How Knight Frank Avoided £595k in Agency Spend - and Grew Direct Hiring by 66%
Knight Frank's recruitment team were spending nearly £2M a year on agencies to hire people their own recruiters could find themselves. Sixty Seconds helped them take back control - with branded video job ads, immediate social publishing, and engagement numbers that turned heads.
Simon on What Changed
£2M a Year to Hire People They Could Find Themselves
Knight Frank hired 611 people in a year - and 45% of those hires came through recruitment agencies. At close to £2M in annual agency spend, the business was paying a premium to outsource something their own recruiters were capable of doing. Worse, they had no visibility or control over what those agencies were saying about the Knight Frank brand.
The in-house team of 15 recruiters was doing their best - manually sourcing specialists across the UK on LinkedIn - but without the right tools or content infrastructure, making a real dent was hard. And getting anything out of the central marketing team took four weeks minimum.
£2M Annual Agency Dependency
45% of all hires came through expensive external agencies - for roles the internal team could fill directly. The business was paying agencies to find the same people their own recruiters could source.
15 Recruiters, No Scalable Content Engine
A team of 15 searching LinkedIn manually - no branded content, no centralised campaign infrastructure, and no way to reach specialist audiences at scale across the UK.
4-Week Wait for Marketing Support
Every content request to the central marketing team took four weeks to turn around. By the time anything was approved, the moment had passed. Speed was non-negotiable - and completely unavailable.
Flat Job Ads with Poor ROI
Paid LinkedIn job posts were generating weak engagement. With a quarter of a million pounds spent on LinkedIn and nothing to show for it, the case for the CFO was getting harder to make.
Branded Content the Team Controls - Published in Minutes, Not Weeks
We worked with the Knight Frank recruitment team to align every role type and candidate persona, then built a library of fully branded video job ad templates. Training covered not just how to create content, but when and how to publish it for maximum impact. The team went from waiting four weeks for marketing sign-off to publishing instantly - with brand consistency built in by default.
Branded Video Job Ad Templates
We mapped Knight Frank's key roles and candidate personas, then built a suite of branded, on-template video job ads. Every post looks on-brand without needing marketing approval - because the brand is already baked into the template.
On-brand content, published instantlyDirect Social Publishing - No Bottlenecks
The team now owns their social publishing - including Instagram and LinkedIn. Content goes live the moment it's ready. The first video Charlotte pushed out hit 5,000 views in 24 hours. No queue. No approval cycle. Full control.
Live in minutes, not weeksPhase 2: Talent Pool Capture
The next phase connects video job ads directly to the recruitment system. Candidates who click will be routed into talent pools by role type - turning every view into a pipeline asset, not just an impression.
Every click becomes a talent pipeline record“I've avoided at least five hundred and ninety-five thousand pounds in cost avoidance by not using agencies. My business love me. With the Sixty Seconds platform, we are actually in control of that - the creation, putting it out socially. It's immediate. I don't have to wait for people to approve it. It's already branded. It's already done.”
“My pitch to the business was: get rid of this two million pound spend. Forty-five percent of all our hires came through agencies - and the only way to change that is to have a really good marketing campaign. Look at all your source channels. Have very targeted messaging to specific groups. How do you do that with only fifteen people searching on LinkedIn? It's really, really difficult to do.”
From a £2M Problem to a £595k Win
The numbers came quickly. Within months of launch, the data told a clear story.
Agency cost avoided by building direct sourcing capability instead of outsourcing to recruiters
Increase in candidate engagement on job ads since switching to branded video content
Reply rate - more than double the 5% B2B industry average, driven by targeted video outreach
Additional clicks on job ads each month since introducing video job ads in June
The very first branded video job ad - pushed live by Charlotte on LinkedIn - hit five thousand views within a day of going out. That's what happens when content is on-brand, engaging, and published without a four-week queue.
Recruitment Was Just the Start
After seeing the results in recruitment, Simon is already talking to Knight Frank's sales teams about bringing the same approach to business development and prospecting. Engaging content at speed, published directly, without the bottleneck of a central marketing queue - it turns out that's a problem every team in a business like Knight Frank has.
Phase 2 of the recruitment programme will connect video job ads directly to the applicant tracking system - so every click either converts into an application or drops into a talent pool, building a lasting asset from every piece of content published.
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