The Good Stuff Exchange

When our film A New Life Starts Today for Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust won not one, but two major national recruitment awards, we were incredibly proud.

The film picked up both the RAD Award and the Recruitment Marketing Award, two of the most respected accolades in employer brand and recruitment communications.

But what stood out even more? We didn’t win in an NHS‑specific category. We won against some of the UK’s biggest commercial brands:

RAD Awards 2026  
Single Use of Video
ASDA · BAT · Currys · Mitchells & Butlers · Nando’s · Life Time · The British Army (Capita) · NHS England · Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS FT (winner)

Recruitment Marketing Awards 2026 
Video up to £15k
Heineken · ICAEW · NSPCC · Volkswagen Group · Babcock · Fostering South West · Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS FT (winner)

These categories represent the best of the best in recruitment storytelling, campaigns backed by budgets, brand power and resources that dwarf what’s typically available in the NHS. And yet, a modest‑budget NHS midwifery recruitment film stood at the top. Which raises a question we hear constantly from NHS, public‑sector and not‑for‑profit teams:

What actually makes a recruitment film work when budgets are tight? And how can organisations under financial pressure compete credibly with the biggest brands in the UK?

Looking across recent recruitment work, from midwifery and senior NHS roles to admin and support services, a consistent pattern is emerging.

The strongest recruitment films are rarely the most polished ones.

They work when they are:

• grounded in a clear employer truth
• honest about the role and reality
• proportionate to the organisation’s context
• designed as part of a wider attraction strategy

In fact, in NHS trusts and not‑for‑profit organisations, over‑polish can actively undermine trust.

Candidates understand financial pressure.
So do internal teams.

When recruitment films look overly expensive or branded:

• external audiences can question credibility
• internal staff can feel disconnected
• the work can feel out of step with reality

The A new Life Starts Today film resonated precisely because it felt authentic and also appropriate, not extravagant, not performative.

Across organisations such as:

• Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS FT (“Nurturing Your Ambition”)
• Swansea Bay NHS, where location, culture and community mattered
• University Hospitals Bristol & Weston, where Administering Skills for Good elevated admin and support roles

The strongest results came when teams took the time to understand:

• what genuinely differentiates them as employers
• who they need to attract, and who they don’t
• how film fits alongside targeting, media and engagement

In these cases, modest budgets weren’t a limitation. They forced sharper decisions.

Why we’re opening this up

We’re seeing many comms, workforce and HR teams asking the same things:

• When does film genuinely add value to recruitment?
• How polished is too polished in a pressured organisation?
• How do you make limited budgets work harder, ethically and credibly?
• How do you avoid creating something that looks good, but doesn’t deliver?

That’s why we’re launching The Good Stuff Exchange, a new insight‑sharing series focused on what’s actually working in positive‑impact communications, particularly in public and not‑for‑profit sectors.