SThree

SThree

When good work leaves room for more

Ask a recruitment company who its brand is for, and most will say the same thing: candidates.

Ask who its brand actually speaks to, and you will usually find someone else in the room: the client. They are the ones paying the fees, so quite reasonably, their priorities shape the language. Solving hiring challenges. Filling vacancies. Finding talent.

Candidates are the reason the business exists, yet inside most recruitment brands they become the product being moved rather than the audience being built for. Say the words "candidate-first" in a pitch and nobody will disagree with you.

The difficult part isn't deciding who the brand is for. It's understanding what that decision actually demands.

I joined SThree, a global specialist STEM talent recruiter, as Head of Design during a major rebrand already underway. A strategic platform had been developed, a new identity was taking shape, and the business had committed real time and investment to redefining how it showed up in the market. My job was to help bring that strategy to life globally.

As with any engagement, I started with a reality check: understanding the direction of the brand, the market it competed in, and whether the decisions being made were building the company SThree actually wanted to become.

What I found wasn't weak thinking. SThree wanted to become the number one destination for STEM talent, with candidates at the heart of the business. That ambition was already reflected in its purpose: bringing skilled people together to build the future. It was a direction the business genuinely believed in.

The opportunity wasn't changing the strategy. It was pushing it further.

The opportunity wasn't changing the strategy. It was pushing it further.

What candidate-first actually means

Recruitment companies naturally organise people by role, discipline and seniority. It's an effective way to structure vacancies and navigate a complex market, but it rarely aligns with how specialists define their own professional identity.

Ask a STEM specialist who they are and they rarely start with a generic job title. They'll tell you what they're trying to solve: the disease they are working to cure, the clean energy grid they are trying to scale, or the architecture they are trying to build.

They care about their craft, the problems they're solving and the impact their work has on the world. People like that don't recognise themselves in rigid, transactional categories.

If SThree wanted to become the genuine home for STEM talent, the brand had to anchor itself to the ambitions of the people it was trying to attract. That's where candidate-first stopped being an abstract statement of intent and became a strategic choice.

The promise Elevate expertise. Energise progress. moved the conversation away from standard recruitment language towards specialists fulfilling their potential. Messaging that had previously spoken about candidates started speaking to them directly:

"You can do things others can't. We find you opportunities others won't."

"Spark new possibilities. Supercharge your potential."

"Your career. Unboxed."

Once the brand aligned with what motivated these specialists rather than how the industry categorised them, every subsequent brand decision flowed from that understanding.

The most dangerous thing about a breakthrough product is believing it can tell the whole story.

An idea big enough for the business

A strategic idea only becomes useful when it clarifies the business underneath it.

“Building a world of payment possibilities” gave kevin. a way to connect things that had previously been explained separately. Its clean-slate infrastructure was how it did things differently. Its mission was to free partners from the pains of legacy payments. Its promise became “Payments you can build business on.”

A2A still mattered. Lower fees still mattered. POS payments, security, direct bank connections and removing unnecessary intermediaries still mattered. The strategy didn’t replace any of those things.

It gave them somewhere to belong.

Instead of leading primarily with the mechanics of account-to-account payments, kevin. could start with what the infrastructure enabled: greater control, new services, better conversion, stronger customer relationships and the freedom to build on top of the payment infrastructure itself.

One of the simplest expressions became:

Your brand. Your scheme. Your rules.

The product had not changed. What had changed was the significance of it.

The story could now adapt for investors, payment service providers and merchants without turning kevin. into a different company for each audience.

This mattered particularly for technology the company could not, or should not, explain in full. Without a bigger idea, secrecy leaves a vacuum and people fill it with the nearest understandable category.

People need to know what they’re joining

The same problem existed inside the company.

kevin. had grown quickly and needed to attract talent beyond its home market in Lithuania. But most candidates cannot fully evaluate the significance of proprietary infrastructure before joining a company, and even highly technical people rarely choose their next employer by comparing product architecture alone.

They need to understand what they are helping to build.

kevin.’s old visual identity was playful, irreverent and impossible to ignore.

Before joining kevin., I had seen the astronaut blowing bubble gum on its homepage. It was playful, irreverent and impossible to ignore. I saw a founder who understood how to get attention, and an opportunity to turn that attention into something the business could sustain as it moved deeper into an industry where trust matters enormously.

But I could infer that opportunity because of my own experience. A company cannot rely on every prospective employee doing the same.

If kevin. existed to expand what was possible in payments, then the opportunity for the people joining it could be rooted in the same belief:

Build your different.

People weren’t simply joining another fintech or helping optimise an existing payment system. They were joining a company built around questioning inherited constraints and creating something that hadn’t existed before.

Defining the idea was only the beginning. The real work was making it useful enough to shape what happened next.

From an astronaut to an invisible ingredient

The visual identity had to make the same transition.

The original kevin. brand had a playful, irreverent quality, epitomised by rocket ships and the astronaut blowing bubble gum. It was distinctive and attention-grabbing, but said relatively little about the role kevin. wanted to play in the payments ecosystem.

kevin. was never supposed to become the brand consumers saw when they paid. Its infrastructure was designed to operate behind its partners, allowing their brands and payment experiences to remain in front.

So the central visual device became a red ball: kevin. as the invisible ingredient moving through the ecosystem, quietly changing what was possible around it.

Sometimes it navigated complexity. Sometimes it unlocked a path or altered an environment. Across the visual system, the same device could express resilience, efficiency, security, POS, mobile and online payments without resorting to the usual imagery of cards, terminals, phones and transactions. The visual-world system deliberately carried that logic across different parts of the business rather than treating the ball as a decorative asset.

The point wasn’t simply to make kevin. look more mature. It was to make the way the company showed up consistent with the role it had chosen to play.

The infrastructure worked silently in the background. The partner remained in control. The end customer didn’t need to know kevin. was there.

Your brand. Your scheme. Your rules.

What kevin. taught me about breakthrough products

Founders spend years immersed in what they are building. They understand every barrier they have overcome, every technical breakthrough and every reason the product is better than what came before. That depth is what allows extraordinary products to exist.

It can also make the product the easiest way to explain the company.

kevin. had already achieved something remarkable before I arrived. It had demonstrated technology people doubted was possible, raised significant investment and gained the attention of some of the largest players in payments.

The strategic work wasn’t about making that product sound more exciting. It was about asking a question product descriptions alone couldn’t answer:

If this succeeds, what becomes possible because it exists?

That question moved the company beyond A2A, open banking and a fight against legacy infrastructure. It created an idea that could connect the technology to the value it enabled, give employees something larger to build towards, and provide a common direction for how the company spoke, hired and showed up.

I left kevin. shortly after the new brand launched, and the company later entered insolvency. That means I cannot claim years of commercial results or pretend the strategy had time to prove its long-term impact. What the work demonstrates is something more specific: how a company with extraordinary technology can still need to understand the bigger idea contained within what it is building.

A breakthrough product can get you remarkably far. But as a company grows, the idea behind it has to travel further than the founder, further than the product demonstration and further than the product itself.

The product proves what you’re building. The brand gives the whole business something to build from.