How To Make An Impressive Landing Page For Your Recruitment Website

Your website’s landing page is probably going to be the first page your clients & candidates see. You need to grab their attention, ensure they understand your offering and then guide them through what you want them to do next and ensure they take action - whether that’s contacting you with a job brief or sending across their CV.  

There are a few factors in my opinion that make a great landing page… 

Clarity & Simplicity 

Your landing page should have a clear objective - to persuade clients & candidates to contact you with their job brief / CV respectively. This objective should be reflected in the page's design and content with a relevant call to action to the contact form or the job listings page. Also keep it simple. Lead with a hero image and keep text to a minimum where possible. A cluttered landing page will be overwhelming and confusing for visitors. 

Copy

Copy should be clear, concise, and persuasive. Highlight the benefits & differentiators of your recruitment service. Your main heading & sub-heading should introduce your company, convey your services and hint at your brand identity. Try to address your clients’ and candidates’ problems, needs & wants. 

Calls To Action

You’re likely to have 3 main user groups visiting your website - potential clients, potential candidates and potential employees. You’ll need to cater to all three user groups and use calls to action buttons and links to guide them through the relevant parts of your website. For example, with candidates you may wish to guide them to the Candidates page, your Job Listings page or CV Submission page. For clients, it could be a Clients page, an About Us page, a Contact Us page or Brief Submission page. And finally for potential employees they’ll probably bounce around your various pages but focus on areas such as About Us, Team, Testimonials, Careers, etc. 

Page Speed

Page speed on mobile and desktop is absolutely key. If I have to wait longer than a few seconds for a website to load then I'm hitting the back button and moving onto the next search engine listing. Each page needs to load quickly, as well as a low execution time to page interactivity (when I can start clicking on links & buttons). The quicker your website, the better experience I'll have as a job seeker, and ultimately the more likely I am to apply for a role. 

Responsive

It’s a good and bad news situation here. The bad news is that there are dozens of screen sizes and your website should aim to look great on all of them. The good news is we can break that 30 or so screen sizes down into about 6 size ranges to make them easier to design for. Now realistically you can’t cater for every screen size but you should design a mobile first website and your landing page, the window to your website should look perfect on all of them. 

Images

I’m a big fan of the hero image style on websites but it can slow down your website, especially on smaller devices. The images & videos you use should be relevant, reflect your agency & industry and should catch my attention. Also use next gen formats such as WebP (a Google image format specifically designed for web images) for large images. 

Navigation

Bad navigation is the most common reason for a high bounce rate. Make it easy for your clients & candidates with a clear menu at the top of your homepage or hamburger icon menu on mobile devices and set out the links in an order that makes sense. If the home page is a long scrollable page maybe consider a “scroll to the top” button for users. Also include navigation links in the footer at the bottom of the page. 

Design

A peculiar one because everything above feeds into this and it’s an area I’m just not qualified to give advice on. You just know when something looks good. Aim for that.