When Olivia Williams joined Dunelm as Employer Brand Manager, the retailer had a recognition problem. Customers loved the stores. But beyond the shop floor, few people knew what Dunelm actually looked like as a place to work. Four and a half years later, that's changed, and Vouch has played a meaningful role in how Dunelm tells its story at scale.
The Challenge
Dunelm is a well-loved homewares retailer across the UK and Republic of Ireland with over 200 stores, multiple distribution sites, and support sites, making it a genuinely diverse business with roles spanning retail, merchandising, early careers, finance, and more. But for a long time, that breadth was invisible to candidates.
"People would know the stores, if they've got a store nearby, or they shop regularly, but wouldn't know the rest of the business, or what opportunities there'd be available," says Olivia.
When Olivia came on board, there was no established employer brand to speak of. Recruiters were doing their best, but without the right tools or content to support them. And as a team of essentially one when it comes to content creation, Olivia needed a smarter way to capture and share authentic stories from across the business, without a production crew, a big budget, or endless hours of editing time.
The old approach was patchy at best. Before Vouch, capturing employee stories meant either recording clunky Teams or Stream calls, or sitting down with someone, taking notes, and writing it all up afterwards. A process that was time-consuming and always produced just a single piece of written content, with nothing left over to repurpose.
The Solution
Dunelm brought Vouch on board as their go-to platform for capturing and repurposing employee video content. The appeal was practical: Vouch removes the friction from the recording process for both Olivia and the people she's asking to appear on camera. Employees can record in their own time, redo takes, and follow prompts, without a camera crew making the whole thing feel like a production.
For Olivia, using Vouch means one piece of content doesn't have to serve just one purpose. "I can kind of chop it up. I can have things in quotes. I can have it written. I can have social edits. I can use videos on the website. Vouch allowed me to be a bit more efficient with the bank of content I had."
Here's how that plays out in practice.
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Graduate & Early Careers Content
One of Dunelm's most active use cases for Vouch is its early careers programme. For many young candidates, Dunelm was the place their parents went to buy cushions and curtains, not somewhere they imagined building a career.
Changing that perception meant showing candidates a side of Dunelm they would not normally see. "We were building a bit of a persona and identity," says Olivia Williams. "Gen Zs and Millennials wouldn't necessarily be our target customer historically. It would be their parents that shopped here. They'd see the store, but wouldn't understand the opportunity at Dunelm for them."
Dunelm used Vouch to let its graduates and apprentices tell that story themselves. Rather than relying on polished corporate content, Olivia could capture authentic videos from people already living the experience, recorded in their own time and in their own words.
"It's really helped to use our own grads and apprentices to talk about their own experiences and what they've done. And with that audience, they're much more likely to jump on and want to talk about things and share their experiences using video."
The videos also gave candidates a clearer picture of what joining Dunelm would actually be like. Alongside employee experiences, the content answered practical questions about the recruitment process, assessment centres and even what people wear to work day-to-day.
"We don't really have a formal dress code, and we found from feedback that people wanted to see what they could actually wear. Saying 'smart casual' wasn't specific enough and ‘wear what you feel comfortable in’ was too vague. Using grads and apprentices to show what they wear in their roles has been really helpful for new starters."
CEO Communications
One of the more unexpected ways Dunelm has used Vouch is for internal communications, specifically keeping colleagues connected to their CEO.
When Dunelm's new chief executive came in, it quickly became clear she was a natural on camera. She'd been filming short clips on her phone as she visited stores, with an ambitious goal of reaching every single one of the 200+ locations within her first 12 months.
Rather than have her email in phone videos, which would then need to be chased down and reformatted, the comms team gave her a Vouch link. She films when she wants to using the Vouch recorder whether that’s in the car, on the road, or on the shop floor. The video goes straight through to the Vouch library, and the comms team makes only minor edits before it's published.
"She has an open link that is always open to her. She uses the same link every week or two weeks. She just films what she wants to say really quickly. It goes off to the comms team. All they do is basically edit the start and the end. They don't edit any of her content."
The result is a regular, authentic window into leadership, captured efficiently without disrupting anyone's workflow.
Winning Over the Nonbelievers
Not everyone at Dunelm was immediately enthusiastic about getting on camera. Olivia describes working with a Finance Director who was understandably cautious, both about what could be said publicly and about being on video at all.
The team's concern was visibility: "Why would we put our best people external? Because they might get poached." Olivia's response was to reframe it. "You're your own best kept secret. So you're not attracting the best people because you're keeping really guarded."
Getting them over the line took some coaching, but Vouch's flexibility helped. Olivia set some questions in the Vouch Request to optional, added guidance notes inside the platform, and removed any time pressure on takes. When the employee wanted to use the autocue feature, that was available too.
"I thought I'm never going to get him on board. But we managed to actually get some really good videos out of it. I think just the way that Vouch had different options to make someone feel comfortable, it wasn't just one way of doing it, really helped."
The Results
Dunelm now has an employer brand that spans every corner of the business, from store-floor roles to finance, and from early careers to executive communications. Content that once took significant planning and budget to produce can now be turned around quickly, repurposed across multiple channels, and gathered from employees across the country without Olivia needing to be in the room.
For a team of one working across a hybrid, multi-site business, that matters enormously.
In Their Own Words
When we asked Olivia how she'd describe Vouch to a fellow employer brand professional, she keeps it simple:
"How I've described it is just an efficient way of getting authentic content. When you're an employer brand person, you do have to dip into being on the ground making content as well as building your strategies, working with stakeholders. You kind of have to do everything. So you need something that is going to be easy for you to get your end product."
And after four and a half years of building something from the ground up, that's exactly what she's got.
"I've done so many different types of video with Vouch. It just gives you a bit of everything and just makes it easy and time efficient for us. It's been a really, really helpful tool for when you've not got a lot of resource, not a lot of budget, and not a lot of time."
Want to see how Vouch could work for your employer brand team? Book a demo and we'll show you around.
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