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5 Reasons your website should be at the centre of your marketing activities

Website At The Centre Of Marketing Activities

5 Reasons your website should be the centre of your marketing activities

Recruitment websites, everybody has one. No matter how big or small, no matter how staffing businesses try and differentiate themselves, the common denominator they all have is a website.

Everybody within the recruitment sector has access to this amazing tool, but it’s so often overlooked and underutilised. Here are the 5 reasons your website should be at the centre of your marketing activities.

Access the best candidates
  • 70% of the global workforce are passive job seekers[1]

  • 30% of the global workforce are active job seekers

What does this mean for recruitment marketers?

It means you have an incredible opportunity to be cultivating this 70% and accessing candidates who aren’t available to every Tom, Dick & Harry.

Let’s try another statistic on for size. ‘The best candidates are only active for 10 days.’[2] Yes, 10 whole days. That’s 240 hours. It’s only 14,400 minutes. A mere 864,000 seconds. That’s not a whole lot. Once candidates get into their 10 active days, the race is already lost as everybody has access to them. That’s why it’s imperative that you target candidates before they are available to the wider market. And how do you do this? By engaging them throughout their career-cycle and driving them to your website.

If you’re engaging the 70% and turning them into active candidates, you’ll quickly find that your consultants are representing high-quality candidates who are not accessible to others. This will not only increase your chances of placing your candidates, but it also means you’re able to charge higher fees as you’re representing high-class candidates who your clients or competitors just do not have.

By immersing yourself within a market and establishing your brand as a long-term partner to candidates, you’re increasing your ability to access the large passive market. If you’re only there for people when they need a job, you’ll only ever be part of the rat race for the active 30%.

The key to creating brand loyalty and trust? Your website.

Which brings us nicely onto our next point…

Beating AI

How will AI affect the recruitment sector? It’s the million, perhaps a billion-dollar question. It’s difficult to exactly predict, but what we can safely forecast is that it will dominate the low-hanging fruit in the employment industry and match active candidate profiles with live vacancies. What this means is that candidates who are actively on the market will be very easily accessible for businesses. What does this mean for recruitment businesses? You cannot keep feeding off low-hanging and you need to access and convert candidates who are not actively on the market. How will your brand do this? One solution is to direct them to your website and being their long-term partner, you will have a ‘commodity’ which AI and potential clients are not able to access.

What AI will do is put human relationships at the centre of the recruitment process and your website will be a key aspect in enabling this.

AI will offer a brilliant service but utilising your website and being human will give you the upper hand.

Maximising ROI!

For many staffing businesses, their website is an expensive resource, with prices for a SAAS website beginning at £300 a month (and escalating pretty quickly from there!). Then add to this the amount which you spend on job boards, generally just to ‘cover all bases.’ The costs are starting to mount rather quickly.

If you place your website at the centre of your marketing activities and drive applications to jobs on your website - rather than relying on applications through job boards - you will quickly see a huge increase in ROI for your website as well as a reduction of costs to your job boards.

You’re paying for your website anyway, so why not maximise everything you can get out of it? Drive the right traffic to your website and you’ll receive a better quality of candidates too. For example, at Camino Partners, our ‘CVs sent:interview’ ratio for candidates generated through our website is 50% greater than it is from other sources.

While it may take a little while to build to the point where your website is your bespoke job board, it is absolutely worth its weight in gold.

And while we are on this point…

Sharing isn’t caring!

Job board applications. Anybody working within the recruitment sector knows the frustrations around job boards applications, the amount of terrible responses you have to trawl through to find a half-decent one is painful and then when you do, how often do you hear your recruiters say, ‘ohh you’ve just accepted a new role, have you?’ There is no denying you can find some gems out there, but everybody else has access to them.

In the current candidate-driven market, you don’t want to be sharing candidates. You don’t want other people having access to ‘your’ candidates, but if you’re over-reliant on job boards, you’ll be the hamster on a wheel who is locked in a race to the bottom and will ultimately be replaced by AI.

 

Having candidates who come through your website and work with you exclusively (this is where the recruiters can add serious value) will enable you to make more placements and justify higher fees. If this isn’t a win-win, I don’t know what is.

In a market which is so candidate-driven and strong candidates are only active for 10 days, you need to access them before you hear the soul-destroying phrase ‘I’ve just accepted a new role’.

Increase inbound enquiries

How much would you recruiters love it if they never had to make a truly cold call ever again? Honestly, nobody is born loving cold calls.

Ideally, your website will be filled with value-adding information to both candidates and clients which effectively demonstrates how you will help them and how you have helped others in their position. This will build trust in your brand and lead to more inbound enquiries. If you’re driving traffic to your website, getting buy-in to your brand and are generating more warm leads for your consultants, that will increase their productivity (and they will love you).

Whilst cold calling isn’t dead, warm calling is the new(ish) kid on the block who isn’t going away.

A recruitment utopia

In a utopian world, your website will be the answer to so many of your problems. As the focal point of your marketing activities, you will no longer need job boards, candidates and clients would be completely engaged with your brands and know exactly where to go, your consultants would be inundated with an influx of exceptional and relevant candidates and your business wouldn’t be at risk with the introduction of AI.

Utopian? Maybe. But by focusing your marketing activities around your website, you will be able to increase ROI, and nobody has ever turned their nose up to that.

*Please note: The statistics used in this article do vary across different publications, but I have selected statistics which sit in the middle of these.

 

[1]https://business.linkedin.com/content/dam/business/talent-solutions/global/en_us/c/pdfs/Ultimate-List-of-Hiring-Stats-v02.04.pdf

[2]https://www.wayup.com/employers/blog/how-to-avoid-losing-qualified-candidates