No matter the market, recruiters will always be on the hunt for more quality candidates, whether to fill a role right away or to help boost the quality of candidates in your talent pool for later down the line. What many recruitment agencies miss is the critical role their recruitment website plays in that process.
The importance of your website cannot be understated – it’s the cornerstone of all of your online activities – being on the frontline for attracting candidates and clients 24/7.
In this article, we’ll give you 4 ways to attract more candidates using your website.
P.S. This article was inspired by Wave CEO and Founder, Dave Jenkins’ appearance on UK Recruiter’s Recruitment Smarts Live show. You can watch it in full here.
Create a brand-driven website
With over 20,000 recruitment agencies in the UK alone, offering what looks like on the surface a similar service, making your agency stand out is no small task. One way you can do that is by ensuring your website looks and reads what you want your brand to project – talking to prospective candidates and clients.
Creating a brand-driven website also builds credibility, showing that you are a company to be taken seriously and showing market leadership. It’s easy to forget that candidates sharing a CV with you is a big action, giving you access to very personal information, so making sure they can trust you is key.
But we get it, there are plenty more fish in the sea, right? Wrong. It takes a lot of work to get traffic to your website, combining different marketing and sales channels, techniques and resources, so when you have the right person on your site, you need them to convert (however big or small). Making sure your website is brand-driven to target these candidates is crucial.
Make the user experience a priority
Making the user experience (UX) on your website seamless is vital to attracting more candidates. In a nutshell, you want candidates (and clients) to reach the information they’re looking for as fast as possible. You can do this with clear navigation paths, calls to action and using distinctive colours and themes to highlight them.
Candidates tend to primarily focus on job listings and roles, so making navigation to that part of your website is essential. While clients, tend to explore pages like your “Meet the team” and “About us” for insights into expertise and fit, candidates may also look there, so ensure access across paths is possible.
Set out key performance indicators to track success
When setting out your key performance indicators (KPIs) for your recruitment website, you must make sure they align with your wider business goals. However, a good starting point for any recruitment agency is placements and hires. However, this can be tricky to identify, so you can be more specific in tracking ‘quality applications’. While quality is defined differently by different agencies, with WaveTrackR we use a traffic light system of red, yellow and green, with red being unsuitable, yellow being good quality candidate but not right for the role and green being suitable and shortlisted.
For more specific recruitment website KPIs, monitoring job alert registrations and client contact submissions is a good way to gauge how popular you are with both candidates and clients.
Once you have established these baseline metrics, you can then move on to setting specific targets which allows you to evaluate your website’s performance over time.
Integrate with your recruitment tech stack
Recruitment is a fast-paced world, with the most efficient recruiter taking the placement prize. When every minute counts, you want to make sure your recruitment technology is working together to do that, so making sure each piece of technology is talking to each other is key.
An example of this is applications, which come in from multiple sources and locations. If your technology isn’t able to feed all of these applications to one central location (i.e. your CRM), it’s easy to miss these candidates hidden in the backend of your website or on a job board site. This would mean you could miss a quality candidate, and while offering a worse candidate experience to this candidate. Small situations like this can lead to major problems in the long run.
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