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How to Build the Best Recruitment Website for Your Staffing Firm

How to Build Best Recruitmetn Website
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Want to design a recruiting website that gets found by the right job seekers – and compels them to apply? Here’s how to create a best-in-class recruitment website for your staffing firm.

If You Build It (On The Right Platform), They Will Come

Creating a website that attracts candidates isn’t easy. Self-service recruitment website design options like Wix and Squarespace are attractive to many staffing companies because they are simple to use, and many people believe they are less expensive than building a site from scratch.

However, one of the best platforms you can use to build a recruitment website is WordPress. WordPress is exceptionally user-friendly and provides a host of benefits that matter for both users and for search engines like Google.

WordPress Simplifies Recruitment Website Design

First, WordPress sites are easy for you to work with on the back end. It is very easy to edit pages, add pages, and maintain your recruiting blog. All of Haley Marketing’s websites are built on WordPress, and those sites are now even easier to use with Elementor, which incorporates similar drag-and-drop capabilities you find in self-service platforms. Once you take control of your site, it’s very simple to make edits and updates on your own.

WordPress Helps Your Recruitment Website Get Found

Additionally, WordPress sites load quickly. Google’s own data tells us sites that are slow to load always lose visitors. That’s why they rank fast-loading sites higher than those that take longer. WordPress sites load quickly, in accordance with search engine guidelines, and they provide a faster and more pleasant user experience. When you’re trying to hook candidates, load speed should not be overlooked.

Recruitment website design isn’t just about desktop browsing. Over half of all internet searches are done on mobile devices, and in many industries, job-seekers are almost exclusively on mobile. Google rewards mobile-friendly sites and even crawls your mobile version of your site before your desktop version. WordPress sites are mobile-responsive, meaning they adjust their appearance for users on phones and tablets.

Recruitment Website Design is All About Visuals and Aesthetics

Recruitment website design should incorporate strong visual elements. Your colors, imagery, font choices and page design all matter. If your recruitment website looks outdated, if the pages are too busy, if the font is difficult to read, etc., potential candidates will lose interest and click away.

Recruitment website design is a delicate balancing act. You need to have enough information and eye-catching imagery to attract attention, but the page also must be laid out in a way that makes sense.

Your images should reflect what you do as a company and the types of people you are trying to recruit. Your copy should be robust but not too long that users get bored. And it should be very simple for potential candidates to click to search or apply to jobs from any page.

“But I’m not a designer,” you are probably thinking to yourself. And that’s ok. Most people are not. Haley Marketing understands that staffing companies have unique brands and corporate identities. Every recruitment website we build for our clients is meant to help convert users while reflecting the unique brand identity of the staffing company. The designs are clean, pages are laid out in a way that allows users to find what they want quickly, and to search and apply simply.

Design A Recruitment Website With Conversions In Mind

When we say “conversion,” what do we mean? When it comes to recruitment, it means that someone applied for a job or submitted a resume (depending on your goals).

We tend to think that in this day and age, people know what actions to take on a website. Where to click to read more, where to go to apply now. But that’s not the case. You have to make it clear to users what you want them to do next, and that’s why calls-to-action (CTAs) are so important.

Every page of your website should have CTAs. One is the bare minimum, but the best recruitment website designs incorporate have two or three clear CTAs on a page and mix up the styles you use:

  • Inline CTA. It is just a linked piece of text or an image right in the body of your content. Like “contact Haley Marketing today.”
  • End of page. These frequently appear in site footers as a “quick contact” form or a newsletter signup form.
  • End of blog posts. Put call to action banners at the end of blog posts that are relevant to the content.
  • Fly-ins. Attention-grabbing and requesting immediate action, these elements “fly in” from the side of the page, the bottom or the top. Some Haley Marketing clients have seen a 50% to 70% increase in job applications just by adding this feature to the home page or job seeker’s page.
  • Click-to-call. As people rely on mobile devices more, this style of CTA is becoming more popular. Your clients or candidates can tap this CTA, and it will initiate a call.

When you’re not using inline CTAs (and those should really be limited), you need to make sure that the CTA can be seen. Make them banners or boxes, choose shades that pop against other design elements and keep them all the same size/color throughout the site, so it’s apparent to visitors that’s where they take action. Finally, make sure the language is action-oriented. “Search Jobs” and “Apply Now” might seem boring, but they get the job done.

