Volcanic: How to: Create a GREAT Recruitment Website
How to: Create a GREAT Recruitment Website
Creating a new website can be a daunting prospect and the cost of getting it wrong doesn't bear thinking about! With a recent rebrand of Camino's fantastic new website being launched, we have teamed up with Volcanic to give you 9 Top Tips to make sure your new recruitment website is a success...
Creating a new website for your recruitment business involves more than simply choosing a provider, handing over responsibility and waiting for the magic to start. At Volcanic, however, we do everything we can to make the process run smoothly. Our experienced project management team will take the lead to make sure your time and resource is well invested - to get your new site up and running and working hard for your business.
Here are our nine top tips for project success:
1. Decide what success looks like
First of all, decide what you want your website to do for you. Attract more candidates, communicate your offer to your clients, boost SEO, reinforce your brand authority, boost your professionalism, tell your story… or all of the above.
Set clear KPIs so you’re working to defined targets from the outset. Building in your desired outcome to your brief might sound obvious, but don’t be tempted to skip this step. It’s the best way to ensure you and your provider are heading towards the same goals.
2. Secure stakeholder buy-in early on
It’s a good idea to involve the decision makers from the outset. Gaining buy-in to the website’s ultimate goals, design, timings and budget at the start of the project will avoid surprises half way through, and will make your job easier in keeping all stakeholders informed and on side.
3. Plan your user experience
What’s critical here is to balance functionality with design - first and foremost, your website must be designed with the user experience in mind. The most beautiful site won’t work for your business if it doesn’t result in candidate visits - and conversions.
Identify who your user is - what they do, where they go, what they read - essentially, what motivates them. This will help you set your buyer persona and build your website accordingly - for more advice, download our free guide on how to create recruitment buyer personas.
Design is very personal. The design team at your website provider will have years of experience in recruitment website design and will be adept at interpreting your brief. Take a look at other websites you love, not necessarily in recruitment, and think about why they appeal to you. Think about your users and what they’re looking for - and how the ideal user experience would look.
Think about how your site will work responsively. With a massive 91 percent of social media users accessing their accounts from a mobile device, responsive design performance is absolutely key for recruiters.
4. Plan your content strategy
Your content strategy will help inform your website’s design - so think about your brand, messaging and the words you will use on your new site, as this will set the tone, look and feel across the site.
A good rule of thumb is to keep it concise, simple and in plain English - and think about your keywords as part of your SEO strategy. This practical, step-by-step Guide to SEO will help you set objectives and build your content to help drive traffic.
5. Get the most out of your site’s CMS
Make sure you’re trained in your site’s content management system (CMS) and you’re clear on how to get the most out of it. There will be a wealth of functionality on the back end of your site that will both help you keep your site up to date and provide valuable reporting to help build in tangible business improvements.
For example, your website’s reporting and analytics dashboard will highlight site performance and help you pinpoint solutions.
6. Put your trust in your recruitment technology provider
Whether you’re completely new to the process of creating a website - and it all feels a little daunting - or whether you’ve years of experience, you’ll have plenty of great ideas to bring to the table.
Working with a specialist recruitment technology provider means that they’ll have encountered pretty much every question you ask - and will have an answer based on long experience in best practice for the recruitment sector.
Put your trust in your provider and try to strike a balance. Being over-prescriptive might stifle a great design concept - but leaving the brief completely open might result in your expectations not being met.
7. The devil’s in the detail
Sounds very obvious but do your due diligence. it’s easy to get swept away by your beautiful new site designs without reading the small print.
Check that your website provider offers full cyber-security and cyber-insurance and can demonstrate full GDPR-compliance for your website. Ignoring these critical business issues at this stage could prove a mistake in future.
8. Check it’s future-proof
Are you confident that your technology will be future proof? Making a significant upfront investment in a site that may in one or two years be obsolete in terms of technology, compliance and design might not be the best choice for your business.
Futureproofing your business model is the key reason for the exponential growth in software as a service (SaaS), where providers offer low risk entry through no upfront investment, no contractual tie-ins and a simple monthly fee. Furthermore, your technology is updated regularly, all as part of the service.
9. And finally...
Enjoy it. Producing a new website for your business is a fantastic project to work on. It’s one of your greatest assets and delivers an instant snapshot on your business to the world.
At Volcanic, our recruitment technology has changed the way the recruitment industry operates, making businesses more productive - and more profitable. If you’d like advice on any aspect of recruitment technology, get in touch - we’d love to help.
