s why we run initiatives such as Talking Talent, host podcasts like A-Players and share first-hand experiences from the clients we work with on our blog.

Implementation

First, we wanted to embrace something that’s been present in our company for as long as it exists. ACELR8 is a name we all truly love, as it’s unique and communicates well what we are trying to achieve: accelerating our clients potential through their talent and hiring. But internally, to just make our lives a little easier, we refer to it as A8. We thought that it would be a great way to maintain our brand internally. The A8 became a part of our new logo, in a shape that represents growth. It helped us to unify our services and give them one, consistent visual look.

The new key visuals are the extension of our shaping story. They have many different sizes, but connect to create a beautiful pattern that goes alongside our logo — here, the shape is shaping as it pushes out in both corners and the patterns show that every addition to your company shapes it in a new direction. We also made sure that it puts people in focus, that’s why on our refreshed website, you can see faces of our recruiters filling the shapes.

Our colour pallet didn’t change much, with the exception of ACELR8 X, which we lightened to emphasize our humanistic approach to executive hiring. We put a clear divide between our candidate-focused and executives-focused initiatives. Talking Talent, Inhouse, and Jobs use warmer colours when ACELR8 X, A-Players, and Employer Branding use cooler ones to convey professionalism.

Brands of Talking Talent and A-Players weren’t left off. Both of the names visualised with ‘by ACELR8’ right by their logotypes, as we want them to be a part of our efforts in building a community focused on hiring, but still have them standing on their own feet. The patterns are, again, focused on people.

A change that’s present on all of the above is a new typeface. From Futura in our logo and Barlow on our website and other assets, we went to Montserrat across all of the visuals. We believe that this change gave our logo and typography a new, fresh, but yet familiar look.

On the website itself, besides refreshing its look, we put a focus on simplifying our services, which include Inhouse, ACELR8 X, and Employer Branding.

Shape your company with ACELR8

The whole process of reshaping our brand allowed us to better understand how our services are perceived and how we position ourselves in the market. Our mission, which is to unlock one’s potential, was always there — we just needed a more clear idea of how we want to present it to the world with the services that we offer and content that we create. We are happy to finally share it with you.

We are looking forward to showing you the ACELR8 way in 2020!

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