The global worker shortage continues to impact most industries, so staffing and recruitment agencies need to find ways of attracting talent in a competitive, candidate-driven market. In the digital age, a well-designed website is pivotal to winning over job seekers.
Here are four must-have features for any staffing and recruitment website:
1. Careers page
A careers website should be so much more than a list of job openings. Staffing and recruitment firms can use this section of their own website to showcase the company culture, as well as what they do and how they can help.
It is an opportunity to provide visitors with a more personable experience. Having highlighted the approachable nature of their agency, recruiters will find it easier to reach out to candidates with job openings.
Branding is important – 75% of job seekers consider it before applying for a role. If candidates are receiving positive vibes from the website, they are far more likely to engage with the recruitment team.
2. Online job board
More than half of all job seekers start their search online, making job boards more popular than networking, social media, and direct recruiting.
Not only does this necessitate the need for an online job board, but it also means that it needs to be functional and easy to find. A recruiter’s platform must be modern and user-friendly to maximize candidate engagement.
Mindscope’s marketing division, TopTalent Communications, provides a comprehensive solution. TopTalent’s Job Board API plug-in allows staffing and recruitment agencies to integrate an intuitive, mobile-friendly jobs page into their website. These customizable job boards blend seamlessly with the overall look of a site and are easy for candidates to navigate. They are optimized for search engine traffic too.
Once up and running, online job boards provide numerous benefits for recruiters and candidates alike.
For candidates, online job boards represent a hassle-free job application process. Search results can be refined depending on a job seeker’s preferences and applying for roles is easier than ever thanks to sophisticated automation features.
For example, with TopTalent’s job board platform, candidates simply upload their resume – from there, any subsequent application forms are automatically completed based on the information included in the document. Job seekers hate lengthy job applications, so being able to submit one with just a few clicks is ideal.
For recruiters, online job boards are all about expanding the candidate pool without creating additional work for themselves.
This is where Applicant Tracking System integration makes such a difference. By seamlessly connecting job boards with ATS software, recruitment and staffing agencies can automatically update their candidate database in real-time. It makes it easy to screen and identify the most suitable candidates at any point in time.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Online visibility is crucial in for any agency competing in the recruitment sector in 2022. Unfortunately, a well formatted website is not enough, work needs to be done behind the scenes too, in order to attract visitors.
Effective search engine optimization drives traffic to a website by making it more visible in Google search results. Full-service marketing agencies such as TopTalent Communications are able to assist with this when building client websites.
Once key search terms have been identified, a web design team can strategically utilize industry-specific keywords in the site content. This can be done in number of ways, including meta-descriptions, blog posts, and landing page content.
Boosting a recruiting website’s relevancy score can have impressive results. By working with TopTalent, Radius Staffing Solutions was able to increase website traffic by 135% in just three months. In turn, this led to a 218% increase in direct job applications.
SEO principles can be applied to all pages of a website, including job boards. The advantage of constructing a job board with search engine optimization is two-fold.
Improved Google search ranking
Like all optimized web content, an SEO-friendly job board improves a site’s overall Google ranking.
TopTalent does this by doing the following:
Dynamically generating new webpages each time, a job is posted
Giving job postings a unique meta-description that is specific to the role advertised
Updating sitemaps
Initiating Google crawl / re-index
Featured on Google Jobs
By formatting job postings in a specific way, TopTalent can ensure that they are picked up by Google Jobs. This means that an agency’s job openings will appear at the top of the Google search page when the relevant terms are entered (e.g., job title and location). From there, candidates can click through to the recruiter’s job board to find more information and apply.
4. Mobile-friendly UI/UX
Nearly 55% of all web browsing is done on a smartphone or tablet. Mobile job search platforms are a basic expectation these days, with 52% of job seekers admitting that they even look for jobs when they are in bed.
It is therefore vital that staffing and recruitment firms have a mobile-friendly website that is both functional and visually appealing. By operating a site that translates well to small screens, recruitment firms are able to tap into the millennial candidate pool – a group that is expected to represent 75% of the total US workforce by 2025.
Whether a job seeker is accessing a website from a desktop or mobile device, they expect it to be easy to navigate. If a candidate can’t find what they are looking for within a few clicks, they are likely to give up and head to a competitor site.
When browsing online, the average person has an attention span of just 10 seconds. It’s important to make sure that critical information is easy to find, with quick links to job postings and contact details.
At Mindscope, we are committed to helping our customers succeed – contact us today to see how we can transform your agency’s approach to staffing and recruitment.
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