Brand strategy and identity for Talent Connect

Talent Connect · Recruitment · Wellington · Brand · Identity · Photography · 2023–Present

Brand strategy, identity and a founder-led team photography library for a Wellington recruitment firm — a recruitment brand built to feel as personal as the service it sells, now live across the website and active on social.

Talent Connect is a Wellington-based recruitment firm with a hands-on, founder-led approach to permanent placement and contract recruitment across white-collar, professional services and technology categories. They came to Obvious with a different brief from most recruitment brands: a desire to look like the small, expert team they actually are — not a faceless agency.

The scope ran from brand strategy through to launch-ready assets: positioning, brand bio, wordmark, identity system, and a photography library that put the founders, not stock people, on every page. The work is now live on the Talent Connect website and active across their social channels — the marker of a brand that’s been adopted, not just delivered.

A small firm that needed to look like itself

Recruitment is a category where most brands look interchangeable. Stock photography, generic stock phrases, the same blue. Talent Connect came to us with a different brief: a founder-led firm doing relationship-driven work in Wellington, and a desire to look like the small, expert team they actually are — not a faceless agency.

The scope ran from brand strategy through to launch assets: positioning, brand bio, wordmark, identity system, and a photography library that put the founders, not stock people, on every page.

Strategy, identity and photography

We started with brand strategy: a short, written articulation of who Talent Connect serves, how they’re different from the bigger recruiters in the market, and what their voice sounds like in a candidate conversation versus a client conversation. That document is short by design — it’s a tool the team uses, not a deck that sits in a drawer.

From there we built the visual identity and finished with the photography. The shoot was kept deliberately small: a few setups, natural light, real moments — the kind of frames that feel like the team you’d actually want to talk to about your next role.

Out in the wild

The brand and the photography went live and have stayed live. Talent Connect uses the imagery actively across their socials and on the website — the test for whether a brand has actually landed isn’t the launch, it’s whether the client is still using it twelve months on.

For a founder-led professional services firm, the work serves three jobs at once: it signals legitimacy to potential clients, it gives candidates a sense of who they’d actually be dealing with, and it makes everyday acts of self-promotion (a LinkedIn post, a follow-up email) easier and more on-brand for the team.

Outcomes

Why this kind of work matters

Small professional services firms often defer a real brand until “later” — and a year in, they’re still scrambling between Canva drafts and stock photos. What we tried to do for Talent Connect was the opposite: get the strategy, the identity and the photography right at launch so the team could spend the next two years doing the actual work of building a client base, not the second-order work of fighting their own brand.

If you run a founder-led professional services firm and you want a brand that actually looks like you, we’d love to talk.

Working in recruitment, professional services or founder-led business?

Obvious partners with small and scale-stage New Zealand businesses to deliver compact, complete brand engagements — strategy, identity, and the photography to launch with. The pattern is consistent: brand strategy, naming or wordmark, identity system, basic guidelines, and a launch-ready photography library — small package, big return on a first impression.