Owning a recruitment website and designing and building one that works hard for you by selling your brand and acting as an additional tool to your recruitment strategy are two very different entities. Simply having an online presence isn’t enough anymore. Your website is the 24/7 face of your company; it should engender trust, create brand awareness, and engage both candidates and clients alike. With offices shut and face to face meetings on hold indefinitely, it is more important than ever that your website reflects positively on your business. If you use this quieter period of time to streamline your online recruitment tools, you will be in a far better position to recover quickly and move on with business when we begin to emerge from this crisis.
Think of it this way – if you owned a shop on the high street you would ensure that it was always well maintained, with the aim of enticing customers in to browse and buy your products, and for them to leave wanting to return. That is precisely the way you need to view your website – it is your virtual shopfront. What you don’t want is for someone to window shop, see nothing worth their while entering and walk on by. Your website should bring clients and candidates in and, once there, it should encourage them to navigate their way through it in a way that ends in the desired result.
If your recruitment website needs a complete overhaul, now is the perfect time to do it. Not only are you likely to be less busy, so is everyone else. We are all at home, on our devices, online. There are no social distancing restrictions in the online world. Investing in your recruitment website may not seem like a priority right now but you can use this downtime to ensure that when business does start to pick up again, you are ready and raring to go with extra tools in your arsenal.
So what is crucial when it comes to creating a recruitment website? We have talked about this in our blog many times, including in Best Practices for Recruitment Websites. Considerations include the path a user will take, brand identity, SEO and mobile optimisation, content, design, security, social media integration, and analytics. However, what is equally important to consider is what you need to avoid.
Our research shows that just over 53% of users who access recruitment websites drop off without any further interaction. In other words, they fail to see anything that interests them or else immediately have a negative experience and leave the landing page without visiting other pages or performing any calls to action. Sometimes this is as simple as the speed at which the page is loading. If the load time takes too long, a user may become dissatisfied or, worst-case scenario, give up entirely and click onto something else. It will also negatively impact SEO, user experience and general branding. Page speed upload improvements is just one of the elements a professional website build company will tackle.
One of the most important aspects to consider when building a website is the user experience. A great user journey will boost your rankings, create a positive brand identity, encourage users to return, and give them that welcome feeling that they would get if they walked into your offices and met you in person. Leads and, ultimately, conversions are the end-goal but right now simply creating relationships, reaching out to as many clients, potential clients and candidates as possible, and engendering trust in you and your brand are crucial building blocks to business success when the jobs market and the recruitment industry starts to recover.
Of course, investing in a professional website comes at a price and that is hard to stomach at a time when we are all tightening our belts. This is exactly why it is just as important to find a competitively priced website design and build company – recruitment web designers that are as good as other market leaders but have the edge when it comes to pricing. And when you consider that you could be saving money in the long term by winning leads and attracting talent simply by the very existence of your website, it isn’t difficult to see why a top-quality, professionally designed and built website packed full of recruiting features and functionalities will be so important as we begin to emerge from this pandemic. Rather than scramble to pick up the pieces post-coronavirus, use this time to prepare for better times to come so that you can move on quickly when the time arises.
Ultimately, the question shouldn’t be “why should I invest in my website? but “why would I not?”
