So you’ve made the decision to start your own business and need a recruitment website pronto. However, before you begin you must take the time to consider every aspect in great detail. The decisions you make regarding your website are crucial to your branding and your reputation. Your website is your agency’s online ID, your virtual shop window and any visitors – whether clients or candidates – will judge you on it. We’ve compiled a list of common mistakes recruiters make when approaching their website build so that you can avoid them.
Hiring a generic website design company
When starting your own company it is essential to know what is worth investing in a recruitment website and what isn’t essential for the time being. One thing that really does make the essentials list is a specialist recruitment website. Your website isn’t simply a vehicle to showcase your wares, it needs to have recruiting features and functionalities at its core – that is what will make it a successful platform to attract the right traffic and convert visits into job wins and applications. Only a recruitment website design specialist would know how to implement advanced job listing, recruitment SEO and integrate a candidate management system.
Not paying attention to SEO
What do you need when you start any company? Customers. As a recruiter, you need both clients and candidates and to do that you need them to be able to find you. If your website isn’t search engine optimised, the only way that will happen is by sheer luck. All content on your website, from jobs to blogs, page titles to descriptions, needs to be optimised. Without SEO your recruitment website will be invisible.
Making the user journey unclear
Neglect the user journey on your website and neither clients nor candidates will navigate to the pages you want them to find and, worst-case scenario, they get fed up with a confusing site and click away onto another recruitment website never to return. Navigation should be clear and there should be an obvious call to action on every page. This all begins with a cohesive sitemap that will lead users on the journey you want them to take. Make it easy for visitors and put thought into the user journey from the very beginning.
Disregarding mobile devices
People use their mobile devices for everything, including job searches. In RecWebs’ Recruitment Website Trends Report, we found that mobile traffic had nearly doubled in comparison to the previous year, to a massive 43% of all visits. It is therefore imperative that your website is mobile optimised or you will end up losing talent before they’ve even had a chance to look at your site. The same applies to clients – a clunky website leaves you looking unprofessional. Furthermore, Google favours websites that are mobile-friendly so if your website is compatible with small screens you will find it ranks higher.
Leaving your website to ‘do it’s thing’ once it’s built
Your website is not a static entity, a beautiful thing to look at but not touch. Once it is built, make it work hard for you. Add fresh content regularly in the form of company news, insight articles and candidate advice blogs. Fully utilise your jobs page by publishing any new jobs you win and add new pages to keep up with business developments. As with mobile optimisation, Google will rank pages with fresh content higher so this will also help you to be found.
Ignoring social media
As well as your website, you’ll need to have social media accounts – and use them. You can bet your competitors will be utilising their social media platforms to maintain an online presence as well as to advertise jobs. Social media allows you to have further reach into a wider range of demographics and find passive candidates. Ensure your website has social media integration tools built-in with social share buttons and the ability to apply using social media profiles.
A well-designed and SEO-optimised specialist recruitment website requires financial investment but it is a sound investment to ensure high website performance results. The goal is to drive the right kind of traffic to your website, keep it there, and convert those visits to jobs, then applications and eventually solid, successful hires. If your website can reliably do that, plus generally increase brand awareness and a positive brand perception, it is undeniably a worthwhile investment. Just remember to avoid these common pitfalls and your website will become an essential component of your recruitment strategy as you navigate your start-up to success.
