UK 
United States
To anyone who’s ever renovated their house or a garden, HSS Tool Hire will be a name they’ve come to rely on. The store-based hire and builders’ merchant brand has saved many an amateur DIY-er the cost of buying expensive builders’ equipment for one-off jobs, by simply enabling them to do a short-term borrow.
But in the autumn of last year, this longstanding high street business (with 130 sites across the UK), was sold off to a private equity investor, so HSS Group could embark on a major new rebrand (as HSS ProService). The sale, and resulting pivot, marked a major change in direction for the business to it being a digital-only platform. The HSS ProService portal now sees it act as an intermediary, hooking up suppliers of equipment with customers. And to really solidify this, last November it entered into a five-year agreement to merge with tool and equipment hire services company, Speedy Hire’s, nationwide network, to create the UK’s first fully integrated online marketplace for equipment, fuel, and related services.
We weren’t just a new brand; we were a new brand looking for very different, and new roles
New brand = new employee brand needed
While the completion of the deal required the HR team to do some complex re-juggling of people (approximately 100 employees transferred from Speedy to ProService, while 300 employees from HSS Hire Service moved to Speedy), the fact that an entirely new business had emerged meant there was also a real, and very parallel need for a completely new recruitment story to be told to future employees.
Kayleigh Wright
HR Director, HSS ProService Marketplace
Kayleigh Wright, HR Director at HSS ProService Marketplace explains: “As the deal was going through, we realised that HSS Tool Hire would no longer be who we are.”
She adds: “By the time we re-launched, we needed to be able show exactly who were again, in a new and fresh way, to showcase what the next exciting employee journey was going to look like, and what sort of people we wanted to attract.”
To achieve this, what was needed was a complete redesign of its careers portal – one which was needed not merely to align its careers with a new brand, but for it to be able to recruit for entirely new (digital) roles that it previously hadn’t recruited for before.
Says Wright: “We weren’t just a new brand; we were a new brand looking for very different, and new roles – especially on the tech, and data side – as our proposition pivoted to being online only. Alongside this, lots more of our roles will need to be remote and flexible, so we also needed to be able to showcase this too, including showing how new joiners how they can benefit from a whole host of perks.”