Don’t Neglect Job Descriptions And Applications

You should also pay close attention to your job descriptions.  Every day, you consult with your clients on the best way to formulate job descriptions, so make sure you are incorporating those best practices into your job listings so that potential candidates want to apply. You don’t want to spend all the time and effort to design an exceptional recruiting website only to lose applicants at the last step.

Finally, create streamlined applications. Every question you add over ten increases the chances that potential candidates will abandon their application. Also, eliminate any questions that ask for personal information, like Social Security Numbers.

Update Content Regularly On Your Recruiting Website

Your recruitment website is not a crockpot. You cannot set-it-and-forget-it. You need to continually update content regularly.

That doesn’t mean you should change the content on your homepage every day. Quite the contrary. Your home page should remain as static as possible, as should most of your regular website pages. Those pages can and should be updated to reflect changes in service offerings, but the “meat” of the content should remain the same.

When we talk about updating new conent, we mean adding new pages and, ideally, new and optimized job posts to your job boards on a regular basis.

Google’s number one ranking factor is fresh, relevant content, and these two features will help you achieve trust and relevancy in Google, and thus, with potential candidates – and isn’t that the point of a great recruiting website?

Your blog is a fantastic place to add tips and advice for potential job seekers. Think like a candidate. What are the questions they are asking about their careers, their industries, and their job search? Answer those questions in well-crafted blog posts, ideally posting one new article per week. Make sure to use CTAs to direct potential candidates to apply with you when they are done reading a post.

Your job board should also have optimized job postings. When you work with Haley Marketing and leverage our job board (which can be integrated into most ATS programs), you get optimized posts that are regularly crawled and indexed by Google. They help you stand out in common searches and in local searches and can improve apply rates dramatically.

Incorporate an Industry-Leading Job Board Into Your Recruitment Website

No matter how much effort you put into recruitment marketing website design, you won’t be successful if you do not incorporate the right job board or career portal into your recruitment website. We touched on the importance of an optimized job board, but the topic deserves a deeper dive.

Your job board/career portal should be simple for you to use (both in terms of uploading jobs and retrieving applications in your ATS), it should deliver a positive user experience and it should offer practical features that help your jobs get found. What do the best job boards for recruitment website design include?

A Positive User (Candidate) Experience

  • Natively attractive, intuitive user interface and integration with compatible custom-designed search interfaces
  • Search by keyword, location, proximity and up to three additional criteria of your choice
  • Mobile optimized search and apply
  • Ability to “Skip the Search” and directly submit a resume
  • Option to save unlimited job searches and receive automatic notifications about new jobs

Advanced Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

  • Jobs individually for optimized search engines
  • Each job has its own unique URL–on your website domain
  • Jobs include Google for Jobs schema (structured data) markup

Website Enhancement Tools

  • Branding exactly matches your company website
  • Search and apply widgets can be added to any page of your website
  • Featured jobs can we display on any page of your site
  • Each post can include a bio and contact information for the recruiter (or office) that owns that job

Social Recruiting Tools

  • Jobs can be shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social networks
  • When shared, jobs automatically contain a featured image to brand your company
  • Jobs can be shared from within Bullhorn and direct people back to your HMG job board.

Free Job Distribution

  • Each night jobs are shared with many aggregators
  • RSS feeds can be set up to automatically share jobs with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter
  • Automated and ad-hoc email talent engagement emails
  • Automatically build a candidate email list

Other Important Features

  • Application source tracking
  • Regular featured enhancements and software upgrades included
  • 24/7 help system with live support during eastern standard time business hours
  • Free training
  • Widgets for integrating the JB into any page of the website.
  • Ability to easily create RSS feeds and XML feeds for sharing jobs with social media for individual recruiters or other 3rd party sites
  • Ability to sponsor jobs on 3rd party job aggregate sites
  • Recruitics boost integration: Promote your job to a network of job boards and career websites.
  • ROI dashboards that provide analytics on job performance and costs.

Does your current job board or career portal cover all that? If not, there’s hope. Haley Marketing’s Job Board does all of that for you and more. It is user friendly and generates true ROI for your recruiting website.

Are You Ready To Accelerate Your Recruitment Website Design?

If you want to get more from your recruiting website, Haley Marketing design you a feature-rich site that can help you become a candidate magnet. Contact us today to learn what we can do for you.

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