Why Change Your Recruitment Agency's Website Design?

We moved into our home in Lewisham around 7 years ago and at the time we invested a lot of time and money into refurbishing and designing our home just how we wanted it. Now 7 years on and I’m in the process of totally gutting our garden and laying down a new patio, lawn and shed and then I’ll move onto our living room, stairs and then kitchen within the next 6-12 months. After 7 years, we found that our needs and tastes had changed and we wanted something different. 

For example you’ve got a big new business pitch meeting with a large well-known company, offering great recruitment fee rates and a large volume and selection of annual roles. I imagine you’re picking out a pretty recently purchased outfit that makes you feel super confident. Your website is the same. Your website is your go to new business pitch meeting outfit but your website is live 24/7, pitching for you. Make sure it’s doing the best job it can to represent you!  

Now when was the last time your recruitment agency's website was redesigned? Maybe 3, 4, 5 years ago? More? Really?! I tend to find that most recruitment agency website designs tend to last for around 4-5 years before they begin to look dated and before the lack of maintenance by their recruitment website provider begins to bite them in the backside. A redesign of your website will definitely be worth it but before you begin a recruitment website redesign, work out all the reasons why you want or need a redesign and use this as a foundation for the next site. 

I have a lot of conversations with recruitment agency owners and recruitment marketers about their agency’s website design. I’ve put together a list of some of the most common reasons why recruitment agency owners and recruitment marketers typically look for a redesign….

Bad Experience With Their Recruitment Website Provider

This one actually arose about a month or so back. I was pitching an engineering recruitment agency who had been with their current website provider for around 6 or 7 years. The website looked pretty outdated but still worked well. It could have done with a fair few improvements but was still performing better than most I see. Anyway I ended up speaking with their marketing manager who was actually looking for a new website as their current provider, a well-known name in the recruitment industry was just refusing to make any changes to their website and refusing to help them with the content management system, just pointing them to online videos, which didn’t answer the query. They’d had enough of this poor service and decided that they wanted to switch providers and totally redesign their recruitment agency’s website. 

Bad Experience With Their Current Supplier's Tech

Maybe you’re working with one of the larger recruitment website providers and you’re tied into their website and also the recruitment CRM. You’re finding that the service with their recruitment CRM has really dipped and now you’re looking to move everything in one go. You want to move to another recruitment CRM and have a new website designed and integrated into your new CRM at the same time. 

Recruitment Website Traffic Issues

One of the main reasons for having a website for your recruitment agency is for it to drive traffic to you! You want it to bring in brand new clients & candidates that have found you via the search engines. And to be frank if you want this to happen then you’re going to need to invest some serious time and money into your website to get your website to rank well. Looking at the maths, there are around 30,000 recruitment agencies in the UK. Now let’s estimate and say there’s around 100 verticals/sectors/niches. So that means you have around 300 competitors in your particular niche. Now research indicates that users click on one of the top five search engine results 91.5% of the time. Between 6-10% of users move onto the second page of results, and only 1-2% go beyond the second page. So to get any website traffic you need to be on at least the second page. Don’t cheap out. Get a great recruitment website, a brilliant SEO consultant, write regular content and don’t blame your website developer. 

Recruitment Website Development Waiting Times 

After 6 months or so with your new recruitment website you’ll likely want to make some changes. Changes that are outside of your control. Maybe you want to add some new pages, new functionality, a website integration or whatever it may be. Something fairly big where you require the assistance of your website developer. Now once you have this brilliant idea and the money sitting in your bank account, there’s nothing more annoying than having to wait days for a reply or to be told that it will take 2-4 weeks before they can begin work on what you need. 

Cybersecurity Issues

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across a recruitment agency’s WordPress website with out of date plugins, which is a really easy target for hackers. Or the amount of times I’ve seen non-compliant cookie consent policies and pop ups, which could land you with a hefty fine if reported to the ICO. Now if your recruitment website developer is leaving you open to cyber attacks or large fines then it’s probably time to move on. 

New Recruitment Marketing Team

This is normally a big one. A new marketing team or marketing manager is hired maybe as a replacement or as a brand new department. They’ll normally have a long list of marketing activities they want to achieve with their new marketing budget. This could be email marketing campaigns, tidying up the CRM, events and of course a redesign of the recruitment agency’s website. 

Target Audience

Recruitment agencies often grow and expand into new areas both sector wise and geographically. What we’re seeing at the moment is a huge expansion into the US markets and clients are looking for a new website, a US style website, with a .com domain that specifically reflects that side of the business. 

Limited Functionality

I tend to find that most recruitment agencies don’t need total control over all of their website’s content and images. Most of this stays pretty static if you’ve done a good job at the very early stages. You should only really need access to a limited selection of pages such as jobs, blogs, team, testimonials, events, podcasts, etc. and you should spend your time on blog / insights creation when it comes to your recruitment agency website. However some recruitment marketers and recruitment agency owners want total control and that’s where maybe a drag and drop template website builder could be a great option. Of course this level of customisation will come with many sacrifices such as speed, etc. 

New Website Pages 

Recruitment agencies tend to go through standard cycles of growth. When you first launch your recruitment firm, you want a low cost and ideally no contract recruitment website provider. Maybe a drag and drop template builder for £30/month or maybe a basic WordPress recruitment website for £1,500. After a couple of years you have maybe 1-3 consultants working for you and you want a better website so you upgrade it, adding a jobs section, testimonials pages, case studies, blog pages, etc. 

Missing Features

I was pitching a marketing director a couple of months ago, who I know reasonably well. He was potentially looking at a website redesign for his recruitment agency. Their website had been designed by a marketing agency with no software / web developers on staff and they’d obviously just farmed the work out to South America or Asia. They’d been told their jobs pages were Google for Jobs compatible, however when I was auditing their current site I noticed the structured data hadn’t even been placed into the jobs page. The website had never been compatible with Google for Jobs. Literal years of free advertising wasted because of a simple lie from their marketing agency. 

Cost Of Changes

I was speaking with one of the recruitment industry membership bodies / community groups a month or so ago. They had been with a well-known recruitment website provider for several years but had been given a huge quote to do some pretty basic development work in my opinion. Their website was full of holes from a security standard (I managed to hack in with very limited knowledge of white hat hacking), which should have been the biggest reason to move on anyway. 

The Recruitment Website Design Has Become Outdated

Things move quickly in our world and recruitment website designs can quickly look outdated. I’ve seen websites latch onto volatile design trends, which were the peak of fashion when the website was released but quickly look outdated within 2-3 years. If you’re looking for your recruitment agency’s website to last 4-5 years it might be wiser to be more conservative with your design plans to make sure it lasts a little longer. 

If you’re looking at redesign of your agency's website for any reason then be sure to get in touch with us for a chat.