Recruitment Website Integrations: Power Up Your Agency's Growth

When I begin initial discussions with recruitment marketers and recruitment agency owners I always bring up the option of integrations fairly early in the conversations. Some website integrations are literally one line of code and some may take a week. I was actually on the team that implemented the two way LinkedIn integration with Mercury’s Recruitment CRM and that took well over a year to fully implement. We’ll take you through what recruitment website integrations are, the benefits to your recruitment agency, what tools you can integrate and the practical steps to do so. 

What Are Recruitment Website Integrations? 

“Integrations” are essentially anything we can plug into your recruitment agency’s website. 

I’d define it as a way or a tool or feature that allows recruitment websites applications to seamlessly connect and interact with other recruitment software, systems, or platforms - and of course non recruitment specific tech. These integrations aim to streamline and automate various aspects of the overall recruitment process and we all know automations are big right now! It’s essentially going to make your day as a recruiter and your processes more efficient and effective. Hopefully this should give you more time to focus on new business development, account managing existing clients, training your team and sourcing talent for live vacancies. 

What Are The Benefits Of Website Integrations? 

The main purpose of integrations and automations is the idea of making processes more efficient, effective and less prone to errors. Recruitment processes that traditionally relied on manual human work and were prone to human error such as taking a CV from an email you received from your contact form and manually inputting this into your recruitment CRM is now done automatically through the integration and a CV parser such as Daxtra or TextKernel. 

Each type of integration will have its own advantages & benefits (depending on the state of the market). For example you may receive 30 applications for a particular advertised job and half of those applications are vaguely relevant - they might not be what you’re looking for in regard to this particular role but they’re good candidates to have in your database. An integration between your website and your recruitment CRM will save you a huge amount of time inputting each of these applicant's details.

Annoyances With Website Integrations

However if we see a downturn in the market and now each of your roles has 300 applications and 200 of these are irrelevant and need to be purged from your CRM - it's a big time waster. 

Key Tools To Integrate With Your Recruitment Website

You can integrate A LOT with your recruitment agency’s website! I’m going to talk you through the types along with dropping the names of a few tools it might be worth looking into. 

Recruitment CRM/ATS: A popular recruitment site integration is of course with your recruitment CRM or ATS. Your website developer should be able to integrate your site with your CRM off the back of the CRM’s API documentation. So we’re talking Bullhorn, eploy, erecruit (Bullhorn), Firefish, Greenhouse, Hireserve, Influence, JobAdder, JobDiva, Lever, Loxo, Mercury, Microdec Profile (Access Group), PinPoint, Salesforce, SmartRecruiters, Workable, Workday, Vincere, Voyager, Zoho Recruit and the other 50 recruitment CRMs that are out there. When it comes to integrating your CRM / ATS with your website you’ll also need to consider the depth of the integration as in, is it a one way or a two way integration? For example a one way integration could just be sending data from your website to your recruitment CRM or from your CRM to your website and a two way integration would be sending data both ways. So you could add a job to your CRM, which is automatically uploaded to your website and you could ensure all applications from the job advertisement on your website directly create a new candidate (if they don’t already exist in your system) against the specific role. As a side note recruitment CRMs will often use the candidate’s email or telephone number as the unique identifier if you do end up with duplicates then just merge them together. 

Social Media Platforms: Integrating your recruitment site with your social media platforms allows your visitors to see what your recruitment business is really like through your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, X and YouTube content. Also adding “ShareThis” buttons to your blog, podcast & jobs posts allows your readers to easily share your content on their social channels. You can also create automatic posts to these channels when you create a new blog, job or podcast post. 

LinkedIn:I thought I’d have a separate section for LinkedIn as there are a few different options here.

First we have “sign in with LinkedIn”, which allows recruitment websites to authenticate candidates and obtain lite profile information about the LinkedIn member. Candidates can use information from their LinkedIn profile to prepopulate application form fields, speeding up the whole process and making it a much more pleasant experience.

Secondly we have “Apply with LInkedIn”, which is officially deprecated so isn’t directly supported anymore but we can essentially hack the functionality of “sign in with LinkedIn”. This enables candidates to apply for jobs using their LinkedIn profiles in place of their CV.

Third, we have “LinkedIn Jobs” for your website. This is basically listing all your LinkedIn jobs on your website. Now you’d only really need this if you didn’t have your own jobs section on your recruitment site or if your recruitment CRM didn’t offer a live web page integration for your recruitment site.

Fourth we have “LinkedIn Ad Campaign Tracking”, which all our recruitment websites come pre-built with. This integration creates conversion actions in your LinkedIn Campaign Manager to track specific activities on your site, like job application submissions or sign-ups. So for example if you were running a display advertising campaign on LinkedIn you could track all the users that clicked on your advert on LinkedIn and who also submitted their details via your contact form, etc.

My fifth option, which I mentioned previously, is a LinkedIn “ShareThis” button, which is easy to implement and allows users to share content such as blog and job posts easily to their LinkedIn profiles. And lastly, probably not a frequent use case but you could integrate “LinkedIn Learning” with your recruitment site - maybe one more so for recruitment trainers. 

Job Multi-posters: Another popular integration choice is with your job multi-poster. So we’re talking Broadbean, eQuest, Idibu, JobMate and LogicMelon here. I’ll also add Jobg8 to this section, even though it works slightly differently to the aforementioned multi-posters. So when you upload a live vacancy advert to your multi-poster platform your job advert will be automatically added to your recruitment website’s job pages too. This is a big time saver as you’ll typically be uploading a job advert to 2-5 websites. 

