What Is A Recruitment Website?

Recruitment websites, whether they’re recruitment agency websites, employer career sites or job boards are the cornerstone of the modern recruitment market, facilitating efficient job searching for candidates and an easy way for employers & recruitment agencies to advertise their vacancies. 

When you boil it all down, they are essentially job boards with sections bolted on to improve the user experience. They’re digital platforms that facilitate the job seeking process, an avenue for you to establish your online brand presence and drive engagement. We’ve come a long way from taking out classified and display recruitment adverts in the local and national newspapers. 

Here we’re going to delve into the types of recruitment websites, what makes a recruitment site, their benefits and how to use the platform effectively. 

Types Of Recruitment Websites

Generalist job boards: these easily garner the most traffic, catering to a wide selection of industries, advertising vacancies from entry level roles to c-suite positions, from both recruitment agencies and direct employers. We’re talking about the likes of Reed.co.uk, Totaljobs, Indeed, Monster, Google for Jobs, etc. 

Niche job boards: much like generalist job boards apart from the fact they focus on just one particular sector or industry. So for example ACCA Careers for the accountancy sector or engineering.com for the engineering industry or Campaign for jobs in media. 

Social media job boards: it’s rare we see a job board (like LinkedIn) create a community which creates and consumes its own content while being a monetized platform where direct employers and recruitment agencies are willing to pay premium rates to advertise their roles. 

Freelancer job boards: platforms such as Upwork & Freelancer cater to the professional gig work sector, allowing the general public, freelancers and small businesses to search for easy to access freelance talent, typically for one off jobs. 

Career websites: most companies with at least 50+ staff with a dedicated careers portal or at least a careers page to advertise their live vacancies and to give people an idea of what it’s like to work there. 

Recruitment agency websites: if you’re not advertising your live vacancies on your website right now then get on it! You’re missing out on a vital and essentially free of charge stream of applicants that should, in theory, be relevant to your positions. Job seekers will have had to input a search term that was relevant to your recruitment business to find you on Google so they should have relevant experience or at least be interested in a role in your sector. 

What Should A Recruitment Website Do? 

Engage candidates (& clients): by optimising your job posts using relevant keywords and making them compatible with Google for Jobs you can turn your website into an amazing and relatively low maintenance candidate attraction tool, which is working for your business 24/7. 

Highlight your agency USPs: it’s a great tool waiting to be used to communicate to both clients and candidates the brilliant work you do in your niche(s). 

Promote your company: it’s so useful for attracting new consultants to your business. Anyone who’s joining your business will want to see a sleek and professional website, painting a picture of what life is like at your agency, talking through the benefits, commission structure, social side, awards and everything else. 

Career Site Benefits For Direct Employers

Developing a career site or at least a careers page for your business will certainly pay dividends even within the first 12 months. It’s an amazing platform to sell working at your business to potential applicants. It’s also a completely free way to advertise your live vacancies and also field speculative applications for talent you may be interested in creating positions for. I’d recommend integrating it into your analytics platform to provide further data on who’s interested in your roles, how they find your business, the most popular roles and where any drop off occurs. 

Recruitment Site Benefits For Recruitment Firms

Advertising your live vacancies can be super expensive and by advertising your roles via your website you essentially have a completely free method of pushing your jobs into the market and handling applications. There’s bound to be several positions that may not be commercially viable to take up a LinkedIn job slot or they might not be worth advertising on generalist or niche job boards. Also if your recruitment site is set up with a valid schema for Google for Jobs then Google will automatically pull jobs off your recruitment site and advertise them free of charge for you. Also updating your agency site with new jobs on a daily basis will only help to push it up the search rankings. 

Benefits Of Paying For Advertising On Job Boards

Generalist (& niche) job boards have dominated the market for decades now. I remember back in 2007 scrambling and begging for an extra credit on Guardian Jobs, Media Week and Monster and we begged and borrowed for them because they worked! I’m not talking every time you had the perfect candidate come through but I can honestly remember one time when I advertised a job on reed.co.uk, which cost me £10, I had the perfect candidate come through the next day via ad response and ended up closing an offer within a week and invoicing the client for £3,750.   

I do see this market changing quite dramatically over the next few years and I wouldn't be surprised if Indeed, LinkedIn and Google for Jobs totally dominate this market by 2030. 

Benefits For Job Seekers 

It’s just so easy in many ways to find relevant roles, along with a tonne of information about those companies too. Advanced search filters, the selection of job boards and easy to apply applications make the process quick, easy and almost fun! 

Advice For Setting Up Your Jobs Portal Effectively

Ensure your job adverts are clear, concise, insightful and attractive for candidates. 

Optimise your job adverts for search engines. Use relevant keywords, without sacrificing readability to ensure your jobs and overall website appeared higher for relevant search terms.  

Set up a search filter, allowing visitors to search based on location, salary, contract type, specialisms, etc. 

Send out a confirmation email to candidates once they’ve applied for a role so they know their application has been logged and thereby also giving them a record of the event.

Consider setting up a job alert function allowing candidates to create a search filter criteria, which updates them on a daily or weekly basis with relevant positions. 

Make sure you insert the relevant Google for Jobs schema into your job pages so all your live vacancies are listed on Google for Jobs. Free advertising! Yay! 

Make the application process easy to complete. Yes you want as much information as possible about the candidate but at the very early stage you should have pretty much everything you need on their CV. Don’t go down the route of Workday. 

Integrate your website with your recruitment CRM, allowing the flow of applications straight from your jobs portal into your CRM and allowing your consultants to post jobs straight from your CRM to your website.

Ensure it’s easy to find and include CTAs all over your website directing potential applicants to have a look through your live vacancies and apply to relevant roles. 

Candidates want and need an easy to use interface. If you have someone on your website who is relevant and is actively looking for a role, then you don’t want to lose them and of course the subsequent happy client and big fee attached, just because you had a clunky and hard to use jobs page.