Ten years ago, we created the Gradcore brand to help us transition from being a regional graduate retention business to a national social enterprise. One dedicated to transforming graduate recruitment and employability. As you’d expect, a lot has changed in those ten years – both in the market and at Gradcore – so the need for a new brand that reflects those changes will come as no surprise.

Trouble is, when things are busy, it’s hard to find the time to pause and take stock. Sadly, like most of us, self-improvement often ends up getting pushed to the bottom of that ever-expanding to-do list. But there are only so many times you can be told that ‘your website doesn’t reflect what you guys really do’.

We needed something that would capture how we actually spend our time: designing employability strategies, reviewing early talent programmes, developing curriculum employability models, and screening thousands of student and graduate applications. Activities that all, at their core, share a spirit of progress and growth…

This new positioning statement for Gradcore is both a statement of intent and a statement about where we’ve come from. It’s talking about our past, present and future, and the past, present and future of our clients, students and graduates.

We’re conscious that ‘journeys’ could be seen as cliché in the world of reality TV, where even the first-round loser on MasterChef cites how it’s been an ‘amazing journey’. But we want to reclaim the word for what it really means. Because, in its truest sense, it gets to the heart of what everyone who works in early talent and employability does. We help to find people’s paths through life.

Developing the new brand demanded that we work with some inspirational partners. It started with words, crafted by the extremely bright mind of Tom Sharp from the Poetry of It All, his creative agency that just focuses on words. The words were then brought to life by a combination of the creative design excellence of Jamie, Phil and the team at Supple studio, Matt, Lieve and the team at Mud who created the website, Tom at TBC who crafted the copy, and India and Magnus from India+Magnus. We’d like to say a massive thank you to all of them for their creative insight and patience.

We hope you find the new brand to be curious, understated and relevant. You’ll be glad to know that it doesn’t herald a sudden switch to lots of direct marketing and cold calling from us. We’re conscious that’s happening more than ever within our sectors, but we’ve never done that and we won’t start now.

We will, however, continue to build relationships, have useful conversations, listen hard and be a trusted partner to clients we’re proud to collaborate with.

Whether you’re new to Gradcore or an old friend, take a look around the site, have a read, watch some of our client stories and get in touch to let us know what you think. The next stage of the journey starts now.

Martin Edmondson, CEO, Gradcore Ltd