What Makes A Great Recruitment Website?

If you’re going to undertake the time & monetary commitment of searching for a recruitment web design agency to partner with, briefing them, writing all the copy, sourcing images, sending them inspirational websites, looking for fonts, and making weekly update calls, then you damn sure want to make sure it’s the greatest recruitment website that the world has ever seen! 

Your recruitment website is an amazing tool when it comes to building your brand, advertising your live vacancies and converting candidates & clients. 

And we’re going to help you make sure it’s the best website your clients & candidates have ever seen. They are going to cry tears of joy on landing on your website. You want it to be beautiful but also to be functional. Don’t sacrifice functionality and technical best practices in the pursuit of superficial design. 

Branding & Design

On the note of design you want your recruitment agency site to blow your clients and candidates away. You want them to say “wow” in a hushed voice. You want them to pause for that half a second while they take in its beauty. You want and need your website to look different to all the other recruitment agencies out there. You should be aiming to differentiate yourself from your competitors in all of these areas considering most agencies offer a very similar service. 

Images

Your images need to “pop”! One of the first things that people notice when they land on a website are the images. Lead with some well chosen images that suit your brand and niche well but that also grab the attention of your visitors. 

User Experience

It’s crucial you make your recruitment agency website as accessible and easy to navigate as possible with a clearly defined journey for clients, candidates and consultants. This should be supported by call to actions at the bottom of each page as a minimum so visitors choose to take a positive action such as registering for your newsletter, applying for a role, sending you a role brief or making a general enquiry via your contact form. 

Jobs Page

Probably one of the most important pages on your website. This page should be driving traffic directly to your bank account. The page should be clearly signposted, should be easy to access from the home page, the navigation bar, the footer and a couple of other pages such as the candidate page. The application form should be quick & easy to complete and your jobs should be Google for Jobs friendly. 

Job Search 

Your search functionality makes job searching for your candidates so much easier. If you’re a small recruitment agency with only 20-30 jobs at one time then surfing through job pages should be relatively easy but if you have 10 consultants working for you, each managing 10 jobs then that’s 100 jobs that candidates will need to navigate through. Set up search functionality with filters for salary, location, job type, specialism, etc. 

Job Alerts

Giving candidates the ability to state their job preferences and set up job email alerts from your website will be a major win for your agency. You’ll save the time of your consultants, combined with directly emailing your candidates with highly relevant live vacancies. 

Recruitment Blog 

Your recruitment blog is an integral part of any recruitment agency website. This is a major tool when it comes to ranking for long tail keywords (search terms for 3-4+ words long). When your website starts ranking well enough for long tail keywords it will eventually start ranking for short tail keywords, such as “engineering jobs”, “scientist vacancies”, etc. Short tail keywords are the holy grail in SEO. It’s also brilliant for engaging and converting clients & candidates. Try to produce a diverse selection of content including video content, written blogs, research papers, salary guides, etc. Make sure your blog is updated on a regular basis, ideally once a week. 

CMS

You don’t want to reach out to a third party developer every time you want to change something on your website but at the same time you don't need total control over it. Get your website copy and images right the first time round. Spend time researching keywords, writing, rewriting and rewriting your copy over and over again until it’s near perfect. You’ll want a content management system that gives you access to create, update and delete functionality on your blog, jobs, team, testimonials, events, podcasts and mini-custom landing pages. 

SEO

SEO is a huge subject but the key is basically being a little better than your competitors. I’d recommend enlisting the help of an SEO consultant. If you need a recommendation we work with two of the best SEO consultants in the industry, an ex-head of a major SEO agency and a consultant who works closely with marketers and is a regular speaker at Brighton SEO. It needs to be near perfect when it comes to technical SEO and it also needs to be pushing out great, insightful and unique content on a daily or weekly basis. A great website ranks well for long tail and short tail keywords. You can check your technical SEO score using Google Lighthouse. I'd recommend checking the title, meta description and header tags on each page and ensure these are keyword optimised. 

Analytics

You need your recruitment agency website integrated with some sort of analytics tool. I’d really recommend Google Analytics 4. It’s free to use and is produced by one of the biggest tech firms in the world. If you’re a recruitment marketer you’ll probably need to spend a solid 15-20 hours getting to grips with it but it’s well worth it and will really help to guide your marketing strategy and campaigns. 

If you’re looking for a great recruitment website that reflects how brilliant your recruitment agency is then get in touch for a chat.