The Impact Of Professional Recruitment Website Design On Your Agency’s Success

I want to make this point clear, early out of the gate because it’s true and it’s the basis of this whole blog post and you’re wrong if you disagree with me - clients, candidates and talent will judge how good your recruitment agency is based on your website! You will lose business if you don’t have a professional looking website for your recruitment firm. You just don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. This is a simple and plain fact and if you disagree then that’s probably because your website is a bit pants. 

Now of course there are a dozen other factors that come into play as well but straight off the bat, a new client, new candidate or a recruitment consultant interviewing for a role at your agency - they will all judge your legitimacy, professionalism, how good you are at recruitment, your knowledge of the market - on your website. Don’t get me wrong of course, I’m not saying just because you have a great website you are now great at recruitment and vice versa. I know plenty of great recruiters with OKish websites so please don’t get offended. 

A dated, slow or poorly designed recruitment website tells me you just don’t care. It tells me you don’t really care about every single facet of your business. And I realise some parts are more important than others in recruitment, for example sales takes priority over marketing and I’d say your website does fall into that marketing part of the business. 

However a professional, expertly designed and well developed recruitment website with clean code and fast performance will set you apart from the rest of your competitors. It will make every part of your job and your consultants’ jobs so much easier. I’ve laboured this point a fair amount through my blogs but when I had my old agency, Media Square Recruitment we had an absolutely brilliant website - and that was from both a superficial perspective but also technically too. That website looked and acted the part and it made my life so much easier. I’d have jobs come on a weekly basis from new clients, candidates come across us on Google and find something on our website that converted them and the website did a great job when it came to selling the company to new talent. 

Now delivering a sleek recruitment website is not easy but it is an objective that should be aimed for. Recruitment website design is tricky as you’re appealing to three different parties, with different motivations - candidates, clients and talent. 

Now I’m ex-agency, having worked for a few recruitment agencies and also ran my own agency for 6 years but I also spent some time in-house working for one of the biggest media companies in the world and a large international advertising agency. I spent 12 years working in the media industry before moving in-house so I knew who all the recruitment agencies were, I knew the good ones, the bad ones and their respective specialisms. A lot of internal talent acquisition professionals or HR managers don’t know the market as well as this and when they’re looking to add another agency to their PSL a large part of the decision will be based on your website. If you’ve got a great looking website then you’re halfway there already. 

Your job as a recruitment consultant and this will sound stupid but is that of a consultant. Much like a management consultant you’re spending extensive time with senior members of businesses - in many circumstances directors & c-suite individuals, discussing their current & future talent needs, taking briefs so they can grow their business and satisfy shareholders, carrying out searches and pairing talent with companies. When it comes to jobs you couldn’t really get much more “professional”. You need a website that reflects this! 

I’ve worked for three different recruitment agencies during my career and the agency that I stayed at the longest, I almost didn’t join. And the reason I almost didn’t join them was in part because of their dated website. We were just edging into 2010, digital and programmatic advertising were just emerging and their website just seemed out of place against the current landscape of websites. They turned out to be at the forefront of the digital media recruitment sector but their recruitment website told a very different story. A quick loading website, displaying all your vacancies and a great about us, team and work for us page will do so much when it comes to attracting fresh talent for your recruitment agency. 

I’ve been a candidate a few times in my career, looking for roles in advertising sales, recruitment, talent acquisition and software development. What I want from a recruitment agency’s website will be very different from what a hiring manager expects. As a candidate you want a fast loading website, there’s nothing more annoying than spending hours job searching and one website taking more than 6 seconds to load. Also I want to be able to find a full list of your vacancies as quickly as possible and I want to be able to find your contact page so I can call or email your consultants, just in case I can’t find a relevant position. 

Now just to prove my point type in a relevant search term into Google so for example if you run a recruitment firm that specialises in the life sciences sector type “life sciences recruitment firm”. Now check out the top few results. I bet all of those sites look professional, load quickly and probably were made in the last few years.

If you want an easier life when it comes to attracting new clients, new candidates and fresh new talent then get in touch for a chat and we can talk you through a few ideas on how to redesign your recruitment agency’s website.