Building a recruitment platform Blue Pelican could own, evolve and grow

Over a partnership spanning almost a decade, Digital SHIFT helped reshape the Blue Pelican brand and build an owned recruitment ecosystem around the business.

The work connected candidate journeys, recruitment content, product direction, SEO, analytics, infrastructure and ongoing delivery. The objective was not simply to launch a new website. It was to give the recruitment business a platform it could continue using and improving as its needs changed.

The relationship continued well beyond launch.

During post-launch work in 2018, Marc Thornton maintained a shared delivery board and prioritised practical issues such as consultant email routing and navigation fixes before pushing further page-speed optimisation. After a successful domain change, he coordinated Blue Pelican and the developers through the remaining work.

That detail matters because long-term digital partnerships are rarely about one dramatic redesign. They are usually a stream of smaller decisions: what is actually blocking users, what carries commercial risk, what can wait, and how do you change the platform without damaging the things that already work?

In 2022, Marc helped the recruitment team reuse its campaign pages, providing director-approved publishing access while preserving existing content links. For later platform updates, he proposed staging tests and a joint client check before live rollout.

The result was a relationship in which the digital estate could evolve without every change becoming a separate disconnected project.

For Digital SHIFT, Blue Pelican is a good example of the kind of partnership we value most: understand the business well enough to make sensible priorities, protect continuity, and treat the website and associated tools as working infrastructure rather than as a finished brochure.