Your recruitment website is your online ID. It is your virtual shopfront, the office that’s open 24/7. It is a platform to share industry insights with clients and jobseeking advice with candidates, to build your brand, to reach a larger talent pool, to post jobs and ultimately to grow your business. In other words, it should be the very centre of your talent attraction strategy.
WaveTrackR data shows that job boards make up a staggering 83% of all jobs posted online. In comparison, just 15% are posted on recruitment websites. However, RecWebs data also shows that recruitment websites receive an average of nearly 2,500 visits per month. Now imagine if you posted all of your jobs on your recruitment website – that’s a huge amount of traffic that might not be seeing what you want them to see. How much potential talent could you be losing by not fully utilising your website? When you look at it like that, investing in your website suddenly becomes far more vital.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t use job boards. They are a tremendously important channel for talent attraction and there will always be a place for them as part of your talent attraction strategy. The leaders attract a huge pool of candidates and give recruiters access to over 1 million CVs. The niche job boards attract candidates in specific industries in greater numbers. That access to volume is invaluable. However, what you also want is your own database of candidates sourced through your recruitment website. Quality, up to date profiles and CVs that other recruiters don’t have access to. That’s the holy grail.
Your website offers a way to attract both active and passive candidates. With effective SEO, active candidates – those that are ready, able, hungry for a new job – will be able to find you. With the right technical set up and keyword content, you will rank higher on search engine pages and be more easily found by those actively looking. Sharing that content on social media will enable you to reach out to passive candidates, those that aren’t actively looking for a career move. The key for recruiters is to be active. Update your content regularly, keep posting to relevant social media sites, post new jobs. Not only will being active help boost your rankings on search engines and place you in front of talent, it also gives you credibility, and builds trust that you will actively source talent and connect them with the right opportunities.
Job boards are great at getting your jobs out there but your website humanises you. That might be a strange thing to say about an entity that exists solely in the digital world but what that portal can do is showcase you – who you are, what your ethos is, the people behind the company. Photos of your team, your thoughts on industry news and trends, a personable tone. What you need is to be able to drive traffic to your website via social media, keyword-smart (but engaging and interesting) content, good SEO, and mobile optimisation.
Many recruiters ask, if you’re going to post to both your website and multiple job boards, whether it makes a difference where you post jobs first. They will end up on multiple online platforms where candidates will be able to see them so does it really matter? Here’s food for thought: if you post jobs on your website before you post on job boards, Google will index it first and start ranking for it straight away. Given organic search traffic is vital for growing your website, this is certainly something to think seriously about.
Whatever you do, don’t view your recruitment website as a vanity showpiece, a great looking site which doesn’t really do or offer much. Your website should work hard for you as a platform on which to post jobs, streamline your recruitment process, and communicate and reach out to clients and candidates alike. It should be given at least as much strategic importance as job boards when it comes to attracting candidates. Remember, your website has benefits that job boards can’t offer.
Dave Jenkins, Wave CEO, will be talking about RecWebs and the benefits of a tailored recruitment website at the online UK Recruiter Tech & Social Media Showcase on June 17th. Join him there!