Communication Tools: I’m going to bundle telecoms altogether for the sake of brevity and it kinda makes sense to me. So we’re talking about the likes of WhatsApp Business, Messenger, Slack, Skype, chatbots such as Payemoji and Konversable and virtual chat apps such as Visitor Chat. Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure also offer their own services if you have a developer who can build on top of these services.

Chat applications are huge at the moment. I’ve been to a number of recruitment events over the past 6 months and a lot of people are talking about the benefits of them. Your recruitment website is similar to having a consultant available 24/7 but there will often be times when candidates and clients land on your site but can’t find an answer to their question and this is where applications such as WhatsApp Business, chatbots and live chat can be super useful. I would only recommend WhatsApp Business for small recruitment firms, say 20 employees and less. 

Google Analytics & Tag Manager: Ensuring your website is integrated with Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager is a must have in my opinion and this comes built into all of our recruitment websites as standard. The integration can be as small as a couple of lines of code but it does certainly get a little more complicated when taking account of cookie consent and GDPR. With this integration and the help of your website developer you can also directly see how many times a blog or job post page has been visited, engaged with and shared. This helps you to see what content resonates with your audience, most popular jobs, where you may need to implement CTAs as candidates and clients drop off from certain pages. 

Google for Jobs: I’m not sure if this would strictly be classed as an integration but I thought it was definitely worth including. By including a certain “map” (structured data) of your jobs data in JSON-LD format your jobs will automatically be listed on Google for Jobs. This is free job advertising, driving relevant traffic directly to your agency’s website. You can also generate an XML feed that allows your live vacancies to automatically be picked up by job boards such as Adzuna, Career Builder, Indeed, Jora, Simply Hired, WhatJobs and so on. 

reCAPTCHA: reCAPTCHA is a free to use CAPTCHA system owned by Google. Most readers will probably recognize the little checkbox on contact forms signalling to the website that you're not a bot. It has many uses such as to stop scam websites from scraping your content such as job and blog posts, it helps stop fraudulent transactions, helps to stop bots from clicking on adverts to generate false advertising revenue for scam websites and so much more. Google is also in the process of introducing invisible reCAPTCHA, which tracks the users mouse movements while on your website to ensure they’re not a bot. 

Internationalization: You might want to consider internationalization too. The front end framework we use for our recruitment sites, “Angular”, which Google uses for a lot of their products offers an in-built translation service, which detects the user’s browser's default language and translates your English web pages. We also offer integrations with Google Cloud’s language translation services if you’d prefer. 

Calendar & Scheduling Tools: Calendar and scheduling tools are great integration options for recruitment websites. I often see Calendly or Google Calendar integrations that allow candidates and clients to directly save time in your calendar. I would say this can be a little dangerous as you’re essentially saying yes to every conversation and one thing I learned from recruitment is that there’s never enough time in the day to do everything and there’s always an irrelevant candidate who’d happily take up 15 minutes of your precious time. If you have an events or podcasts page it’s a great idea to add a Google Calendar or Apple Calendar integration allowing visitors to save the event in their own personal or business calendars. 

Email Marketing: You can also integrate your email provider / service with your recruitment site, allowing you to automatically send out emails when a candidate or clients subscribes to your newsletter or when a candidate applies to a vacancy or when a candidate registers on your candidate portal. These are all super useful automations and make the website experience so much better for everyone. 

Social Reviews: Don’t forget social reviews too! I’m a big supporter of using testimonials and case studies pages to get buy-in from clients & candidates. Through an integration you can list the reviews you’ve received on other websites, directly on your recruitment site. You can integrate Google My Business, Trustpilot, Facebook and Yelp with your website and list all of your reviews and overall rating on your site. 

Assessment Tools: I haven’t seen this on any recruitment websites as of yet but it’s entirely possible to integrate assessment tools as part of the application process. You could see a huge drop off in applications through integrations like this but any applications you did get would be fully qualified and I imagine highly relevant. 

Implementing Integrations: Technical Considerations 

It really depends on what you’re trying to integrate with your recruitment website and what platform your website is built with. 

Custom-Built Websites: For example we build our websites using a frontend framework called Angular and a backend comprised of Firebase or .Net & C# and in this instance you’d need to hire a qualified software developer to implement any integration for your recruitment website. 

Website Builders: For website builders such as Wix, GoDaddy, Squarespace and WordPress you’ll need to check the platform’s marketplace or plugins section for existing integrations with your CRM, social media, chat apps, etc. For example, WordPress has plugins for CRM integration, social sharing buttons, and a whole lot more.

Simple Integrations: Sometimes integrating tools such as chatbots and virtual chat applications are pretty easy and only take a couple of lines of code inserted into your index.html file. 

Conclusion

Recruitment website integrations empower your recruitment agency to operate at peak efficiency. By automating tasks, streamlining workflows, and delivering an exceptional user experience, you can gain a competitive edge, attract top talent, and cultivate lasting client relationships.

If you're ready to leverage the power of integrations, reach out to our team at Abstraction Labs. We specialise in designing and developing recruitment websites that seamlessly integrate with the tools you need to succeed.

Book a Demo: Schedule a personalised demo to see how our integrated recruitment websites can revolutionize your agency.

Get Started Today: Contact us to discuss your integration needs and start building a website that drives results.

Remember, in the ever-evolving world of recruitment, embracing technology is key. By harnessing the power of recruitment website integrations, you'll not only stay ahead of the curve but also pave the way for continued growth and success.