we turned a firm’s name into a

recruitment strategy.

Everyone was hiring. Nobody was different.

By 2022, accounting had a crisis that had nothing to do with numbers. Over 300,000 accountants and auditors left their jobs in a two-year span. CPA exam candidates dropped nearly 7% in a single year. Every firm in the country was competing for a shrinking pool of talent—and most of them sounded exactly alike doing it.

Freed Maxick is a Top 100 CPA firm with three offices in Western New York and fully remote positions nationwide. They provide accounting, tax, and consulting services across industries, and they’d identified recruitment and retention as a top strategic priority. But recognition of the problem wasn’t the same as having a solution. Their recruitment approach was episodic—post a job, fill a job, repeat. There was no ongoing strategy, no candidate pipeline, no reason for a talented accountant scrolling LinkedIn to stop and think that firm is different.

Freed came to Riveter ready to change that. Not with a better job posting. With a brand.

freed maxick 

freed maxick 

Client/Industry

Freed MaxickProfessional Services

Tactics

Employer BrandingRecruitment StrategyResearch

Research first. Always.

Riveter partnered with Wayforward Associates, a strategic human resources firm, to build the initiative from a foundation of actual insight rather than assumptions about what candidates want to hear.

Through in-depth interviews with employees across roles and tenure levels, we isolated the themes that defined the Freed Maxick experience. Not the benefits-package talking points—the real reasons people stayed. The patterns that emerged were specific enough to be meaningful and broad enough to be true: employees at Freed had genuine latitude to shape their career paths, an entrepreneurial culture that encouraged specialization without isolation, steadfast support through personal and professional transitions, and a level of flexibility and respect that went well beyond remote-work policies.

Those themes became the employer value proposition—the strategic foundation that every piece of creative would be built on. The EVP and its key messages weren’t taglines. They were the organizing framework that ensured everything the campaign said was rooted in something employees actually experienced.

freed-thrive
freed-brochure
freed-grow

The insight hiding in the firm’s name.

Campaign platforms can come from anywhere. This one came from four letters.

The research made clear that what set Freed apart was freedom—not the work-from-home kind (which, as employees noted, can actually be constraining for some people), but freedom woven into the culture itself. Freedom to pursue a specialty. Freedom to define your own success. Freedom to grow at your pace, in your direction, with genuine support behind you.

And the first four letters of the firm’s name spell “Free.”

“Free to Thrive” became the campaign platform. It was immediately ownable—no other firm could claim it without sounding derivative—and it was infinitely extensible. Free to grow. Free to explore. Free to balance. Free to connect. Free to innovate. Free to define your own success. Every extension mapped back to a specific EVP pillar, but the structure was flexible enough to feel fresh with each new application.

The visual system reinforced the individualism at the heart of the message. Employee evangelists—real Freed team members selected because they embodied the key messages—were photographed in full color against grayscale backgrounds. They literally stand out. A handwritten script font (Original Handwriting Italic) added a personal, almost signature-like quality to each headline, as if the employee had written it themselves. The effect was contemporary, confident, and unmistakably not what accounting firms typically look like.

 

Real people telling real stories.

Video was central to the strategy, and it had to be authentic. We helped Freed identify Employee Evangelists—team members whose personal experiences naturally demonstrated the EVP pillars. Katie, whose entrepreneurial spirit and ability to specialize without being siloed captured the career-shaping message. Katelyn, whose story of flexibility through starting a family showed how the firm backs people through real life transitions. Raj, whose exploration of different industries with consistent support illustrated the growth culture.

The interviews were documentary-style. No scripts, no corporate talking points. Each evangelist spoke from their own experience, and the footage captured both the professional and personal dimensions of what it means to work at Freed. The resulting video became the centerpiece of the campaign—a proof point that everything the campaign promised was actually true, told by the people living it.

A careers page that actually recruits.

Most company careers pages are afterthoughts—boilerplate copy stacked on top of job postings. Freed’s became a strategic asset.

