Essential Recruitment Website Features: Your Ultimate Guide to Attracting Top Talent and Clients

I could write a very long list about all the pages, forms, images, content, integrations and functionality your recruitment agency website should carry but I’ve tried to boil it down to the most important features. But what features are truly essential to making your recruitment website a success? I've distilled years of experience designing and developing recruitment websites into this comprehensive guide, highlighting the must-have features that will set your site apart from the competition.

The Foundation: Essential Recruitment Website Features

Landing Page

This is the fundamental basic page of any website, including recruitment agency websites. I come across plenty of recruitment websites that are just “one pagers” and I think this is a brilliant option if you’re just launching your recruitment business. You can set the homepage with a hero image on the landing screen, a little about us section, a section for clients, one for candidates, the services you offer and then the contact us section at the bottom. 

Contact Us Page / Section

I occasionally come across the odd recruitment agency site, which doesn’t have contact details, no email address, no office address, no telephone number, maybe just a contact form at best. In my opinion you need a full contact us page and a full contact us page is your office address, general email address, switchboard, social media channels and a contact form with attachment functionality. 

Office Address: Build trust by showcasing your physical location.

Email Address (General): Provide an easy way for general inquiries.

Switchboard Number: Offer a direct line for immediate contact. I think displaying a landline number makes you look like a bigger business (rather than a mobile number)

Social Media Links: Connect on platforms where your audience is active. Ensure these all open in new browser tabs (instead of the current one) so you don't risk losing visitors.

Contact Form with Attachment Functionality: Enable CV submissions and detailed inquiries. Carry full form validation with corresponding errors messages.

Header / Navigation / Footer 

The candidate and client journey is how your website visitors navigate around your site and the buttons and links that guide them. Your website links are integral to this journey.

Header: Your logo and a clear navigation menu are essential for a user-friendly experience.

Navigation: Intuitive navigation helps visitors find what they need quickly. Ensure subsections make sense too and are properly categorised. Throw in a fancy slide animation to impress candidates & clients.

Footer: Your footer also needs to list certain, legally required business information such as the company registered address, company name, company registered country and company registration number. 

Content Management System

I had to enter this here as the following jobs & blogs section just wouldn’t really be possible without the content management system. If you wish to update pages such as the team page, testimonials, case studies, events, podcasts, vacancies list or blog pages then you’ll need a content management system to enable you to add, edit & delete content. 

Security & Compliance

This should be a huge consideration for all businesses but especially recruitment agencies. Just look at the amount of sensitive data recruitment firms hold about candidates - address details, telephone number, email address, visa details, passports, etc. All of this information can be sent through your website via the contact page and it's your job to protect it. Your website needs as a minimum an SSL certificate (the "https" text that comes before your domain URL). If your website is built on the WordPress platforms then ensure your plugins are updated on a regular basis as WordPress websites are hacked more often than any other website! All of our websites are hosted and stored with Google, in two different data centers, to ensure integrity.

Recruitment-Specific Website Features:

Jobs Pages

Every recruitment website needs a jobs page with search functionality, allowing users to search for vacancies based on keywords, location, job type, contract type, salary, etc. Considering the principal role of a recruitment website is to showcase your live vacancies, generate applications for those jobs and sell to your clients, your jobs pages are pretty much your website's raison d’etre. It should go without saying but they should be Google for Jobs compatible too. 

Advanced Job Search: Allow candidates to search by keywords, sector, seniority, location, job type, salary, contract type and more. This is a step up but if you have the budget then utilise map-based search for geographical convenience.

Job Management System: Easily add, edit, expire, and promote jobs. It needs to be an easy, intuitive and quick system to upload jobs to your website. Don't annoy consultants with frustrating admin.

Application Management System: Streamline the application process and track candidate progress. I like clean, simple and minimal application forms. You're giving candidates a better user experience and your completed application numbers will increase.

Job Alerts: Let candidates subscribe to receive notifications about new job postings that match their criteria. Make sure your recruitment CRM is kept clean and up to date and only send candidates roles that are directly relevant to them, otherwise you're going to ruin your domain spam score.

"Apply with One Click" or Easy Apply: Simplify the application process to maximize submissions. If possible just let candidates upload their CV. What else do you need? All the information should be on there anyway.

