World Host Group – Client Case Study

Building an internal creative agency and global marketing function from scratch, alongside key Tech and Data hires.

Disciplines: Marketing, Creative, Tech, Data.

Client Overview: World Host Group is a leading web hosting and domain name provider, with 30 brands and a truly global customer base.

The Challenge

In 2023, World Host Group scaled at pace:

• Grew from 80k actively hosted sites to 1 million.
• Acquired eight businesses.
• Expanded their global team from 30 to almost 600 people.

The Founders wanted to build an internal creative agency and a world-class marketing function from scratch. Key challenges included:

• Speed – hiring at pace.
• Skills – sourcing niche expertise across multiple disciplines.
• Scale – building entire functions from the ground up.
• Culture fit – ensuring alignment with their vision and values.

Our Approach / Solution

We partnered with World Host Group as their Outsourced Recruitment Partner, delivering a strategy that combined:

• Branded advertising – telling WHG’s story to attract candidates aligned with their mission and vision, including passive talent.
• Targeted headhunting and outreach – leveraging explicit branding to stand out from generic approaches and boost response rates.
• High-volume application management – over 1,000 applications in the first four weeks, filtered and shortlisted to save WHG weeks of screening time.
• Specialist collaboration – our Creative, Marketing, and Digital teams worked together to place initial leadership roles, leading to an exclusive partnership.

Once the leadership team was in place, we scaled at speed to build out the three functions, attracting top agency and in-house talent across the South of the UK.

The Outcome

• Roles filled across multiple disciplines (see full list below).
• Exclusive partnership established following initial success.
• Time saved – WHG avoided weeks of screening and admin.
• Business impact – enabled WHG to onboard a new marketing and creative team much faster than planned, supporting global growth.

Roles Filled

Creative Leadership & Team

• Creative Director
• Senior Copywriter
• Senior Designer x2

Marketing Leadership & Team

• Global Marketing Director (CMO)
• Head of Performance Marketing
• Campaign Manager x2

Digital Performance Team

• Paid Media Manager
• PPC Manager
• SEO Manager
• Data Analyst

Tech Roles (Upmind, WHG sister company)

• Lead DevOps Engineer
• Front End Developer
• UX/UI Designer
• Senior PHP Developer x2

ADLIB Teams involved:

• ADLIB Design Recruitment team
• ADLIB Marketing Recruitment team 
• ADLIB Technology Recruitment team
• ADLIB Data Recruitment team