With Free to Thrive as the organizing framework, we rebuilt the careers landing page to do real work. The EVP and key messages lead. The employee evangelist video anchors the experience. Expanded content details what it means to build a career at Freed, not just fill a position. Visitors can explore different career paths and—critically—sign up for a careers interest list even when there isn’t an open role that fits. That list became the foundation of the candidate pipeline: a database of interested, pre-qualified professionals who’d already self-identified as drawn to the firm’s culture.

Once candidates joined the interest list, they entered a lead nurturing sequence—periodic emails reinforcing the EVP and keeping the relationship warm until the right role opened. The shift from episodic hiring to continuous recruitment was exactly what Freed needed. Rather than starting from zero every time a position opened, they now had a pool of engaged candidates who already understood and connected with the brand.

Play VideoPlay Video

Paid LinkedIn that did more than spend budget.

The social arm of the campaign included both organic content strategy and targeted paid promotion on LinkedIn, where Freed’s candidate audience lives. The paid campaign was structured to layer awareness and engagement: static image posts ran for the first 30 days featuring the EVP pillars, followed by video content retargeted at people who’d engaged with the initial creative.

Targeting was precise—accounting and finance degree holders in Western New York, upstate corridors, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Indiana, excluding current Freed employees. The campaign ran on a month-to-month basis with continuous optimization: monitoring creative fatigue, adjusting bids to maintain efficient cost-per-click, shifting budget toward higher-performing formats, and refreshing creative at regular intervals.

The data validated a pattern worth noting: people-forward imagery consistently outperformed text-heavy graphics. The “Free to be me” creative featuring a real employee photo delivered a click-through rate more than double that of a testimonial quote graphic. Video completion rates stayed strong, and the campaign consistently reached the right job functions—accounting, finance, and business development professionals at the companies Freed wanted to recruit from.

A system designed to last.

The campaign guide was the deliverable that ensured Free to Thrive didn’t depend on Riveter’s ongoing involvement to maintain quality. It documented everything: the messaging framework and expanded headline word list, the visual treatment (color-against-grayscale photography, script font usage rules, color palette specifications with explicit “avoid” examples), the photography style and image library, typography hierarchy, color breakdown ratios, and sample applications across formats.

The guide was designed for Freed’s internal team—HR, marketing, anyone creating candidate-facing content—to extend the campaign without diluting it. That’s a deliberate choice. Employer branding campaigns fail when every new piece requires agency involvement. They succeed when the system is clear enough for anyone on the team to create something on-brand, with guidelines that prevent the most common mistakes.

Then it earned a second year.

The strongest proof of a campaign platform is whether it survives contact with time. Free to Thrive did.

After the original content library was fully utilized across all channels, Freed’s stakeholders weren’t asking for a new direction—they were asking for new faces. The platform had proven itself. The visual system was recognizable. The messaging resonated. What was needed was evolution, not reinvention.

Riveter developed a second-year refresh that maintained the established Free to Thrive brand while introducing a new cohort of employee evangelists, fresh content themes, and a narrative arc positioning the new work as the next chapter—showing the results of the initial promise. The refresh extended across social media, the Thrive Hive blog, candidate nurturing emails, and HR advertising. New video production captured five additional employee stories for social distribution.

A campaign built to last is worth more than a campaign built to launch. Free to Thrive was both.

What professional services firms need from marketing.

Freed Maxick is an accounting firm, but the challenge they faced transcends industry. Every professional services organization—accounting, law, consulting, financial advisory, architecture, engineering—competes for talent in markets where the work itself is often hard to differentiate from the outside. The technical capabilities look similar. The service descriptions blur together. The difference is the culture, the people, and the experience of building a career there.

That story doesn’t tell itself. It requires research to surface the truth, strategy to organize it into something ownable, creative to make it felt, and systems to keep it consistent over time. That’s what we build for professional services firms: the clarity to stand out in markets where trust, expertise, and relationships are the product.

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Employer branding is just one dimension of what professional services firms need from marketing. We also develop brand positioning, service-line messaging, thought leadership platforms, and growth strategies for organizations where the sale starts with trust. If your firm has a story that isn’t being told, we should talk.

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