Google for Jobs Compatibility: Ensure your job postings are discoverable on Google's job platform. As mentioned previously if your jobs aren't compatible with Google for Jobs then you're missing out on free advertising and highly relevant applications.

Blogs Pages

Maybe a surprise entry but it’s going to be hard to get your recruitment agency website ranking well on the search engines without updating it on a weekly basis with fresh new content. Good news is that your blog pages are a great vehicle for this. Write quality, keyword rich content that attracts and engages with your visitors and you’ll be on the first few pages of Google in no time at all. 

Fresh, Relevant Content: Publish regular blog posts on topics like industry trends, career advice, and company news. This attracts organic traffic and positions your agency as a thought leader. And if you need recruitment blog ideas then we've got you covered!

Update Old Content: Don't forget about content that you wrote 6, 12, 18 months ago. Go through it, update and add to it where you can. Google prefers to rank newer content and your competitors will be going after the same keywords you are so you'll need to update your old content to ensure it continues ranking on the first page!

Keyword Optimisation: Use relevant keywords in your blog titles, headings, and content to improve search engine visibility. There's no point writing content if no one is searching for it as it just won't show up on Google. Research keywords that your clients and candidates search for and write content for them, not you!

Internal Linking: Link your blog posts to relevant job listings and other website pages to enhance user navigation. Your pages are able to pass on "link juice" so link popular pages to less popular pages to increase your overall search engine visibility. It also makes for a better user experience and should increase visitor engagement times.

Additional Recruitment Website Features

Candidate Registration and Portal: Allow candidates to create profiles, upload CVs, and track their application history. You're getting into a more complex recruitment website here and would recommend this only for larger agencies, say 50+ consultants upwards really. There are so many benefits of this, including better communication with candidates, better engagement, happier candidates, higher placement numbers, to mention just a few.

Job Shortlist Functionality: Enable candidates to save jobs of interest and apply later. Bear in mind candidates won't always be sitting at their laptop when job hunting. They could be in a taxi, on the tube, out with friends. They won't always have their CV available or won't always be able to apply for that role right there and then so give them the ability to save vacancies.

Social Media Integration: Make it easy for visitors to share your job postings and content on social media. You'll see better engagement and traffic figures if you give visitors this functionality.

Testimonials or Case Studies: Showcase your success stories and build credibility. If clients & candidates are on your website then they're likely on a journey to making a buying decision. They're looking for information or looking to be persuaded. Testimonials and case studies are great ways to persuade potential clients to say yes to reaching out to you.

CRM, Multi-poster & Analytics Integration: Track website traffic, candidate behavior, and recruitment metrics. All of our recruitment websites are integrated with Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager and LinkedIn Campaign Manager. Also look into to see if it's worthwhile setting up a one way or two way CRM integration. Integrating multi-posting tools such as LogicMelon, and Broadbean make it so much easier and quicker to post your jobs to your website but also to several job boards at once.

Mobile Optimization: Ensure your website is responsive and easy to use on all devices. This is pretty basic but I still see so many recruitment websites that aren't fully mobile responsive! And don't just cater to smaller screens, make sure your website is responsive on larger desktop screens too.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

And my last entry on the most important features your recruitment agency website should have. We all want a website that ranks in the top spot for every search term related to our business. And why’s that? Because we want warm leads coming to us. We want clients who are actively hiring, landing on our website. We want high quality and relevant candidates scrolling through our jobs pages. And if this is achieved it will save us time and money. The money we would have to invest in job adverts and business development training and the time spent trawling through our CRM, LinkedIn and cold calling prospective clients. One big focus of your SEO strategy is building backlinks. Google uses your domain authority and the number of backlinks you have leading to your website as a key indicator to how high in the rankings they should list your site / pages. 

On-Page and Technical SEO: Optimise your website's structure, content, and meta tags for relevant keywords. Implement schema markup (like Job Posting schema) to enhance search engine visibility.

Backlink Building: Earn high-quality backlinks from reputable websites to boost your domain authority and search rankings.

And as daring as it is, I’m going to leave it here. There are plenty more features and pages I could add but the list I’ve given you, is a list of the most important pages, sections, functionality & integrations in my opinion anyway.