The Recruitment Agency's Ultimate Guide to Candidate Attraction in 2024 and Beyond

There are currently between 30,000 recruitment agencies in the UK so whatever niche your agency specialises in you'll literally be against hundreds of competitors fighting for the best talent. With this level of competition vying for top talent, a robust candidate attraction strategy is non-negotiable. And competition gets even tougher when the labour market is tight. You need every competitive edge to ensure you attract the best talent for your clients’ roles. Your aim should be to persuade candidates to register their CV, sign up to your newsletter, apply for a job, follow you on your socials or encourage them to find out more. Try to put yourself in the candidates shoes and think about their motivations and see things from their perspective. 

One of the first introductions between you and potential candidates is your website so let's try to make it as attractive as possible. 

Understanding Candidate Attraction

Candidate attraction encompasses all the efforts you make to make your agency irresistible to potential candidates. It's a strategic blend of employer branding, candidate experience, targeted outreach, and digital marketing savvy. Think of it as the art of seduction, where you're not just offering a job, but a career-enhancing experience.

Why Candidate Attraction Matters Now More Than Ever

The job market is undergoing a seismic shift. Remote work, evolving preferences, and an upcoming candidate-driven market (hopefully) demand a reimagining of your recruitment playbook. Today's candidates crave flexibility, value work-life balance, and seek employers who align with their values. A strong candidate attraction strategy ensures you're not just filling seats, but building a high-performing team.

UX Design That Wows

UX or user experience is how candidates interact with your website. It includes the candidate's perceptions of utility, ease of use, and efficiency. 

Persona-Driven Navigation

First of all let’s break down your candidates into different personas, so firstly we have returning active candidates that are currently signed up or have worked with you previously, secondly we have new candidates actively searching for roles and thirdly we have passive candidates who may apply to a role if they see a role that interests them. Each type of candidate is at a very different stage of the journey and will therefore have different motivations for visiting your website, as well as differences in what they do when they’re navigating around your site.

Active candidates have one primary purpose - to find the jobs page and apply to any relevant positions so a clear and intuitive navigation to your jobs page is absolutely key. Once there on the jobs page, job listings, advanced job search functionality and job alerts are all must haves.

New candidates will have an interest in current live roles so will want to navigate to your jobs page but will also want to visit your candidates page to get an idea of your agency & how you work with candidates.

Returning passive & active candidates may want to look through the team page to see if any consultants they’ve previously partnered with still work at the agency and they’re also likely to look through your job listings. 

New passive candidates are much harder to predict. They may land on your home page and get distracted by the TV or maybe they don’t like the look of the website and end up navigating away within seconds. They may not have a clear purpose and may bounce around a few different pages, getting an idea of your business. They may navigate away and return several times before taking any definitive action. You need a home page that stands out to visitors and separates you from competitors, which means quality design, a clean format and clear branding. Passive candidates may not find a relevant position for them so will need a clear call to action, a way from them to register. 

Search

You'll need an easy to locate jobs page with any easy to use search filter section. If you're a relatively small agency then it may be fine to expect candidates to scroll through 10-20 jobs. Any more than that and you'll need pagination (pages) and a search filter to minimise your long list of roles to those which are most relevant to them. 

It’s so much easier to apply for roles with a clearly marked "Apply Here" button as well as an "Apply With LinkedIn" button. 

Jobs Page Optimisation

An easy to use jobs page that offers filters is essential, fields such as job categories, specialisms, salary ranges, contract types and locations are key to helping candidates fine-tune their results. Streamlined search, filtering, and job alerts are non-negotiable. Goes without saying these days but make sure your jobs are Google for Jobs compatible. 

Compelling Job Descriptions

Recruiters have been writing job descriptions and adverts for a fair few decades and they’re still awful for the most part. I can scroll through most job boards and find hundreds of boring job ads that are only going to attract the most average of candidates. You and your clients want the best talent out there so start with your job ads. Ditch the jargon and speak directly to your ideal candidate's aspirations. Highlight your clients culture and show them why they should join your clients company. Be clear about the role, salary, company, culture from the outset, set clear expectations to attract the right fit. Look at the questions your candidates regularly ask about your clients and their roles and base your job ads off of these. 

Candidate Application Process

How many times have you seen stories on LinkedIn of candidates complaining about long application forms? Probably too many. If the application process is too long, too complicated or asks for reels of repeated information from their CV then candidates are more likely to simply drop out of the process and apply their efforts elsewhere. So what makes a great application form?

