What is the point of a website? To sell products and services? To tell the world what your business does and who your team are? To communicate company news? To engage with potential and existing clients? All of these are important but you can do more, especially in times of crisis or at pivotal moments.
- Communicate key messaging
Your website is your online ID, your shop window to the world and should therefore also be your mouthpiece. It should reflect your business values and communicate your brand message. What you stand for is vitally important in a world that is undergoing intense change in the midst of a global pandemic and an international fight for diversity and inclusivity. Using your recruitment website to communicate key messaging will simultaneously convey important information and cement your branding.
- Messages of support
When the pandemic hit, businesses across the world utilised their websites to send out clear messages of support to their customers. It was the perfect place to display not only a company’s measures and procedures in response to government guidelines but also to reach out to clients in incredibly worrying and challenging times. With the entire nation suddenly in lockdown and working from home, websites took on a whole new level of importance. Without the ability to meet anyone in person, business websites truly became the face of the company. Acting fast, many communicated their company’s individual response to the crisis and their pledge to help their customers via their websites.
- A vehicle to help clients and candidates
Like many, we published a statement on Wave’s website to keep clients informed of our immediate response and of possible contingency plans. It was important to share the ways in which business might change, as well as to reassure and offer support. We wanted to extend a helping hand to clients. It was important to us to let them know that we were there to help where we could. To tie in with this we also wrote blog articles with the aim of helping our clients and candidates through the difficult times they were immediately facing and advising on what they could do to prepare for the future.
- Make your D&I policy clear
Coronavirus isn’t the only event to rock the world in recent months. The death of George Floyd earlier in the year and the subsequent global protests, fuelling the Black Lives Matter movement, catapulted the fight for equal opportunities for all into the headlines.
RecWebs client Ashby Jenkins, founder of Ashby Jenkins Recruitment and recent Talent Matters webinar guest, felt so passionately about the importance of diversity and inclusion within recruitment that she placed the agency’s ‘Commitment to Diversity’ front and centre of their website. This makes the agency’s D&I policy crystal clear to both clients and candidates. It reinforces in their minds that they are the agency that supports and cares. The team are of course also talking to clients and candidates and marketing it in other ways, but the clear messaging on their website leads the way. It immediately tells everyone that lands on their homepage who they are and what they stand for.
Your brand message should be woven through your website copy and reflected in its design elements but you can go further. Using your homepage as a mouthpiece to communicate important messaging about relevant world events can be incredibly powerful. Clearly, this needs careful thought. A recruitment website’s homepage isn’t the place for opinion pieces. Any musings relevant to recruitment can be included on your blog page, anything else kept to personal platforms. However, with consideration, your website can be used to heighten branding and communicate vital information. Make your recruitment website work hard for you and it can be central to your marketing and brand strategy.
