“Keep it Simple. Keep it Consistent” Sean Furey on Building First Point Group’s Global Brand

When Sean Furey joined First Point Group, posting jobs to the website wasn't a ‘go-to’ for the recruitment team. Now, they’re a critical touchpoint for candidate attraction.

We spoke with the Global Head of Marketing to discuss how marketing has become a core part of the business, why candidate experience starts with relevance, and his plan to make First Point Group’s website a viable alternative to job boards through hyper personalisation.

You were featured in the Attract 50 for your approach to online candidate attraction. What do you think sets your strategy apart?

The first and most important thing is posting all jobs to our website aside from the confidential roles. It sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised how often that step gets missed.
When I joined First Point Group, part of my role was bridging the gap between marketing and recruitment – showing the business commercially what marketing could deliver for them. 

We’ve been really consistent in that message: post your jobs to our website, not just on LinkedIn and job boards. Our site is optimised for Google for Jobs and syndicates to other job boards, which naturally helps with reach.

The more visible your job is, the more candidates you’re likely to attract… it’s volume and visibility. And over time, that feeds into the CRM, so applications for one person’s job post might help a colleague fill a different role. That shared benefit really helps embed the habit. 

How do you collaborate with your recruitment team? What’s helped make that partnership click?

Being visible with the recruitment teams globally is crucial – whether that’s in the London office or on weekly Teams calls with our international offices. It helps me understand how they’re attracting clients and candidates.

That collaboration flows both ways. If the team uses marketing material to win clients or candidates find our resources useful, I encourage them to share success stories. Ultimately, it’s about clear communication.

Let’s talk about the website! How has it evolved to become such a central part of your strategy?

When I joined, one of my first priorities was to rebuild the website and demonstrate ROI. The old site was built to showcase the business, which was fine for the time, but it wasn’t optimised to generate client leads. It generated candidate applications but naturally it could always be better.

Our new site is built to do both – and it’s working. By upskilling the marketing team in SEO and using tools like Ahrefs, we’ve brought that capability in-house. We run regular SEO audits and have steadily built up performance from there. The site now delivers consistent results for candidate and client attraction.

The next phase is improving the candidate experience. We’re working with our web agency to personalise the job application process, which will help to deliver a positive experience for the candidate and more relevant applicants for our consultants. It’s a work in progress that I’m so excited to see take shape… watch this space! 

Finally, I’ve been diving into Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) – how we make our content more discoverable by AI tools. We’ve already seen traffic coming in through channels like ChatGPT and CoPilot. It’s still early days, but it’s something I’m learning more about and building into our marketing strategy.

How do you maintain a great candidate experience when dealing with a high volume of applications?

Because we’re a global business, we receive a high volume of applications from all over the world. For one role, we had over 2,000 applications in a single week (Dubai is still a really popular destination to work!) It quickly became unmanageable for the consultant, and personally replying to each applicant presented serious challenges.
To help address this, we introduced a logic step in the application process which improves the user experience and ensures our recruitment consultants only receive relevant applicants, making it easier to respond directly to candidates.

Looking ahead, we’re working to make the process more interactive by adding steps like uploading qualifications or certifications. This helps candidates feel their application is being taken seriously and helps them to self-assess their fit before investing more time. Ultimately, it’s about respecting everyone’s time on both sides.

If someone was starting from scratch with their employer brand, do you have a golden piece of advice?

We recently finished a project revisiting our mission and values. Not quite starting from scratch, but more of a refresh after around 15 years and significant expansion since our original mission statement.
What we landed on was more than a tagline. It’s grounded in the reality of what recruitment can do: whether that’s helping candidates in South Africa transform their family’s financial future, or supporting clients in the US with critical tech hires.

When starting a brand from scratch, I would prioritise asking what’s the purpose of the business. If the answer is “we exist to just make money,” that’s not a differentiator. Every recruitment agency needs to make money. What makes your agency different?

The second piece of advice is simple, but underrated: communicate. When communication breaks down internally, everything else does too – whether it’s culture, delivery, or candidate experience.

And finally, speed. It’s not a “value” in the classic sense, but it’s something we pride ourselves on. Timing is everything. That’s how we win business and it’s also how we deliver a brand experience that sticks.

Speed, purpose, and open communication. That’s where I’d start.
Are there any brands – inside or outside recruitment – that you look to for inspiration?

A solid reference point for me has always been the accountancy firm, PwC. Not the most obvious (or glamorous) answer for most, but I find their marketing clear and straightforward. Their YouTube ads recently were unexpected, but the messaging was so well-executed.

But the brand I use most as a benchmark for improving our candidate experience is Amazon. Their personalisation is absolutely spot on. When I talk to our website agency, Amazon is the go-to example for the kind of hyper-personalisation we want.

It sounds like your work keeps you busy! Do you have any hobbies or interests that help you to switch off?

I’m a huge fan of travelling! I’ve been fortunate enough to go on a few big trips around the world.  

In 2020, I published a children’s book inspired by my travels. The inspiration of the story came from my nephew, who gave me a small bear to take travelling. In the book, the ‘talking’ bear travels the world with me. Since then, I followed it up with a second one… I’ve always enjoyed writing, so that was a really nice creative outlet.

And outside of that, I’m a keen runner. I do races whenever I can. So those three things – travelling, writing, and running –  are probably my favourite ways to switch off.

Sean and First Point Group were recently featured in the idibu Attract 50 report, spotlighting standout candidate attraction in staffing and recruitment. Download the full report for free.