Once they hit the "Submit" or "Apply" button ensure they are informed that their application or message was successfully sent. It's so annoying hitting the "Submit" button and not getting a positive confirmation of it. Personalise all candidate communication and make them feel valued at every touchpoint. When they apply for a role send them a confirmation email that you've received their application and you’ll come back to them with feedback within 72 hours. Work on a feedback loop and gather insights to refine your approach continually. Ask candidates how they found the application & interview process and if there’s anything you could improve or change. 

Mobile-First Imperative

We always think of our company website on a desktop but your mobile website is more important than the desktop site. Your digital presence should be mobile first, desktop second. Around 88% of job seekers look for jobs on their mobile phones at some point during their job search, however the mobile application experience tends to fall far below the desktop experience.

Glassdoor found that job seekers complete 53% fewer applications on their mobile device and those that do complete an application take 80% longer to do so. However if a job seeker plans to do an extended search one evening or lunch break they're more likely to use their desktop - looking for a job while on a good sized screen, with easy access to your CV is just so much easier and less frustrating. 

Whichever way candidates are searching for jobs, you should design your website with mobile first in mind. 

Lightning-Fast Page Speed

Page speed on mobile and desktop is absolutely key. Google’s current recommended page load time is 2 seconds – any longer and it can hurt the ranking of a website in search engine results. 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. The quicker your website, the better experience I'll have as a job seeker and subsequently the more likely I am to apply for a role. 

Navigation 

It's so frustrating landing on a recruitment site only to be faced with obscure navigation tab names & headers. You want your website to be easy to navigate, clearly labelled sections & pages. And remember just because it makes sense to you, it might not make sense to everyone else. 

Design

Design your website not for you but for your candidates (& clients). You, personally may have more of a colourful and bohemian style but if you're catering to the finance or pharma sectors then it may be more appropriate to have a more minimal, traditional and "professional" looking website. Cater to your market and the people you're hoping to attract. 

It takes just 50 milliseconds to form an opinion about your website before a candidate decides to either stay or leave. 

Clicks

Research suggests that users should only have to click a maximum of 3 times to reach the target page on a website. Ensure job seekers have a minimal number of clicks to the pages they want to see and need to see in order to send across their details. 

Tech-Powered Recruitment

There is so much recruitment technology out there currently that it can be easy to get swamped. Talk with your peers and see what they’re finding useful. Don’t turn down those sales calls from recruitment suppliers, set some time aside to have a chat with them and see how they could potentially improve your business. 

You can leverage AI for so much now such as telephone screening, chatbots, and predictive analytics. 

Build your personal and company brand on LinkedIn and across relevant social and engage directly with talent. 

Your website should also be integrated with tools such as Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager, LinkedIn Campaigns to enable you to track key metrics like traffic, most visited pages, visitor demographics and locations and use that to form future candidate attraction strategies.  

Innovative Outreach Strategies

I’m a huge fan of hyper-Personalisation when it comes to sales & outreach. Tailor messages to resonate with individual candidates, using previous conversations, their LinkedIn content, CV, experience, etc. 

Personally I’m too old for voice notes and video messages but I definitely think they have a place in the future of recruitment. Forge personal connections that stand out in a crowded email inbox. It’s so much easier to connect with someone through video and audio content. 

If you have a marketing team, who are a little technical then look to create personalised landing pages for certain clients or recruitment campaigns. Create tailored experiences for different roles and candidates.

Be creative with your emails and offer valuable incentives beyond basic job alerts. And I can't tell you how many job alerts I receive with irrelevant roles - clean your database people! 

Retargeting / remarketing advertising campaigns are still in the early stages in the recruitment sector but I was recruiting for this area back in 2010 and got to see first hand how powerful a tool it can be. Keep your agency top-of-mind for potential candidates by retargeting them when they’re on other websites.

Adapting to the Evolving Landscape

Candidate expectations are in constant flux. Stay ahead by embracing flexibility, prioritising well-being, offering career development advice, fostering diversity, and leveraging technology. Monitor emerging trends like the gig economy and environmental consciousness to tailor your strategy accordingly.

The Future of Candidate Attraction

The future of recruitment will always switch from candidate to client-centric depending on the state of the economy. Recruitment agencies are moving more towards automations and using AI to deal with many communication touch points but candidates are already becoming fatigued with this. By crafting an authentic employer brand, optimising the candidate journey, and embracing innovative outreach, your agency can not only attract top talent but also retain it for the long haul.

Conclusion

I realise there’s a fair amount of information here to take in but it’s all worth taking into consideration when rebuilding your website. Spend some time getting it right the first time around and it will need minimal maintenance thereafter.