12 Essential Elements To Consider When Building Your Recruitment Website

There’s so much to consider when creating your website but we’ve tried to list some of the most important aspects to pay attention to when beginning the journey. 

Choose The Right Building Blocks

How do you want to build your website? Do you want to use a content management system such as WordPress, which allows you to easily add and update content across your website but may not scale effectively or if not updated regularly may pose security issues later down the line? So is WordPress the right option for you? Or do you want a more scalable & secure website built with a frontend framework such as React or Angular with a backend in .Net or a cloud based backend like Firebase but may take a little longer to build? 

Define Your Values, Mission, Brand and Messaging

Establish a clear brand identity and messaging that aligns with your business and your target audience. Ensure you have a clearly defined colour palette, logos, wording, style of writing, tone, etc. Your brand identity for your agency should be aligned across all marketing channels, your website, social media profiles, marketing materials and so on.

A Clean & Professional Design

Leading on from the above point but important enough to single out and focus on separately. Websites have developed a lot from the cluttered and messy days of the late 90s and early 00s and we’ve now reached a point where there’s a general consensus that clean, simple & minimal designs tend to look and work best. There's some many website design styles that could suit your brand.

UX & UI Is Important

Make sure your website is easy to navigate, with clear and concise menus and navigation. This is a given these days but remember your website should be developed mobile first to ensure that clients & candidates can easily access your site from any device, especially given that most of the traffic you receive will be mobile based. Also, ensure your website is accessible for all, for example those with disabilities, those using screen readers, etc. Accessibility is a basic & fundamental principle of the internet. Make sure your content is properly spaced out across all devices and colour contrasts & palettes work well. 

Keep Interactivity To Just What Is Needed

When building a website these days you will have so many add-ons at your disposal, such as chat bots, AI tools, and so on. I’d recommend keeping these to a minimum and include only what you need. If you don’t need a chat bot, don't create a chat bot. It just adds extra weight to your website, reducing speed & performance, for little added benefit.  

Focus on Search Engine Optimisation

SEO should be at the very core of your website and should start with the development team. We could write a whole article on SEO for recruitment agencies but essentially ensure you are using semantic HTML, next generation image formats, proper labelling of links, buttons and images, page titles and meta tags, internal page links, a page structure that makes sense and well written content that reflects the page and the search terms you’re looking to rank for, 

High Quality Content

Your content pages are a crucial tool for building your brand and explaining to your candidates, clients & potential employees who you are and what your business stands for. There are some absolutely brilliant recruitment blogs out there that broach new topic material well, and there are some truly dire blogs out there too that recycle old cliché content or copy and paste content from Chat-GPT. Try your best to create high quality content - the kind of content clients & candidates will actually read and find useful and post your recruitment blogs on a regular basis. Also make sure to check for spelling & grammatical errors. If you have the budget we’d recommend hiring a professional recruitment copy / content writer. 

Implement a Content Management Plan

Your website should be continually updated and this will be part of a larger content management plan, outlining the types of content you will publish, when, where and by whom. 

Use Social Media to Promote Your Website

Use your social media channels to promote your website and specifically new website content such as blogs or directing candidates to relevant job posts. To get the best results we'd recommend outsourcing your social media management to a professional, well-known and recruitment specific social media agency.

Jobs Page

You can in all fairness have a recruitment website without a jobs page but you’re making things a lot harder for yourself. A vacancies page will increase your pool of relevant and active candidates. It also adds credibility to the business - the more jobs I see on your website the bigger I perceive the recruitment agency to be. The application process should also be smooth and easy to follow for candidates and the search functionality should be comprehensive and intuitive. You can customise the process and add questions for diversity and equality monitoring or ask for references & compliance at the point when candidates apply for roles. Also make sure your jobs are structured correctly to be picked up by Google for jobs, ultimately leading to more traffic for your site. 

Use Analytics to Track Performance

Tools such as Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console can help monitor website traffic, page conversions, user behaviour and so on. This data can help to form a strategy when it comes to website changes, trialling different copy, introducing new images, etc. 

Technical Maintenance & Upgrades

Depending on how your website has been built will determine how much technical maintenance you need to carry out. For example, websites built with WordPress will need to be regularly updated to avoid security risks from outdated plugins. 

If you’re still at the early stages of exploring a new website then we’d be happy to have a chat and talk you through what else you’ll need to consider.