STX Group
Recruitment Campaign

STX Group is a leading global environmental commodity trader and climate solutions provider, operating at the intersection of capital markets and decarbonisation. As the business scaled rapidly across multiple international markets, STX faced a familiar but critical challenge: how to attract exceptional talent in a competitive financial services landscape, while clearly differentiating itself from traditional employers in the sector.

Referred to Neon following earlier work for Moody’s ESG Solutions, STX approached us to help redefine how the organisation presented itself as an employer. The ambition was not simply to fill roles, but to appeal to a new generation of candidates who were questioning traditional definitions of career success and actively seeking meaning, purpose, and impact in their work.

The Challenge

STX needed to:

• Compete for top-tier talent globally
• Stand apart from conventional financial services employers
• Speak directly to candidates motivated by sustainability, ESG and real-world impact
• Translate a complex, technical business into a compelling human story
• Create a flexible employer narrative that could scale across roles, regions and platforms

At the heart of the brief was a cultural insight: many high-performing professionals reach a point where progression, status and remuneration alone are no longer enough. They want their career to mean something.

Why Neon

Neon was brought in not simply as a creative execution partner, but as a strategic brand collaborator. Our strength lies in translating complex, purpose-led organisations into clear, emotionally resonant stories that attract the right audiences.

For STX, this meant:

• Identifying the human truth behind a technically complex, highly regulated business
• Reframing sustainability, ESG and capital markets through the lens of individual purpose
• Developing a unifying narrative that could scale globally across roles, regions and cultures
• Creating a distinctive visual and verbal system that felt authentic, not corporate or generic

Our experience working with mission-driven organisations — including prior work for Moody’s ESG Solutions — gave STX confidence that we could balance credibility with creativity, and ambition with authenticity.

By combining strategic insight, narrative thinking and craft-led design, Neon helped STX articulate not just what they do, but why it matters — and why that should matter to future employees.

Strategic Insight

Rather than positioning STX purely as a successful environmental commodities trader, we reframed the organisation as something more human and more purposeful: a business that helps money flow into projects that actively decarbonise the global economy.

This reframing unlocked a powerful idea — significance. Not just what STX does, but why it matters, and how an individual’s career could become a vehicle for positive environmental impact.

The Employer Narrative

We developed a central employer narrative built around the theme of Meaning / Significance, crystallised in the master line:

“Your career. Ready to make it mean something?”

The narrative positioned STX as:

• Traders in environmental progress
• Facilitators of finance into decarbonisation
• Enablers of corporate climate action through Strive by STX

Crucially, it connected the organisation’s mission directly to the personal motivations of potential candidates — suggesting that just as STX helps money find its significance, it can do the same for careers.

The full narrative articulated STX’s scale, growth, entrepreneurial culture and non-hierarchical structure, while maintaining an emotionally resonant tone rooted in purpose, optimism and ambition.

Creative Expression

The employer narrative was brought to life through a distinctive and ownable visual language.

Key elements included:

• Portraits of real STX employees to ensure authenticity
• Clever double-exposure style montages blending people with natural landscapes and sustainable industry imagery
• Visual metaphors for environmental impact, growth and transition
• Use of the angled ‘X’ from the STX brand as a dynamic framing device

This approach created a visual system that felt human, aspirational and optimistic, while clearly rooted in sustainability rather than generic corporate finance imagery.

Deliverables

The work rolled out across a fully integrated recruitment ecosystem:

• A hero employer narrative and messaging framework
• A suite of recruitment campaign assets for LinkedIn and digital channels
• Short-form video and motion assets featuring STX employees
• A redesigned STX Careers portal incorporating the new narrative and imagery
• A comprehensive employer booklet introducing STX, its teams, culture and recruitment process

Each touchpoint was designed to reinforce the same core idea: that working at STX offers both professional success and genuine purpose.

Outcome

The result was a cohesive, scalable employer brand that:

• Clearly differentiated STX from traditional financial services employers
• Spoke directly to purpose-driven, high-calibre candidates
• Humanised a complex global business through real people and stories
• Aligned recruitment messaging with STX’s broader mission and growth ambitions

Most importantly, it gave STX a confident, authentic way to answer a question increasingly asked by today’s talent:

What does a rewarding career really mean?

At STX, the answer is clear — significance.
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