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Posted On Wednesday, October 16, 2019
Author: David Armitage (Technical Director)
So I spend the first few hours of every morning engaging with existing and potential clients. I answer questions, review websites, offer feed back etc. The information I provide I hope is valuable and so, I thought why not directly copy and paste Q&As into a blog to share with others. Here's the first of it's kind "What makes a good job board or a good recruiter site?"
Hi [unnamed],
As per our conversation on LinkedIn. Here's some tips I think will help with your website.
To answer your question…
what "makes' a "good job board or a "good " recruiter site
Here are some main pointers
I've found the most successful recruiter websites have a simple layout and are easy to navigate. You've got to think about what is the intent of your website. In most cases the bottom line is to capture candidate & client data. If this is the case then we need to make this process as simple as possible and the first thing website visitors see. Maybe some nice call to actions "Register Your Resume", "Submit a Job Vacancy", "Search Jobs".
How your website is falling short on this?
1. Firstly the homepage doesn't really have any call to actions. I would expect to see some nice shiny buttons attracting your visitors to engage. There's some content about your company and latest blog articles etc. I'm guessing 90% of your visitors aren’t overly interested in this and prefer to get straight into the action. I would be more inclined to reduce this type of content on the homepage and replace (or compliment it) with some call to actions.
2. Next is the application process. The application form is simply too complex. I'm guessing you're missing out on a lot of applicants. I would simplify this as much as you can. Maybe just have first name, last name, email, phone, and resume.
If you need more information this could be done as a second tier approach and probably better done by further engaging with the most suitable candidates.
3. Next is the job searching. Again I think this is too complex and could be simplified a lot. I think there's far too many search options. I would probably be more inclined to simplify this to have only 3 search options.
- Category
- Location (change to a dropdown)
- Work Type or Keyword of Job Title
If all the extra search fields are essential then you could add more filters elsewhere (presented cleaner). Maybe an advanced search button bringing the rest of the filters into view. Making the first engagement as simple as possible is always the best way.
4. Contact Form - I tried to fill in my details but couldn't click inside the text boxes. I think something is broken here.
A good recruiter website has a lot of tasks automated.
1. Firstly I recommend (if not already) integrating your website with application tracking software and multi-job posting software.
Once this is done you can do two things.
Multi-Job Posting
Integrating with your website with multi-job posting software makes managing jobs on your website nice and easy. You can post jobs from your mult-job posting software directly to your website. At the same time you can post your job to any other job boards you choose. There’s a load of job boards willing to advertise your jobs for free. Multi-job posting software allows you to post your jobs to all these websites (including your own) with one click of a button.
Application Tracking
Integrating your website with an application tracking system means anyone applying for jobs on your website will be inserted directly into your application tracking system or CRM. It just makes managing your applicants much easier.
If you're not already using this type of software then I would defiantly take a look at https://jobadder.com/. Their software includes both application tracking and multi-job posting all in one, plus a load of other features. It's cheap to run and you can even get a free trial.
2. I also find adding job alerts to your website is a great feature. You don't want job seekers coming to your website and not finding what they're looking for. They will leave your website and never return. You won't have jobs for everyone, all the time so this is going to happen a lot.
Instead of letting this happen we prefer to give visitors a second option. If there isn't any jobs matching their search criteria then allow then to create a job alert.
Job alerts is a feature we offer that captures the visitor’s email address and search criteria. Your website then uses this information to notify them via email as new jobs matching their criteria become available.
A successful job board and recruiter website must have a good marketing strategy. There's too many job boards out there today and most fail within the first year.
Why?
That's because a lot of job board owners think they can get away with creating a site that looks and functions great and then business will flock in. Unfortunately it's not the case. You need to find the business and traffic then drive them back to your website.
Fortunately in the recruitment industry there's a lot of ways to do this. I will just mention our favourite. We recommend these for any job board or recruiter website.
Job Feeds
Convert your website jobs into XML job feeds. You can then use these feeds to submit to a load of websites (other job boards) which will advertise your jobs and direct traffic back to your website. These types of websites offer free and paid per click traffic.
Our personal favourites are AdZuna & Indeed. These two companies have a pay per click pricing. The reason why we like this form of marketing is because we find it to have a good ROI and at the same time is easily trackable.
There’s too many websites that offer this type of marketing to mention and there's more popup every day. Unfortunately they don't all follow a standardised XML schema. The websites we build come with an XML feed generation tool so it's easy to create XML feeds matching the unique structure most of these websites require.
It's important your website is ready for SEO.
This basically means your website is built to standard, works well on mobiles, responds fast, and has great content that's targeted at relevant keywords.
Here’s a few SEO tips for recruiters.
1. Write blog articles related to your industry. We recommend at least one a week. Google loves fresh content and it will reward you for it. At the same time it gives you some engaging content to share on LinkedIn & Twitter. Win Win.
We know this is a lot of work and recruiters just don't have to time to focus on this. This is why we have a content team who can manage this for you.
2. Keywords in URLs (job search and landing pages). Most recruitment websites fall short on this.
Eg.
Instead of this
/job-search/job?id=11223/
It should look more like this.
/job-search/accounting-jobs/accountant-sydney/
This helps Google find your pages easier.
3. Industry Specializations
This is something I think recruiters do well (by chance). Always add industry specialisations to your website. It's a great way to add some SEO friendly content. Google will love you for it. I also recommend this to be content heavy. At least 250 words. Even better would be 500 words.
As I said, recruiters tend to do this already. What they don't do is match their job search classifications to their industry specialisations.
In most cases on recruiter websites the industry (classifications) that job seekers can search when looking for jobs don't seem to match the industry specialisations on the information pages. I never understand why these are different.
I always recommend bringing these in-line with each other. An even better solution is to combine the industry specialisation pages with the job search pages. So an industry specialisation page might look like this...
1. 50-100 words SEO friendly content at the top about the industry. 2. Then the list of jobs you have within this industry. 3. Then a further 250+ words SEO friendly content at the bottom.
I hope this helps all this helps answer your question. If you want to explore any points further let’s have a chat.
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